Remember the good old VHS video cassettes? They are basically obsolete now in this age of online streaming and hard disk recording, though many people still have VHS recorders and tapes. I still have a couple of prerecorded and blank VHS tapes and even an old Betamax tape (the rival video cassette format that lost the format war to VHS).
Way before hard disk recording, this was the only way to record TV programs. I still remember setting up the timer on my brother’s VHS Video Cassette Recorder (VCR) to record various programs in the 1990s, a process called time shifting. But while we were recording the occasional program, someone on the other side of the world was recording television news and a few other programs 24/7.
Marion Stokes, a resident of Philadelphia in the USA, recorded news 24/7 over a period of 30 years on more than 70,000 VHS tapes and made her own observations on 50,000 journals. Her quest only stopped when she passed away in 2012. These tapes have now become a treasure trove for historians, broadcasters and academics. There is even a documentary based on her life and work – “Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project” by director Matt Wolf.
The 20th century which Marion lived through was the first century in history where mankind invented the ability to record and playback moving images along with related sounds (still photography was invented in the 19th century and sound recording was also invented in the latter part of that century).
But the first ‘audiovisual’ medium was film, though early films had no sound and were in black and white. By the 1930s, both sound and colour had come to the scene. The next audiovisual medium was television, from around 1936 though sound-only radio had existed from around 1910. Now we have the World Wide Web, which combines text, audio, video and a plethora of other inputs on one platform.
Audiovisual documents, such as films, radio and television programs, are our common heritage and contain the primary records of the history of the 20th and 21st centuries. The General Conference of UNESCO approved the commemoration of a World Day for Audiovisual Heritage in 2005 as a mechanism to raise general awareness of the need to preserve and safeguard important audiovisual material for future generations, and for urgent measures to be taken to conserve this heritage and ensure it remains accessible to the public now, and to future generations.
Our collective histories are often captured on film, video, audio or digital formats, and through these, we engage to learn about the past and to share our own histories with future generations. Increasingly, recordings serve as our memories and tell the stories that constitute our cultural heritage. In recognition of the preservation efforts of the thousands of archivists, librarians and caretakers around the world who care for these valuable collections, this year’s World Day for Audiovisual Heritage (which falls today, October 27) again celebrates their dedication and expertise.
Without the knowledge and devotion that is required to preserve, digitize and provide access, large portions of our cultural heritage would disappear to be lost forever. Thus this year’s World Day for Audiovisual Heritage is being celebrated on the theme, “Engage the Past Through Sound and Images”.
Unfortunately, that heritage is now endangered, because sound recordings and moving images can be deliberately destroyed or irretrievably lost as a result of neglect, decay and technological obsolescence. Through initiatives such as the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage and the Memory of the World Program, the work of preservation professionals is encouraged, to manage the range of technical, political, social, financial and other factors that threaten the safeguarding of our audiovisual heritage.
Sound recordings and moving images are extremely vulnerable as they can be quickly and deliberately destroyed. Essentially, emblematic of the 20th century, our audiovisual heritage can be irretrievably lost as a result of neglect, natural decay and technological obsolescence. Public consciousness of the importance of preservation of these recordings must be engaged and the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage is intended to be the platform for building global awareness. Indeed, some organisation must come forward to preserve and protect the likes of Marion’s 70,000 tapes via digitization, because it is a record of contemporary news in the 20th century.
In fact, there is a drive worldwide to preserve our audiovisual heritage, especially, film and videotape. Film is notoriously difficult to maintain without temperature and humidity controlled facilities. In Sri Lanka, there have been several attempts to build such a facility but most films would have been lost if not for the tireless efforts of a few private collectors. Sri Lanka does not even have a copy of the first-ever Sinhala colour film Ranmuthu Duwa (Treasure Island) starring Gamini Fonseka, though a copy is believed to be in a vault in London, UK. Our best films should be scanned digitally in 4K resolution with the help of connoisseur labels such as Criterion Collection for preservation and release on Blu-Ray physical media.
Today, there are enough technological methods to store movies and videotapes digitally, but what matters in the end is public access. How can we access a news broadcast on, say, the 1969 Moon Landing by Neil Armstrong? We should be thankful to Time Burners Lee for inventing the World Wide Web and making all this possible. It is now a simple matter for anyone with a laptop or smartphone to just type in the words “Moon Landing 1969” and again share the awe experienced by 630 million people exactly 50 years ago. It does not matter where you are on Earth – a computer server somewhere on Earth will whir to life and play back that clip for you.
In fact, YouTube, Vimeo and other video repositories such as Facebook and Twitter have become the biggest archives of life and news in the 20th and 21st centuries. One can find videos on any topic on these sites (of course, there is a dark side to these sites which deserves another article) and play them back at any time of the day. But don’t be alarmed by reports that conventional television is about to die.
There certainly is a lot of convergence of audiovisual media, but standalone television is still the medium that most people turn to, to get their news. Watching the news on a smartphone is nothing like watching it on television, though one can certainly see the appeal of watching an event in Washington on a smartphone while stuck in Colombo’s traffic. Television as we know would reign supreme for a long time, bolstered by new broadcast technologies such as 4K and display panel technologies such as OLED and Micro-LED. Radio too will live on thanks to new digital technologies and the Internet, which has made all local radio stations truly global. Whatever the medium, it is vital to preserve every second of footage that tells the story of our time.