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J.-P. DE T.

We are pondering the durability of books in an era when the prevailing culture seems to be tending towards other, perhaps more high-performing tools. But what about the media formats that were supposed to provide durable storage for our data and personal memories? I’m thinking of the floppy disks, videotapes and CD-ROMs that we have already left behind.

J.-C. C.

In 1985, the French Culture Minister Jack Lang asked me to set up and run a national cinema and television school, La Fémis. I put together a great technical team under the direction of Jack Gajos, and chaired the organisation from 1986 to 1996. Obviously, for those ten years, I had to be completely up to speed on every innovation in our field.

One of our main challenges was simply showing films to our students. When studying and analysing a film, you have to be able to stop, rewind, pause, and sometimes proceed one shot at a time. With the traditional reel this cannot be done. At the time we had videotapes, but they wore out very quickly and were completely useless after three or four years. It was around that time that the Vidéothèque de Paris was set up to conserve every piece of film and photography about Paris. The Vidéothèque had to choose between archiving these images on videotape or on CD – both at the time known as ‘long-term media formats’. It chose to invest in video. Other people were trying out floppy disks, which were getting the hard sell. Two or three years later, the CD-ROM appeared in California. At last, we had the answer. We watched demonstration after thrilling demonstration. I remember the first CD-ROM we saw. It was about Egypt. We were staggered, and completely sold on it. We bowed low before this new invention, which seemed to solve all the difficulties we had been struggling with for years. And yet the American factories that used to make those little marvels closed down more than seven years ago.

On the other hand, our mobile phones, iPods, etc. are capable of ever-greater feats. We’re told that the Japanese write and publish their novels on them. The Internet has become portable and wireless. There is also the promise of Video on Demand, folding screens and all sorts of other phenomena. Who knows?

It may seem as if I’m talking about things that changed over a very long time-span, a matter of centuries. But all this has taken place in barely twenty years. It doesn’t take long to forget. Less and less long, perhaps. These thoughts are probably rather commonplace, but it’s important not to throw out commonplace things. At the start of a journey, in any case.

U. E.

A few years ago, a CD-ROM of Jacques-Paul Migne’s 221-volume Patrologia Latina was on the market for 50,000 dollars. As a result, only big libraries could buy the Patrologia, not poor scholars (having said that, we medievalists soon started gleefully copying them). These days, all you have to do is subscribe and you can consult the Patrologia online. The same goes for Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which was formerly sold by the dictionary publisher Robert on CD-ROM. Today, I can search it online for nothing.

J.-C. C.

When the DVD came on the market, we were sure that we had finally acquired the perfect solution – a format that would permanently resolve all our requirements around data storage and group screenings. Until then I had never created a personal film library. When DVDs came along, I was finally sure that I had my ‘lasting media format’. How wrong could I be? They are now announcing much smaller disks, which require new players and, like the e-book, can hold a substantial number of films. Even our good old DVDs will be given the push – unless we keep the old players that allow us to watch them.

There’s actually a trend for collecting things that technology is ruthlessly outdating. A Belgian film-maker friend of mine keeps eighteen computers in his cellar, just so that he can watch old work. Which goes to show that there is nothing more ephemeral than long-term media formats. Enthusiastic collectors of incunabula, such as you and I, are probably quite tickled by these banal, now rather hackneyed musings on the frailty of contemporary media formats. Look at this. This little incunabulum comes from my bookshelves. It was written in Latin and printed in Paris at the end of the fifteenth century. On the final page the following is printed in French: ‘These hours for the use of Rome were completed on the twenty-seventh day of September year one thousand four hundred and ninety-eight for Jean Poitevin, bookseller, of rue Neuve-Notre-Dame, Paris.’ Though the word ‘use’ has been spelled in an old-fashioned way, and this manner of describing the date and year has long been abandoned, we can still decipher the text easily enough. And so we can still read a text printed five centuries ago. But you can no longer read, or rather watch, a video or CD-ROM that is only a few years old. Unless you have space for a lot of old computers in your basement.

J.-P. DE T.

It’s important to emphasise the increasing pace with which these new formats are becoming obsolete, forcing us to reorganise our working methods, our back-up systems, the very way we think …

U. E.

And this increasing speed is contributing to the loss of our cultural heritage. That is definitely one of the thorniest issues of our time. On the one hand, we invent all kinds of tools to preserve our memories, all kinds of recording equipment, and ways in which to transport knowledge. This is certainly major progress in comparison to the days when you had to rely on mnemonics to remember – people had to rely on their own memories, because they didn’t have everything they needed to know at their fingertips. On the other hand, we have to acknowledge that, above and beyond the perishable nature of these tools, which is in itself a problem, we are not even-handed with the cultural objects that we choose to preserve. For example, if you want to buy an original of one of the great comic strips, it is horribly expensive, because they are so rare (these days, a single page of Alex Raymond’s work costs a fortune). But why are they so rare? Simply because the newspapers that used to publish them threw the plates in the bin the moment the strip had been printed.

J.-P. DE T.

What were the mnemonics that people used before the invention of artificial memories such as books and hard drives?

J.-C. C.

Take the case of Alexander the Great. He is once again about to make a far-reaching decision, and has been told of a woman who can predict the future with total accuracy. He summons this woman, to teach him her art. She tells him that he must light a big fire and read the future in the smoke from the fire, as from a book. But she gives the warrior one warning. While reading the smoke, he must on no account think of the left eye of a crocodile. The right eye if he must, but never the left.

Alexander gave up on knowing the future. Why? Because as soon as you have been instructed not to think of something, you can think of nothing else. The prohibition becomes an obligation. It is in fact impossible not to think of that crocodile’s left eye. The beast’s eye has taken over your memory, and your mind.

Sometimes, as in Alexander’s case, remembering and not being able to forget is a problem, a tragedy even. Some people have the ability to remember everything, using very simple mnemonics; they are called mnemonists, and have been studied by the Russian neurologist Alexander Luria. Peter Brook based his play I Am a Phenomenon on one of Luria’s books. If you tell a mnemonist something, he will be unable to forget it. He is like a perfect but crazed machine, recording everything without discrimination. Which is actually a flaw, rather than a quality.

U. E.

All mnemonic techniques use the image of a city or palace in which each area or place is linked to the thing that must be remembered. In his De oratore, Cicero describes Simonides attending a dinner with many of Greece’s senior dignitaries. At a certain point in the evening, Simonides takes a break from the gathering, only for the ceiling to collapse and all the other guests to be killed. Simonides is called in to identify the bodies. He manages to do this by remembering each person’s place at the table.

The art of mnemonics is thus to associate spatial imagery with objects or concepts in order to link them. The reason that Alexander can no longer behave freely is that he has linked the crocodile’s left eye to the smoke he must read. The memorising arts were still practised in the Middle Ages, but it seems that they were gradually lost with the invention of the printing press. Paradoxically, that was when the great books on mnemonic techniques were published.

J.-C. C.

You mentioned the original plates of the great comic strips being thrown in the bin after publication. The same thing happened with cinema, and many films were lost for ever. It was only in the 1920s and ’30s that cinema became, in Europe, the ‘seventh art’. After that it was considered worth conserving films, because they belonged to the history of art. And so they created the first film archives, in Russia and then in France. The Americans, however, don’t consider cinema an art. For them it is a renewable product. They are constantly remaking Zorro, or Nosferatu, or Tarzan, and because the previous version might be a rival to the new one – especially if the old film was good – they throw away the old film stock. In fact, the American film archive wasn’t created until the 1970s! It was a real struggle to raise finance, to convince the Americans of the importance of their own cinematic history. The world’s first film school was likewise in Russia. We owe it to Eisenstein, who thought it crucial to create a film school as good as the best schools of painting and architecture.

U. E.

In Italy, great poets like Gabriele d’Annunzio were already writing for the cinema at the beginning of the twentieth century. D’Annunzio co-wrote the script for Cabiria with Giovanni Pastrone. In America, that would have been bad for his reputation.

J.-C. C.

All this is even more the case with TV. Creating television archives seemed absurd at the outset. There was a radical change of perspective with the creation of the INA (France’s National Audiovisual Institute) to preserve audiovisual archives.

U. E.

I did some work in television in 1954, and I remember that everything was screened live, and they weren’t yet using magnetic tape recording. To make a recording, they used a method they called ‘Transcriber’, until they realised the word wasn’t actually used in English-speaking TV. It was simply a camera that filmed the screen. But it was so tedious and expensive to use that they didn’t bring it out much, and lots of programmes were lost.

J.-C. C.

I know a lovely example of this. A televisual incunabulum, if you like. In 1951 or ’52, Peter Brook shot King Lear for American TV with Orson Welles in the title role. The programmes were broadcast without being recorded in any way, and nothing was kept. But as it turned out, a film did in fact exist. Someone had happened to film the television screen during the broadcast of the programme. This film is now a prize exhibit in New York’s Museum of Television and Radio. In many ways that story reminds me of the history of the book.

U. E.

Up to a point. The idea of collecting books goes back a very long way, so what took place in the film world never happened with books. The cult of the written page, and later of the book, goes back as far as writing itself. Even the Romans wanted to own and collect scrolls. The books we have lost have been lost for other reasons. They have been destroyed through religious censorship and because libraries, rather like cathedrals, had a great tendency to burn down at the slightest provocation, chiefly because both were built mainly of wood. In medieval times, a cathedral or library burning down was a bit like a plane being shot down during the Pacific War. Normal. The fact that the library in The Name of the Rose ends up burning down would not at the time have been particularly out of the ordinary.

Indeed, the fact that books were liable to be destroyed by fire was the reason people wanted to keep them safe, and collected them. This is the very basis of monasticism. The repeated barbarian invasions of Rome, and their habit of setting fire to the city before they left, seem to have led the Romans to seek out a safe place for their books. And what safer place than a monastery to put books out of reach of the dangers that threatened the preservation of their history? At the same time, this practice inevitably entailed saving certain books at the expense of others, and so the filtering process was begun.

J.-C. C.

The cult of rare films, on the other hand, is only just beginning. There are even people who collect film scripts. In the old days the script would go in the bin as soon as the film had been shot – like those comic-strip plates you were talking about. But then, in the 1940s, people started to wonder whether the script might not retain a certain value of its own, once the film had been made. A commercial value, at least.

U. E.

And now there’s a kind of cult around famous scripts, like the script for Casablanca.

J.-C. C.

Especially, of course, if the script has been annotated by the director. In some circles Fritz Lang’s annotated film scripts are worshipped, almost fetishised, as collectors’ objects. Others have been beautifully bound by their owners. But let me return to my earlier comment for a moment, about creating a personal film archive. Which format is best? Storing traditional reels at home would be impossible. You’d need a projection room, a special viewing room and lots of storage space. As we know, videotapes lose colour and definition and wear out fast. CD-ROMs are over. DVDs won’t last long. And in any case, we can’t count on always having access to enough energy to run all these machines. What if the July 2006 New York power cut had spread, and continued? Lose electricity and you lose everything, for ever. But even if our entire audiovisual legacy were to be lost in a power cut, we would still be able to read books in the light from the sun, or in the evening by candlelight. The twentieth century is the first century to give future generations moving pictures of itself, of its own history, along with sound recordings – although on formats that remain insecure. It’s strange to think that we have no sounds of the past. We can of course presume that birdsong was the same, the sound of a running stream …

U. E.

But not human voices. Museum collections show us that our ancestors’ beds were smaller than ours – and so the people must have been shorter, too. This in turn means that their intonation and the quality of their voices would have been different. When I listen to an old Caruso recording, I always wonder whether the difference between his voice and that of today’s great tenors is due exclusively to the technical quality of the recording and the media format, or whether human voices at the beginning of the twentieth century were in fact different from ours. There are decades of increased protein intake and medical advances between the voices of Caruso and Pavarotti. Italian immigrants to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century tended to measure about five foot three, whereas their grandsons average five eleven.

J.-C. C.

When I was running the French film school, I challenged the student sound engineers to re-create certain sounds and sonic atmospheres of the past. For example, I asked them to create a soundtrack for Boileau’s satirical poem ‘Les Embarras de Paris’. I reminded them that the road surfaces were made of wood, the horse-drawn carriages had iron wheels, the houses were not as high, etc.

The poem starts like this: ‘Qui frappe l’air bon Dieu de ces lugubres cris?’ (‘Who, by God, strikes the air with dismal cries?’). What would be the nature of a ‘dismal’ cry in seventeenth-century night-time Paris? This attempt to dive into times past by way of sound is fascinating, but difficult. How can one ever be sure?

All this is to say that, even if visual and sound recordings of the twentieth century are wiped out by a gigantic electricity failure, or for some other reason, we will always have the book. We will always find ways of teaching a child to read. The idea of culture being on the road to ruin, of memories being endangered, is of course as old as the hills. Probably older than the written object itself. Let me give you an example from Persian history. We know that contemporary