IASA 2019 Annual Conference

Over the course of the past year, Národní filmový archiv in Prague has been rethinking its relationship towards film sound, particularly in the context of collection policy, acquisition of materials connected to film sound and music, their preservation, presentation and related research. This new approach is inter alia represented by a project focused on one of the foremost European film music composers, Zdeněk Liška. Film sound and music research is by its nature an interdisciplinary exercise that needs to make use of approaches from different fields of study (film history, musicology, archival studies, media archeology etc.). That is why one of the aims of the project is to create a methodology of how to connect data that are spread between various types of material as well as several institutions. Even though the main output of the research is a publication focused on Liška's compositional methods and his use of electronics and sound design, questions of typology of sound on film, the ways of connecting information from scores with their manifestation in film, inquiries into period sound engineering techniques and subsequent questions are of an equal importance. The paper will present main research issues and methodological approaches towards integrating information from archival documents (scripts, scores, magnetic film stock) with other data (oral history projects, Barrandov Studios archive) and a comparative examination of the final versions of the soundtracks. Through this, we hope to provide a glimpse of the possible future models of interdisciplinary archival care and scholarship.