There was talk of Stonehenge recently at Today the story from hereFirst, and the megalithic monument dating back thousands of years was presented with period sound archives. Well, from another era. The serious production included a comic capsule imagining a report on the construction site 3000 or 4000 years ago broadcast on April 26, 2001 by the late funny program tarmac tribes.
“I often say this when I brainstorm with my team: our program is neither a university work nor a thesis: it tells a story using archives”, explains Maxime Coutié, host of the daily since September. “The story is built around archives like a report is built around quotes, images on TV, sound clips on the radio. There are plenty of historical podcasts on the web. What sets us apart, what makes us rich, is access to exceptional archives. One of the mandates of the show is to highlight them. »
Canadian broadcasting is turned centenary in 2022. The Crown corporation CBC/Radio-Canada was created on November 2, 1936. The public media audiovisual vaults accumulated since then, unique in the country, are also among the ten largest in the world. There are approximately four million items distributed in 18 regional production centers across the country.
Past 2.0
These treasures are in the process of being completely digitized. “We digitize first to protect the content because the physical medium has a limited lifespan,” explains Patrick Monette, senior director, media library and archives at Radio-Canada. “Digitalization then facilitates consultation and dissemination. Our staff have been able to telework since the start of the pandemic. »
The digital project spread over ten years, now halfway through, must transfer approximately 700,000 radio and television media. In Montreal, the digital transfer of radio funds is carried out at 60% and 15% in regional stations. Half of the images are digitized. The copies are kept in triplicate at two separate locations.
The broadcast takes place on a site created in 2017, now divided into around twenty themes (arts, society, politics, techno, food, etc.), but also on different platforms (YouTube, Facebook and Instagram). It is not a question of putting everything online, the copyright of external productions constituting the first obstacle to the complete opening of documents. Talk radio would, on the whole, pose no problem from this point of view.
When you think archives, you think old, black and white, and old radio show. Rather, it should be understood that broadcasting an extract from last week’s radio news implies recourse to the archives.
The new show in the summer schedule, The little story of a big day, will return to monumental moments (opening of Expo 67, Apollo 11, September 11, 2001…) by offering an “immersive and sensory experience” drawing on background sounds. Podcasts also fully exploit the treasures of yesteryear. The list is long, and in fact, almost all podcasts have a place for the accumulated archives: The story does not end there, Stories of investigation, The voices of the tower, For having lived it, etc
The sounds and images of the past also and even above all serve to enrich daily news productions. “When we think of archives, we think old, in black and white, and old radio broadcasts, notes Patrick Monette. Rather, it should be understood that broadcasting an excerpt from last week’s radio news involves recourse to the archives. There are almost no shows where you don’t find these kinds of excerpts. »
At RDI, about 70% of the content comes from visual material prepared by archivists. The funds are also commercially exploited to sell clips by the second to private producers.
Marie-Laurence Rancourt, co-founder of Magnéto, a non-profit podcasting organization, had a painful experience of it. For the use of 425 seconds for the podcast The Night Myra Creeshe had to pay $ 2,643.28 in February 2020. At this rate ($ 5 per second, plus administrative costs), the extracts from programs of the famous host of… Radio-Canada have been reduced to the bare minimum.
“I discuss it with colleagues and we all experience the same reality: the padlocking of Radio-Canada archives,” laments Ms.me Rancourt, who is demanding rates adapted to small organizations like his, modulation to which Radio-Canada ensures that it is subject to depending on the formats, the distribution channels and the nature of the projects. “So I was not able to buy the archives necessary for the realization of my initial project. It remains anecdotal. The most important thing is to ask questions about the transformation of collective memory materials into commodities, of course, and about the use to which they are put. »
Cutting-edge skills
Both archiving and interpreting collections require advanced skills. The media library and archives department employs dozens of people, “all nerds,” says their boss, all with a master’s degree in library science, often after a baccalaureate in another discipline.
This is the case of Mario Bolduc, media librarian at Radio-Canada for nearly two decades. He mainly works for audio now, podcasts and radio. You can hear his sonic discoveries at Journeyto 15-18 (which often opens with a historical nugget) and at Today the story.
He digs into film trailers, radio novels, reading texts so as not only to come out of interviews. He can also draw (by paying) from the side of French-speaking European databases, including the very fabulous one of the National Audiovisual Institute of France. The legal deposit introduced in the early 1990s allows the protection of a hundred TV channels and almost as many radio stations in addition to films and websites. Around 900 people work in this Louvre of French audiovisual memory.
Fishing extracts from the sea of old productions also makes it possible to measure social changes. Contemporaries can be lenient, excuse things, contextualize them, while remaining honestly critical.
“There is a certain nostalgia for the Radio-Canada of yesteryear,” says Maxime Coutié. I listen to a lot of it, Radio-Canada of yesteryear. There were excellent reports, absolutely masterful productions, journalists like Marcel Ouimet or René Lévesque who left their mark on the quality of their work. There is also some very, very bad stuff. There are misogynistic, racist and other comments that bear witness to an era. You can’t stick your head in the sand. »
The tone has changed too. We “pearl” a lot at Radio-Canada, which gave itself the air of Radio-France. So much so that one wonders how the good ordinary people managed to recognize themselves. “I wonder who these people were talking to,” says Maxime Coutié. No one on the streets in Canada spoke like that. There was a break in tone, an accent, except for René Lévesque or Pierre Paquette, for example, who were never in this radio-Canadian tone. »
Marie-Laurence Rancourt asks us not to lock ourselves into a conception of archives as a simple reminder of a bygone past with no regrets. She quotes the “very beautiful book” The dark voice (POL, 2015), by Ryōko Sekiguchi, which focuses on the traces left by a voice. She adds that all the recordings have value in order to better situate ourselves now, hence the importance of making them accessible.
“Archives allow us to understand what surrounds us, our way of life, it’s not absolute,” she says. They make it possible to do archaeology, to better understand why things are the way they are and could be different. They lead to emancipation. »