Gunnar Dedio agrees that the DEFA archive (which this year celebrates its 75th anniversary) is the company ‘treasure’, constituting more than 4300 digitised films (and a lot more yet to be digitised). What’s more, it is the only film collection that can claim to represent the complete audiovisual heritage of one country, Dedio points out.
But Progress Film oversees so much more than DEFA, currently owning in excess of 30,000 titles. “And it is more every day, so we are constantly hiring people. It’s constantly growing very fast.”
The company has recently signed up the state archive of Vietnam, Dedio points out, which can be added to existing archives such as the Catholic Church, various US archives and other collections “east of the Iron Curtain including all the eastern European countries, also African [and] South American countries.”
“We added over time other treasures, to have different perspectives,” Dedio comments, reminding how a multi-perspective approach to research can benefit most audiovisual works. He cites the example of the former East German newsreel Augenzeuge and its West German counterpart Blick and Die Welt, both of which are in the Progress collection.
“Week by week Augenzeuge told the perspective from the east side of the Iron Curtain about what was happening all over the world, and at the same time we have the newsreel from West Germany,” Dedio observes. “Now you can compare week by week by week what was the ‘truth’ on one side, and what was the ‘truth’ on the other side.”
“We don’t believe in the one perspective,” he elaborates, further citing his response to researchers looking for Black Lives Matter content in 2020. “It is interesting to invite people to understand what different perspectives mean. Take the footage shot by camera people from the West side of the Iron Curtain from the 60s and 70s in South Africa, and you see the white man filming white people and ‘how cool is that, swimming pools, maids, sun, beaches, golf’ etc.
“And then you see footage shot by East German, Russian, Polish camera people at the same moment in the same place… What they see is injustice, so they turn the camera at the same location onto the poor small black boy who is carrying the golf clubs bare foot…”
Dedio underlines therefore what he will be telling potential customers during the March 2 Archive Day at EFM. “We want to go out to the community and say, ‘Guys there is so much unknown archive, please don’t re-use for the tenth time this 5% from sources which are not the original source, which you clip out of a film which was [in turn] clipped out of another film. Come on here. There is so much fresh perspective.”
So, has coronavirus really been the boon for archives that is commonly reported? Possibly, Dedio says, but it is hard to give a definitive answer. He has seen a lot of success over the past twelve months, but there are many potential contributory factors.
“What I would like to say is, our turnover is growing, growing, growing every day, but we don’t know what is cause and what is effect. Because we work very hard, we onboard a lot of archives, we try to spread out to the world. So we don’t know, is it the effect of our work, of our offer, of our metadata, of our marketing? Or is it the effect of corona? We don’t know. What we see is that we are able to grow, and everyday there are new clients signing up.”
