He Was Once (1989, 16min) via IndieCollect Kickstarter page
Filmmakers – Do you know where your negatives are? Didn’t shoot on film? Do you know how little time digital masters are expected to last if you don’t keep migrating them to new formats? The history of independent film – especially its current history – is in jeopardy. As an industry, we’re always focused on what’s new and what’s next, but our indie history is just as important as what’s around the corner, and the reality is that the majority of independent films aren’t properly stored, archived and indexed (so they can be found), and current indie films are being shot on digital formats that disappear quickly (remember floppy disks?). Sure, it seems like you can find just about anything on YouTube, but actually, you can’t and even those films online are usually not being preserved for the future.
Sandra Schulberg has a solution – IndieCollect, and when Sandra comes up with an idea it always goes somewhere – she founded the IFP, and has been a leading figure in the indie film sector (and is also a filmmaker). She realized that the history of indie film needs to be saved, and she’s gathered up a posse of like-minded people, including me and some others – to help out. IndieCollect is indexing, archiving, preserving, digitizing and making available the history of independent film. They’re partnering with existing archives (such as UCLA, the Academy Film Archive, the Library of Congress and others) to ensure that indie films are properly stored, and finding homes for those that are in danger. They’re rescuing thousands of films that were close to disappearing, and they’re working on solutions to make sure that filmmaker’s work can always be discovered, and that (whenever possible) filmmaker’s can get paid for that work.
IndieCollect recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to save some super cool films from early indie film history – the Apparatus films of Christine Vachon and Todd Haynes. Check out the Kickstarter page to learn more about what IndieCollect is doing, the Apparatus films they are saving and more. If you want to learn more, read this NYT article on IndieCollect, and if you like what they’re doing, please contribute and/or spread the word.