From the salon indien du grand café
2008
Since the aesthetic and historical value of motion pictures received universal recognition, films and
cinema have been officially considered cultural heritage and therefore worthy of being preserved.
Once defined and classified the cinematographic heritage, this Master Thesis discusses the issue
of its preservation and access within the theoretical framework of cultural economics. More
specifically, the research question addressed is: what is the impact of digitalization and the Internet
on the cinematographic heritage sector?
The paper is divided into two parts. In Part I – in which the main literature is reviewed, ranging from
the cultural economy of heritage to the economic analysis of the cultural industries (including
issues related to copyright), and from the literature developed within film archival practices to the
current debate on digitalization – the topic and the research question are investigated theoretically.
At first, a case is made for the definition of a new category of heritage, labelled ‘information
heritage’, which differs from both the tangible and the intangible heritage and whose essential
attribute is reproducibility. The information heritage comprises all the products of the content
industries and (only) within this category digitization equals preservation; as far as films are
concerned, however, only their ‘content’ but not their ‘narrative’ can be transferred on new media,
hence the authenticity value of a movie’s original negative and prints must be acknowledged.
Having outlined the domain of the inquiry, the section continues with the application of the cultural
economic theory on heritage to the cinematic sector, with the description of how the world of film
preservation is organized (how archives, cinematheques and film museums operate) and finally
with the investigation of the revolutionary changes digital technologies have brought about in the
field. The cultural economic analysis of a concrete example of a large-scale film heritage
digitization project is also included.
Part II, the empirical section of the thesis, researches how the potential power of digitalization is
currently used (or not used) in the cinematographic heritage field and in particular how the
audiences perceive this new reality. To address those objectives, a survey is designed, organized
around a central willingness to pay question. The sample is selected among the users of YouTube
who normally watch, upload and/or comment on (parts of) heritage movies on the ever increasingly
popular website. The data collected is subsequently analysed both with descriptive statistics and
econometrics (logistic regression). The outcome of the survey shows that peer-to-peer networks
and online video on demand systems are considered the best ways of delivery of cinematic
heritage content, especially in terms of accessibility. The results of the data analysis suggest that
this occurs because (for several reasons) cultural institutions do not offer a satisfactory alternative
and ignore contemporary audiences’ needs.
In the concluding section, further research is recommended into the development of legal
alternatives to YouTube and the torrents (that should occur under the supervision of experts),
including extensive WTP studies that would help understanding how to maximize the revenue
capture potential of the systems and assure their economic sustainability overtime.
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