Film Archive Forum

A night at the pictures presented by Maryann Gomes confounded pleasurably two sets of stereotypes. That historical factual film albeit worthy and educational can also be entrancing, entertaining, revealing and viewed with affection and humour, and that archivists can be lively and energetic, passionate and extrovert as well as knowledgeable about their collections.

Born in Glasgow of Goanese parents, she was educated at Loreto Grammar School, Manchester, the University of London, and Leeds Polytechnic, training in the teaching of art and art history. After educational posts for Manchester City Art Galleries Service and Manchester Polytechnic, where she developed interests in both social history and film, in 1983 she became curator of the North West Film Archive, one of the pioneering regional film collections to emerge in England in the mid 1970s. Maryann rose to the challenge of developing the film collection to reflect the history of the region and earning for local productions a hitherto neglected place in the canon of British cinema history.

Maryann’s presentational style reflected her personality - her passion for the subject, her affection for the images and their recording of ordinary peoples’ lives and her determination that the films would be available for future generations to understand and enjoy. Throughout her tenure as Curator, later Director, of the Archive she fought hard to preserve and develop the archive’s role of acquisition, preservation and access, activities which were maintained in good part through stalwart support from Manchester Metropolitan University, despite a dispiriting lack of statutory core funding and fluctuating staffing levels.

She acquired new skills in marketing management to equip herself with the tools of fund raising which in recent years of necessity would occupy the greater proportion of her time. Successes in this field came about due to her determination, tenacity and drive, attributes that carried over into every aspect of her life. As a colleague she was challenging, stimulating and demanded the highest standards in everything, yet she was also delightful, funny and the most welcome of companions on any occasion.

She has left her colleagues with many fond memories of the strength of her personality. Maryann during sight-seeing breaks at international congresses, doggedly and good humouredly bartering for hours with local traders and typically emerging triumphant with armfuls of gifts for friends and workmates back home while her faint hearted colleagues sat quietly in the shade of tropical heat. Meetings of the UK’s Film Archive Forum, of which she was a founder member, enlivened by her contributions - always articulate and energetic, if not always consensual. It is hard when someone with such a zest for life is taken so young from the friends and colleagues who loved her.

Janet McBain, Curator, Scottish Screen Archive

With her profound commitment to the film heritage preserved in her archive, Maryann naturally took a leading role in championing such material in the international domain. She made an incontestable case for the NWFA’s membership of FIAF - the International Federation of Film Archives - and gained admission in 1995, when the Federation was governed by rules which normally expected candidates to “operate at the national level.” Although many FIAF members at that time had little time for non-fiction film of any kind, Maryann’s symposium presentations on amateur film at the Cartagena Congress in 1997 and on local topicals at the London Congress in 2000 helped open their eyes. Her participation in other elements of the Federation’s annual congresses proved the relevance and value to FIAF’s terms of reference of all kinds of moving images - and moving image archives - and helped pave the way for the more inclusive membership definition that was adopted in 2000.

In AMIA - the Association of Moving Image Archivists - Maryann stimulated an even more immediate recognition of the cause of regional film archiving, when her first attendance at an AMIA Conference, in Miami in 1998, led to the creation of a Regional Archives Special Interest Group, which she immediately volunteered to chair. Her compelling ability to explain and to share her passion for film as a record of the lives of ordinary people was demonstrated in two important presentations: “The Richness of the Regions: Projecting a Global Picture of the Twentieth Century” at the AMIA Conference in Montreal in 1999, and an equally influential presentation on diversity in Los Angeles in 2000.

Maryann's life refuted those who complain that the spirit that fired the legendary founders of film archives and cinematheques in the middle of the last century has no equivalent in the increasingly bureaucratic modern world. Her memorial will be the number of archives and archivists who will continue to acknowledge her as an inspiration in their own work.

Roger Smither, Keeper, Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive/Vice-President, FIAF