ABSTRACT
As with private collectors, film museums and institutes held specific views on which film material they preferred to collect. These preferences had the following three broad parameters: first, film museums showed a preference for the well-known canonical titles from the silent period (Bordwell, 1997: 24); second, they tended to favour films that were old or rare, even if they were less well-known – although when it comes to the collection of unidentified film material, this begs the question as to why film institutes were interested in these unknown titles if they could not screen them in their theatres; third, all the institutes affiliated to FIAF agreed to collect the films produced by their national film industries. In this way, FIAF hoped that a near-complete, overarching archive would emerge, enabling the retrieval of any film made anywhere in the world. These parameters, therefore, can be summarised by the categories: filmmaker and/or title, year, production country. However, questions remain concerning their wider background, as well as how the archives manifest nuances in their appreciation of the various categories of films they collected, and the way all this was intertwined with the inclusion or exclusion of films from the archives and, consequently, with the writing of film history.
