ABSTRACT
The change in archival priorities more or less paralleled developments in film historiography, causing film museums to re-evaluate what they considered to be, in Bourdieu’s words, re-evaluating their ‘specific capital’. This consisted of old film titles that were at risk of perishing or already listed as ‘lost films’. The focus on endangered and lost films was clearly in tune with the new ideas that had started to dominate film historiography: the aim appeared to be to acquire as many unknown films as possible and rehabilitate them by including them in the museums’ programming and in the new film historiography. These shifts in priority, however, introduced a number of new problems. The first was practical: from the 1970s, institutes gradually ceased to project nitrate material; instead, they began showing newly made acetate duplicates, giving these acetate prints a new status – namely, that of a presentational museum artefact. 79 However, because there was not enough money to duplicate the entire stock of nitrate prints, the institutes had to make choices and thus consciously think about their selection criteria. In the case of the Dutch institute, this led to a new collection policy in 1989, the essence of which was recorded in the so-called Conserveringsplan 1989-1992 (Preservation Plan 1989-1992). The plan, which was quite revolutionary, was the first statement of the new director Hoos Blotkamp and her deputy director Eric De Kuyper, whom she appointed in the same year. 80
