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This article is a follow-up to the author's "First Tango in Paris: The Birth of FIAF, 1936-1938", published in the Journal of Film Preservation, No.88, April 2013. 1
On 25 October 1938, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York issued a press release announcing the formation of the International Federation of Film Archives, as agreed with the representatives of the other three founding film archives a few weeks before. In it, John Abbott, Director of the MoMA Film Library and first President of FIAF, wrote:
In times like these it is most encouraging to realize that nations, through the medium of film, can get together in a strong cooperative movement that is practical and entirely non-commercial, that has no political motivation, but has for its object the better understanding, in its most enjoyable fashion, of the lives, customs, arts and achievements of the citizens of every country.2
Such an optimistic statement seems at odds with the prevailing international situation in late 1938.
The founding of the new international organisation, thanks to the considerable efforts of the representatives of the four founding archives 3 since their first informal meeting in May 1938, was indeed nothing short of a miracle, given the rapidly deteriorating international context of that period, and, as noted in the MoMA press release, the considerable "difficulties arising through differences of national outlook and even more, of varying legal and other circumstances obtaining in the four countries". 4 It had taken over four months for the FIAF statutes to be signed by the four archives' representatives and counter-signed by their higher authorities. Yet, signing the founding document, establishing a Board of Directors 5 and finally announcing the launch of the Federation to the press was only the initial - and perhaps easiest - stage of the foundation process. If FIAF was going to be more than another ineffective international body and actually serve some kind of useful purpose, it urgently needed to validate its existence and establish its legitimacy by first acquiring a viable financial basis, setting up a secretariat, convincing other emerging film archives to join the network, and creating a systematic protocol for exchanging films and other materials among its members. But a few weeks after the signing of the...