30th anniversary for National Film and Sound Archive
Last night the NFSA in Canberra marked its 30th anniversary with a tribute to the 1980s.
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Last night the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra marked its 30th anniversary with a tribute to the 1980s.
The NFSA was opened by Prime Minister Bob Hawke on October 3rd 1984. It moved into its new home – the 1930 art deco building previously occupied by the Australian Institute of Anatomy – six months later.
Is now home to 2 million items which are digitised at the rate of 7,000 a year, including 516,000 moving images, 444,000 recorded sounds and 1,205,000 documents and artefacts.
Yesterday NFSA was partying to new wave, rock and pop from vinyl records with a screening of Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli.
CEO Michael Loebenstein said: “As the custodians of the national audiovisual collection we are proud to celebrate our first three decades. We also want to take this opportunity to thank the Australian public, and the talented creatives working in our film, recorded sound and broadcast industries, whose legacy lives on at the NFSA.
“Our reason for being is to develop, preserve and share a significant collection of sound and moving image – the ultimate ‘living’ record of people, places and events. The NFSA plays an essential role in the long-term survival, interpretation, enjoyment and re-use of our audiovisual heritage.”
But earlier this year the national institution announced it would cut 28 jobs as part of a major restructure, and was struggling to keep up the pace of converting deteriorating film stock into digital.
“The pace of broadcast, the pace of the film industry, the pace of the music industry is changing dramatically,” he told ABC.
“How can we stand still? If you work in audio visual archiving you work for permanence, but at the same time, you know that you have to walk at a very brisk pace.”
Items in the collection:
Oldest items: The Hen Convention (sound recording on wax cylinder, 1896), the Lumiere film Workers Leaving the Factory and Australia’s earliest surviving moving image shot at the Melbourne Cup carnival (both from 1896), plus ‘magic lantern’ projectors from the early 1800s.
Iconic items: 1943 Oscar for Kokoda Frontline; costumes from The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Muriel’s Wedding; the car that splits in half from Malcolm; Graham Kennedy’s throne and crown; the world’s first feature-length narrative movie The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906).
One Response
Let’s not mention the Screensound Australia disaster. In the late 1990s a slick PR company managed to convince the NFSA to spend a sizeable amount of its meagre budget on a rebranding exercise. The amount of film and music donations fell sharply as many people believed the NFSA had closed down. They persevered with the Screensound Australia monicker for six or seven years before realising the error of their ways and going back to their original name.