Pic: Viktoria Conzelmann
When Dr Adelheid Heftberger spoke to Business Doc Europe, it was just a few hours after her keynote speech last week at Leipzig’s DOK Archive market. “I wanted to explain a little bit the position of film archive in terms of access, and what happens in the background,” Heftberger [Head of Film Access, film dept of the German Bundesarchiv in Berlin] said of her address to the professional audience.
An outsider might think that being at the helm of a national film archive would be a prestigious but relatively straightforward job. The remit is to preserve archival footage and to make it accessible. In her speech, Heftberger talked about how the Bundesarchiv has digitised and has catalogued its collection. She touched on rights issues, explaining how the Bundesarchiv has worked with its sister companies such as Transit Film GmbH and Progress Film GmbH, which dealt with the commercial side of matters.
That, though, as Heftberger acknowledges, is where matters get complicated. The Bundesarchiv’s core collections include films from the periods between 1930 and 1945 and those produced in the former GDR. In other words, the archive has material from two totalitarian regimes. When it came to licensing this footage, Transit Film GmbH handled all the deals with (mostly) documentary films/newsreels between 1930 and 1945, and newsreels after 1945, and Progress Film GmbH dealt with documentary films from the GDR.
“Since the Bundesarchiv is a governmental institution, we cannot make money. We cannot sign contracts where we sell something, and so this was why “companies like Transit and Progress were hired,” Heftberger points out.
You don’t need a telescope to see the elephant in the room. The State has been benefiting financially from licensing films made during the Hitler era. For some reason, little discussion has taken place about whether this was appropriate on an ethical basis. “I don’t want to shy away from this discussion. I want to participate. I can’t change the past. I just want to signal that I fully understand it is a problem for many people that Germany made money from films that were made in the Nazi period,” Heftberger says.
Heftberger does, however, remind BDE that the money made on these licenses was used for preservation and digitisation of the Bundesarchiv’s film holdings.
That said, there has been significant change recently at the Bundesarchiv, with more to come. Heftberger underlined that, as of Jan 1 2022, the Bundesarchiv no longer works with Progress. And as of 2024, the institution will no longer be working with Transit.
“From 2024 onward, we will handle everything. We will use a different model. We will not do licenses anymore,” she tells BDE. “Users will only deal with us, no third party dealers. We will charge technical fees (like many other film archives), but not license fees based on “our” rights. Users will receive an invoice for fees, but not a license contract.”
There are also knotty rights issues to untangle. “I also told everyone that I had initiated a rights clearance project in the Bundesarchiv, basically because I had doubts that all the rights we claimed were really claimed justly. You will not be surprised that we are finding out more and more that these rights cannot be claimed anymore.”
Some of the material from the archive, then, should never have been licensed in the first place. (This isn’t uncommon. Many archives across Europe have similar rights issues to address.) Heftberger, though, is cleaning operations up. “We are just going to do things differently!”
The Bundesarchiv is thought to have around 370,000 films in its collection – a huge amount. The organisation is the “agglomerate” of many different archives. It has links with the Reichsfilmarchiv, founded in the mid 1930s, and in the Staatliches Filmarchiv, founded in East Germany in the mid 1950s. In West Germany, meanwhile, a Federal archive was created in the early 50s. Everything came together in the early 1990s after reunification of Germany.
“There’s a lot of material from [early film pioneers] the brothers Skladanowsky in 1895 up to the most recent productions, because we have a legal deposit now with anything that is funded from German film funds – that all goes to the Bundesarchiv as well,” Heftberger says of what is an immensely rich collection, albeit one with a very complicated back story.
The Head of Film talks about the “shift in paradigm” at the archive. The emphasis now is primarily about making material as accessible as possible. Digitisation of material is happening at breakneck pace. “We are building our digitisation facilities really big time. I think we have three archive scanners now. We have six in the near future. We have bought another two fast scanners for access digitisation…we are more busy with preserving and digitising our films than looking into ways of monetising the collection. We don’t call our users ‘customers’…they are our users.”
