I’ve been thinking a lot about Joni Mitchell’s lyrics of late as I look through the final weeks of the Arc Cinema program, deciding what I have time to see between work and my own social life and kids’ soccer matches before funding cuts cease the program at the end of September.

My family moved to Canberra not long after the National Film and Sound Archive opened its doors in the early 1980s and I remember a wide-eyed visit to its two halls of memorabilia from Australia movies.

In 2005, in days of better funding, then-CEO Paolo Cherchi Usai took one of those halls and had a theatre purpose-built to be able to deliver film in all of its many formats.

It was a fascinating and well-executed piece of work by the architects, who had to acknowledge the building’s heritage status and do no damage to the environment in which it was built, and the end result was a lush little jewel box in which Canberra audiences have been offered a couple of university degrees worth of film literacy education since it opened in 2007.

“Arc Cinema as Paolo saw it was really the embodiment of a utopia of pure cinema,” says current National Film and Sound Archive chief executive Michael Loebenstein.

“Within a landscape where more and more film is seen and consumed on all kinds of devices, he made a bold statement for a purpose-built movie theatre where you could see film screened in its original format and with programming outside the confines of commercial distributors,” Loebenstein says, “and that is something that did not exist in Australia before. That bold statement will be diluted over coming weeks as part of a sweeping range of reforms to the National Film and Sound Archive, with Arc Cinema ending its regular programming, its bookshop and gallery shut and around 30 staff having left or beginning their exit from the organisation.

We the public have been up in arms about this. Loebenstein’s plans for the organisation have drawn vocal condemnation, with various film industry luminaries and community members signing a petition for greater transparency and access.

“This shows how much passion and support is out there for an independent and sustainable National Film and Sound Archive,” he says, adding that consulting and being open about the reforms are important to him because “the archive will need all support it can get from the film industry.”

For me, the biggest tragedy of these changes is the loss of film curator Quentin Turnour, whose encyclopaedic brain of film history and culture added much to the country’s cultural richness.

archive in 2005 to work towards Arc Cinema’s launch in 2007 where he initially programmed four sessions of reparatory (the industry word for ''film classics'') a week before Arc expanded its programming in 2009 to include seasons of new international and Australian cinema.

He says he has faced tough challenges in the past seven years but also joys, including bringing French film director Bertrand Tavernier to Canberra to give a lecture on the history of cinema.

He has also been a vocal advocate of the role of the archive.

“It is important for an archive like the NFSA to screen films in their historical context,” Turnour says, “in a post-celluloid age, to offer the chance to see a film in its original format, run at the correct speed, the correct aspect ratio, the original accompaniment.”

“We are the only cinema in Australia that can run films in 119, which is an early 1930s Hollywood screening ratio,” he says, “and people are interested in this – when we run outdoor screenings in the summertime people want to come up and look at the film running through the machine, talk to the projectionist about what they’re seeing.”

There is still the chance to see the last of Turnour’s programming work, with much of the Arc Cinema winter program to run in August and September, including the ongoing retrospective of pioneer Australian documentarian Dennis O’Rourke with screenings of Cannibal Tours (Sat August 9, 2pm), Half Life (Sat Aug 23, 2pm), and my favourite of his documentaries, the incendiary look at rural Australia in Cunnamulla (Sat August 16, 2pm).

“When I travel overseas, all the Australian filmmaker people always talk about is Dennis O’Rourke,” says Turnour, “from his part in the wave of filmmakers who started talking about Papua New Guinea in a new sense, as a neighbour rather than a colonial subject, to films like [The] Good Woman of Bangkok, where he pioneered a new style of documentary, thoroughly colonialist and sexist but profoundly aware of its own issues.”

There is a season of restored classics from Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu with Equinox Flower (Sat Aug 9, 4.30pm), Good Morning (Sun Aug 10, 4.30pm and Sun Aug 24, 2pm), An Autumn Afternoon (Sun Aug 24, 4.30pm) and Late Autumn (Sun Aug 17, 4.30pm and Fri Aug 22, 7.30pm).

These are the kinds of seasons you won’t see in a commercial venue, unlike cult classics, which each of the commercial cinemas has their own variation of. Arc has a few to come, with Fantastic Voyage (Sun August 10, 2pm) and Robert Altman’s Countdown (Sun August 17, 2pm) among them.

While the changes Loebenstein and the NFSA board are bringing in are about running an organisation with tighter budgets, both he and Turnour are philosophical about the changing cinema landscape in which Arc has been working.

“This slow shift over the past few years from 35mm film to digital is equivalent to that from 1927,” Turnour says, “the change from silent to sound and from 16mm to 35mm.”

“The increased festivalisation of film culture means less reparatory screenings, and more international or subject matter festivals and that is something all big cities, whether Berlin, New York or Paris, have all had to face,” Loebenstein says.

archive collection.

It has taken me some time to write this article because my thinking has vacillated between frustration and practicalities since the archive first announced its cuts. Shame shame shame, thought I initially, but the story of the NFSA is echoed around this town as programs are shut, cultural institutions struggle to maintain services and opening hours. When you have a larger job, like the maintenance of Australia’s 1.9 million works of audio and visual heritage, with new items being added every day and an ongoing struggle to preserve older film formats and external pressures to digitise the entire collection, the softer parts of the workload fall to preserve the core business.

Voting in a government that talks openly going into an election about reducing the public service and cutting the spending in Canberra will of course mean they will do just that.

While the ideology behind reduced government is that it creates opportunity for small business to provide those services, there is in reality little capacity in private enterprise to deliver the kinds of programming Arc Cinema has been giving our city for the past seven years. It is financially unsustainable, that’s just a fact. But it represents the kind of cultural investment a nation can make in its people that pays dividends down the line, though the kinds of dividends that can rarely be reported in ‘'metrics’' – that awful word budget-slashers can hide behind.

The documentary Into The Shadows was made by local filmmaker Andrew Scarano in response to the 2006 closing of Canberra’s arthouse cinema Electric Shadows as reflecting a bigger trend in Australia, with small independent family-owned cinemas closing their doors, falling to the pressure of the big commercial cinema chains.

Some handsome devil was quoted in that film’s early cut (I got edited out in the version that played in cinemas) about how short the public’s attention span was.

“I think people will say they’re upset,” I believe my words went, “but then they’ll love the new wider seats at the Dendy, and the better parking and bigger choice of films and they’ll forget pretty quickly.

“But in a few years they’ll look back nostalgically and they’ll come to realise what the community is missing.”

And I think the same is true about Arc Cinema.

Arc Cinema is marking the 100th anniversary of Charlie Chaplin’s first appearance as his iconic Tramp character in the 1914 Keystone Film Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. To celebrate, NFSA is rounding up many old friends from among the musicians who’ve accompanied its silent film screenings over the years, as well as some new talent, performing to a selection of early Chaplin classics and rarities. Chaplinitis is on Saturday, August 30, at 7.30pm. For more information, visit nfsa.gov.au.