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South
Africa Film and Video Project
The South Africa
Film and Video Project (SAFVP) was established to provide access
to the broad and deep heritage of the film and video that recorded
the world’s most extraordinary political and racial transition
of the twentieth century – the coming of majority rule in
South Africa and other countries of the Southern Africa region.
As the U.S. Librarian of Congress said in 1993, "The moving
picture is not so much the art form as the language of the twentieth
century...Future generations will wonder why so little of such a
marvelously accessible and appealing record was ever preserved or
seriously studied by the strangely transparent and otherwise exuberant
society that produced it all." (James H. Billington, , 1993)
In a variety
of formats and genres, the different communities in these diverse
and conflict-ridden societies of Southern Africa recorded their
perceptions of the struggle, the state, the peoples, the resistance,
and the movement toward peace and democracy. As a result, three
large archives in South Africa have more than 30,000 film and video
materials that include many unique pieces, most of which are largely
uncatalogued, undescribed, unduplicated, unsecured, and resting
in many cases in environments without preserving temperature and
humidity controls.
This
project made of this South African heritage accessible in the U.S.
It established a distributed system to allow simultaneous searching
of multiple databases in S.A. and the U.S. that have been independently
cataloged and that describe the collections that are maintained
by the five partner institutions. This allows for their cooperation
in sharing tasks of building this networked database, in providing
access to these rich collections of South African film and videotape
for both South Africans and scholars and other users in the U.S.
The
South African films and videos that are the focus of this project
are held by the UWC-Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Film and Video
Archive (Cape Town), the African National Congress Archive (Johannesburg),
and the National Film, Video and Sound Archive (Pretoria). These
institutions hold the three premier collections of film and video
in South Africa, making their partnership in this project very significant.
Using the new electronic technologies and the internet, the project
builds on the 10,000 item database that already has been created
by the MSU African Media Program and the long history of film and
video reviewing and indexing of MSU and Cultural and Media Studies
at the University of Natal (Durban). At MSU, the project is a joint
effort of the African Studies Center and MATRIX: The Center for
Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Studies Online.
This is an exciting project as it is the first effort to use new
technologies to construct a distributed database system linking
the U.S. and South Africa scholarly and archival communities to
provide public access to information about these very diverse, but
very complementary, holdings.
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