Film Preservation in the Age of Digitality

We now live in a digital age, seemingly guaranteeing instant accessibility. Much of the general public in fact believes that every film and television program ever made has already been digitized and is now available in Netflix’s catalog. That is hardly the case, because digitization is still massively expensive, there is no such thing as a digital preservation medium, and even the migration of digital films is fraught with technical difficulties.

Chris Horak is Director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive.