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Every second as I'’m talking now,
cinema is falling to dust.
Most people don'’t realize or think somebody else should
think about it.
Not just celluloid, but also videotape, and now
digital, have all the same problems.
All of us have had our experiences of loss,
and that becomes the foundation of archiving.
Film does have a limited life, but that'’s the value
of preservation, isn'’t it? It'’s to make certain that
that life is a long life.
How much less we would know about the world that
we might never travel to without being able to watch
films, from different eras and different countries,
that only exist because archivists saved them.
People working in this field consider themselves
to be backstage people.
So not many people know what we are doing.
When I personally become interested in an artist
or a thinker in any way, one part that'’s very interesting
to me is the path that they took to get to that point.
And archiving; it shows that path.
A film archive, as a space, is interesting, there are work
areas and there are vaults where things are stored.
But anytime I give a tour to somebody of the archive,
they'’re still kind of blown away by the scale of it,
because we just have a ton of stuff: on pallets
and in boxes, on shelves and in cans, and barcodes
and numbers written on boxes...
As these things get stored, and labelled and numbered,
and put into an archive, these become, quite literally,
our memories.
So we think that about 80% of all the silent films
in the world are completely gone.
They didn'’t really think they were of any value,
and they melted them down for the silver.
Not only were you saving yourself in storage costs,
you were also making money by reclaiming the silver
that was included in the film stock.
They were like, maybe the way people treated comic books
when I was a kid: they were cheap, they fell apart.
Who cared? You used them, then you got rid of them.
They were deliberately destroyed.
Film was not treated as art, and film was not treated
as a historical source.
So dump them. That'’s the way the attitude was.
And they believed that, once safety film came along,
there was no need any longer to keep nitrate film.
Nitrate, or nitrocellulose film, is the film stock
that was used from the very beginning up to about 1950.
All of those Hollywood features that you see
on TCM or in festivals were created on nitrate film.
It says: Eastman Kodak Nitrate Film.
It'’s a really good film stock. It'’s very, very strong,
but it'’s very, very flammable.
It can withstand time, if treated with respect.
If it gets too close to an open flame or a match,
it'’ll go up like that.
It literally explodes.
There'’s this dark joke or comment that the largest
archive is the bottom of the Pacific Ocean,
because so many of those nitrate prints were dumped.
And there were a handful of catastrophic nitrate fires.
The Fox Film Corporation had a devastating fire in 1937
at their vaults in New Jersey that they lost most
of their silent films.
"Autumn,which was previously booked for Saturday, was
destroyed in a fire." Back in the day, nitrate fires were
very common, and they had to change the program because
they lost their print.
They would make movies constantly, but they weren'’t
very good about saving the movies made five years
before or ten years before, because their attitude was:
"If you like a Fred Astaire movie, just wait, there'’ll
be another one in six months."
This was even the approach of the filmmakers. Very few
of them, some did, of course, but very few of them
in the early days wanted to keep any films.
After the initial run of the film, they couldn'’t
imagine that there'’d be another use for it.
There wasn'’t a lot of awareness of film as an art
maybe at the Studios, but it was happening in museums
and archives around the world.
They had legal restrictions. They were surrounded in large
by the indifference of the cultural environment
of the time.
Four major national archives that would become FIAF:
the International Federation of Film Archives,came together.
They had to explain what they were doing. They had
to explain to the Studios that they were not a threat.
They had to explain to their government funders
and to the public that cinema was an art.
They had to explain to the Fire Department
that they had to be able to build nitrate vaults.
There was the first generation of archivists: Henri Langlois,
Iris Barry, Jacques Ledoux, Ernest Lindgren. Most of them,
not Ernest Lindgren, were film collectors, and it was their
enthusiasm that put together collections of films,
and they were run on a semi-official basis.
For him to avoid the Germans, who would take the films
and burn them, because they were forbidden films, he was
switching films. So that'’s why even today we find a film
that was not corresponding to its cans.
Gosfilmofondis the Russian State Film Archive, which was
founded in 1948. The film depository was there
from 1937. There was a legal deposit of everything.
So there is a very low probability of a Soviet film,
from 1948 to 1991, to be lost. On the other hand,
Gosfilmofondholds one of the most important
collections of foreign films. And this is where a huge
amount of lost or partially lost films were found,
especially German films, because when the war was won,
the Soviet troops took the material to Moscow
and the Germans, before that, captured lots of films
from the territories they occupied.
So Gosfilmofondis still an invaluable source for many
international collaborations.
Our vaults were at a little village outside London called
Aston Clinton. Once a week, a van came to pick up any waste
film we had. We were the furthest out of London.
So when it arrived, the van was full of film.
I and a colleague used to unload all the film off
the van, replace it with other nitrate films, and put them
into the collection. Now, this was strictly wrong.
But 10 or 15 years later, they'’d come back to us and say:
"Have you got a print of this?" And we'’d say: "Yes."
But we never told them this was a print
we'’d actually taken off the back of the van on its way
to the silver recovery plant.
David Shepard, starting as a film buff, he worked
at the American Film Institute in charge of collecting films
from the Studios, because, at the time, the Studios wanted
to destroy their own films.
For example, the Universal silent films have been
destroyed by Universal. So it took people like
David Shepard or Sam Kula to tell RKOin 1966:
"Don'’t destroy the negatives of Citizen Kane, Fred Astaire,
King Kong,and so on. Why don'’t you bring them
to the Library of Congress?"
On this side, we have Universalpictures.
So we have, like, the original negatives of Frankenstein
and Dracula.
That'’s been the challenge as to step in and decide
who'’s responsible for saving these important films
for future generations. Is that the responsibility
of the companies that produced them? Many
of those companies are out of business or they belong
to big international corporations.
Or is it the responsibility of the government? So that'’s
always been the tension in the United States?
In a way, I look at this as an archaeology center.
We'’re trying to rescue films that are lost or unknown
before they ultimately disappear forever.
I fought for things which one day perhaps will be lost.
Heaven knows if in hundreds of years people will still see
films of Murnau and Lang and Renoir.
It'’s too hot. Thank you.
I hope I wasn'’t too pessimistic.
But film is really a fragile art.
That'’s the first thing you do: you collect and you conserve.
And then there'’s the technical challenge, because when
the films were collected, finally, it took quite some time
to realize that you need to preserve them: nitrate film
stock and the safety film stock. There was decomposition,
and there'’s the vinegar syndrome and the color fades.
Film decomposes, if not stored properly.
The great majority of audiovisual film heritage is
still very much at risk of being lost forever.
Without the right temperatures and humidity controls,
this would happen to film archives all over the world.
But you can see the image is almost completely gone.
Just like the rest of us, it'’s organic material
and it'’s going to decay.
Film is susceptible to the vagaries of time,
of weather and temperature, and whether it had this type
of chemical composition or that. Each one will age
or rot in a different way, and that will eventually
affect the images. So it wasn'’t a large leap to look at all
this rotting film and think of it as our own rotting
memories. And I was always looking for images where
people were trying to be heroic in some way.
It was either tragic or comic, or something.
That they were valiantly punching the boxing bag,
you know, with the boxing bag with now just some chaotic blob,
you know and you don'’t know if it'’s going to win or lose,
but they'’re still in there fighting. And that is
the experience of being alive. We'’re fighting every day
for another one.
Anything that we have in our archive now is a survivor.
The archives had no money at that time at all.
We did virtually no film duplication.
In fact, the chief technical officer at the archive,
Harold Brown, made his own printer. We couldn'’t afford
to buy a printer, he built his own printer, using parts
of an old showman'’s projection outfit, bits of elastic,
and things like this.
Only careful copying of the restored
original enables us to see the great
Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson as Hamlet. And look at
that ghostly cinema trick that they contrived!
This unique film was saved for posterity when it had
almost perished. Sir Johnston'’s daughter found it rotting
in an attic, when it had already started to shrink.
The film base can just dry out and the film is very,
very brittle. I mean, it'’s a negative. Luckily, this film
exists elsewhere. It'’s an original George Méliès negative
called: From Paris to Monte Carlo.
As the film starts to decay, it will eat through everything
around it. It'’ll spread. It'’s almost like a cancer.
It'’ll go everywhere.
We have open boxes where all that was left was dust,
brown dust.
When you get to this point, you really don'’t have
anything left. This is a soundtrack from 1929.
But we'’ve also opened boxes where the film is just
a solid block of plastic.
It begins with accumulating the material and inspecting it,
and documenting it, and understanding
what shape it'’s in. And from that, you can construct
priorities for preservation.
It'’s heartbreaking when you have to make decisions,
what can be preserved, when 100 films are falling
to pieces and you can preserve only ten.
The practice of personal record keeping is very,
very old. You could argue it goes back to the cave
paintings, or to clay tablets, or to quilting, you know,
writing letters. And that somewhere in the middle
of this spectrum of personal record keeping is home
movies and home video. And then video with our telephones,
and who knows what comes next.
People forget that up until the video era of the early 80s,
everybody captured everything on film, especially
these home movie formats.
Home movies really goes back to this guy right here.
It'’s basically a smaller version of the Lumière Cinematograph,
if you would. It'’s a hand crank camera.
In 1925 they came out with this guy right here.
And by the way, these all still work.
There are a lot of clichés, birthday parties, holidays
and so on. But there'’s also just things you would never expect
were documented on film, sometimes quite creatively.
It'’s quite a creative culture in amateur film.
I think about the film that we found of one
of the American concentration camps for Japanese Americans
during World War II.
Footage that my spouse found in a house that was abandoned,
when she brought it home, it was film shot during the Depression
in the United States. And it'’s the real people that were
in the book and the film of The Grapes of Wrath,
migrant agricultural workers who were living under terrible
conditions, working in the fields in a very
complicated moment in 1938. And here'’s color footage showing
the real lives of these people.
We found footage of Vienna showing Jewish stores that have
been vandalized and destroyed by Nazi gangs, material that is
now used in almost every documentary and every book
about the Holocaust in Austria. Home movies really begin
to change the way we look about history, because ordinary
people who shot home movies have been witnesses
to historical events.
Different people can look at them in different ways:
for anthropological reasons, cultural, historical,
sociological reasons.
Every year we organize Home Movie Day,and we invite
people who donate their film. It'’s always in tears,
when you listen to their story, it'’s like so much memory
of the people who shot it. I think that'’s kind of like...
what makes me feel good about what we are doing here.
But there it is. And it'’s on that little teeny weenie
frames, on this tiny little film.
Last year, one of the NYU students, Becca Bender, was
doing an internship at Lincoln Center, and one collection
turned out to be a large home movie collection
by Leopold Godowsky, Jr. He and his father were known
in the classical music world. But, by happenstance,
he also was the co-inventor of Kodachrome film process.
Kodachrome, the most beautiful color format ever invented,
perhaps. In the midst of this home movie collection,
there was one anomaly, a reel of 35mm nitrate film.
And it'’s the most charming thing you'’ve ever seen,
Mr. and Mrs. Einstein pretending to drive. Meanwhile,
Warner Bros. is rear projecting footage of Niagara Falls,
a jazz club and whatever.
It'’s also funny because Albert Einstein famously
never learned to drive a car. And when it was posted online,
it literally has now been seen by millions of people.
That'’s me, 4 or 5, looking very sceptically:
"What is this world all about?" That'’s my father, that's
my mother, and that'’s Adolfas.
Cinema is like a big tree with many different branches,
the same with literature, the same with dance, the same
with music. Diaristic cinema, in which I'’m involved,
there are many, many little stories, because
what is a story? Every day, we go through many different
mini-stories. There are big stories, and there are tiny
little stories. So there is a very wide range of what
a story is.
We received a letter from a lady in California.
Well, she happened to have a film, and she said:
"Would you take it? It'’s been in our family for years."
It was made in Italy by Roberto Leone Roberti.
He sent it to his brother in New York, and he wanted
to save it from censorship.
Our curator looked at it and realized that it was
a lost film. And Roberto Leone Roberti was
the father of Sergio Leone. No one had seen it,
but it was the family saying: "We have to save this piece
of our family history. We believe this is important."
And it was, it was important!
Sometimes what we consider a lost film is something
that has not been identified yet.
The Lon Chaney film from 1927, The Unknown,was missing.
But because the film was marked "Unknown," it ended up in a room
with thousands of other cans of films that were unknown.
It was like: "What'’s in these cans?" And they realized:
"This isn'’t an unknown film. It'’s The Unknown,
with Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford!"
And that had been missing for years and years.
It takes a very long time to list and catalog films.
We do it very, very slowly.
It'’s hard not to talk about Pan Si Dongbecause it was
such a surprise.
It is an adaptation of one of the legends in the Chinese
classic The Journey to the West which is a legend that every
Chinese person knows. They know it by heart.
And it'’s a legend that has been used in books
and as illustrations, and in very many ways.
This was the very first film adaptation, and it has
all the superstars. It had a large budget,
and it was also very modern in its technique.
It disappeared and it was considered lost.
So when we discovered this seven reels of Pan Si Dong
in our archive, the Chinese film archivists, they had a hard time
believing that it was really, but they confirmed that this was
really an original print of that adaptation.
So we brought it back to China, and it'’s been screened
from Singapore to Seattle, all over. But of course,
to Chinese speaking people, it has a special place.
We'’re not going to keep finding silent films.
And then, like, several times a year, it seems somewhere
in the world, not just single movies appear that were presumed
lost, but sometimes whole collections.
Of course, there was some smuggling. There were
people like going to a screening room, taking a film, making
what we call a '’dupe negative'’ in a printer,
during the night, and then returning the print.
Basically, illegally, one print would bring babies.
Many times, this original print is gone. No one kept it.
But the dupe negative is still there.
There was this big discovery of a complete but very low
photographic quality print in Buenos Aires, and missing
sequences were included from that print in the beautiful
previous restoration. But I finally liked the film,
which I never enjoyed before. When we have all of those
extra plot lines in Metropolis, that'’s when this whole thing
starts to click and work. So I think the film is
different now. This was an eye-opener for me.
One of the more fun things that we do around here is
we host a workshop called Mostly Lost.
We have an audience to help us identify films that we don'’t
really know what the titles are.
And we ask people to watch them and yell at everything
they recognize. Misfortune!
And people come in from literally all over the world.
Some are archivists, film specialists...
Locations specialists, license plate specialists,
fashion specialists...
It'’s a lot of fun. It's a lot of people shouting at the screen
when they recognize an actor, or a place, or something.
That bridge is in Philadelphia!
That car is a such and such, and they only built those
for two years...
This is what would have been called a heavyweight car.
And it'’s been amazing to watch these people figure out
what these movies are.
The actual celluloid itself can tell you a lot of different
things. Is the film negative or positive?
Is it a talking film, is it a silent film?
The manufacturer: Kodak, Fuji...
You can often find on Kodak stock an edge code that will
help you locate the earliest year that that film could have
been made.
A triangle and a square, which is 1924.
And then you can start looking for clues inside the image.
Is it an actor'’s face? Is it the type face of the intertitle
that'’s indicative of the Studio that may have produced it?
Where it gets very tricky, if it'’s a Western, those are
the worst to try to identify. All horses kind of look alike.
All rugged terrain looks alike. There'’s so little clues
to go on with a Western, and there were so many made!
It'’s very close to detective work because it triggers
your curiosity.
Many of these films we dragged from the dumpsters
in the streets of New York, when the labs went bankrupt.
Everybody switched to video and the labs had to close.
I would get called up by lab owners and they'’d say:
"Just go over and take it. Take what you want."
I'’m trying to locate anyone that was related to the film,
then seeing if they have any elements left, in their closets,
in their basement, and then trying to get them to bring
them into our vaults.
So, basically, what you can see all around here are new
deposits. And it'’s coming and coming.
Whenever I meet someone, I say: "Do you have films?"
To my banker: "Do you have films?" I'’m dating a girl:
"Do you have films?" I'’m asking the question to everyone.
And I always end up in places with dead mice.
I don'’t know why but I always end up in a place that has mice.
And I'’m like Indiana Jones' father: "I don'’t like mice!"
And I always get to that.
When they closed a lot of these big labs,
they discarded the stuff off to the scrap man.
Millions of dollars worth of perfect equipment,
they had signs on them: "Scrap."
A lot of people thought I was absolutely crazy,
I got trailer loads of stuff.
I edited on this all my films.
We used to cut on film. The Steenbeck, the actual
machine you cut on, is still fine.
The joiner is still fine, but the technological
infrastructure collapsed to prevent us from cutting
on film, even though we still shoot on film.
Someone at Pixar posted an article from Screen Daily
that said that Ken Loach, the British filmmaker, was
looking for coating tape that you use for film editing.
We couldn'’t get a particular numbering tape.
It has a colored emulsion on it, and a machine stamps
consecutive numbers. If you line up the numbers,
then the sound is lined up with the picture. And nobody makes
that anymore. My office was right around the corner
from what we call the Pixar Film Museum,
which is sort of a repository of all the unused film equipment.
And we had a bunch of it.
We asked all around the film world, and it came from Pixar
in the States.
The ultimate digital film studio comes to the rescue
of a man who is insisting on working in film.
We were very grateful for that, and we'’ve exchanged
some happy messages with them.
As technology is changing all the time, artefacts
from the past get forgotten. So part of an archive,
as far as I'’m concerned, also includes a cinema museum.
This camera was actually used on the movie Star Wars.
A lot of Waldenwas shot through this camera.
There'’s not so many inventions that stayed efficient
for so long. And the projector the Lumière we'’re using is
pretty much the same as the projector that is behind me.
And for one century it was like the best tool we could use
to show moving images.
We found recently a group of films by the Lumière
brothers. The physical condition of these prints is amazing.
In theory, and maybe even in practice, these films can
still be projected.
So, those DCP projectors we have now, they'’re going to be
transformed very soon, and it'’s going to be different,
and it'’s never going to be the same tool.
One day, Henri Langlois brings to New York, and
at the Metropolitan Museum, he projects a nitrate film
by Raoul Walsh. I became aware of what we lost in the richness
of the nitrate film. I could not believe it.
Hey there, everybody. Welcome to TCM, I'’m Ben Mankiewicz.
In May, the George Eastman Museum will be opening its doors
for its third annual Nitrate Picture Show Film Festival,
focusing solely on the conservation and preservation
of films made from nitrate.
The first film we actually showed
in the inaugural Nitrate Picture Show
was a print from the Museum of Modern Art
of Casablanca.
That'’s the oldest existing material for that film.
Everybody has seen Casablanca dozens of times, probably.
This print made everybody rethink that they never saw
Casablancabefore.
So, personally, I feel that'’s my Starry Night.
I do believe that film is comparable, as an art form,
to the paintings and sculptures that are in this building.
It'’s having those archives, now that they'’ve taken care
of the film for so long,
looking at those films as projectable material.
When we'’re running nitrate and this is open, we'’ve got
our hand on the douser the entire time.
We'’re looking at the screen, and we'’re watching the film run,
and we'’re listening to it run.
If the film ever stops, then we just immediately
close the douser, and we cut off the heat, which is what would
cause the fire.
My father had his collection, which he was building of all
this nitrate film, because he foresaw that television was
coming in and they were going to be making documentary
productions, that they were going to need actuality footage.
When they started to sell their films to TV in the 50s,
they realized: "Well, we better start having preservation
programs of our own."
Because as long as you can keep selling the movies,
then there'’s a desire on the studio part to preserve them.
Ted Turner paid a huge amount of money for the same
collection that we have here, which is the MGM pre-1948
collection. And he bought that to start TCM, to run on TNT,
TBS at the time. And he pays a huge amount of money for it.
And suddenly the studio executives were like: "Whoa,
we can get money for this." Now, the only one that really
thought that before, in my opinion too, is Walt Disney.
Disney was always saving his films, always was very
conscious about how his heritage would be saved and remembered.
And then, way down at the end, all by itself, is
the Walt Disney Collection. So, we have the original negatives
to Snow Whiteand Fantasia. They never threw anything away,
we have all sorts of stuff from Disney.
The Snow Whitethat Disney saw as a child, later made him do
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
And we were able to find this film, which had not been
seen, and we restored it.
You look at something like Snow White,that'’s still
around, and it'’s been transferred from film to VHS
to DVD to Blu-ray to 4K. But the original element is
still on film.
So, there are Hollywood Studios that have nitrate
film stored. Every time that they'’re doing a new scan,
they go back to that original material.
From the top to the bottom, is Gone with the Wind.
They have to go back to the original because
that'’s where all the information is.
This was in the film camera, on the film set,
with Clark Gable, with Vivien Leigh, with the director.
We have films in our collection that are very controversial.
We have films in our collection that are very popular,
but they'’re all kept in the same vault right next to each other.
Technological transformation has been inherently part of film
history from the first day.
All the major developments in cinema occurred before 1906.
That was the great period of experiment.
You found 68mm film, 70mm film, 17.5mm. So there were
no standards.
And it'’s always so bizarre, when you discover films
in an old recorded gauge or format that is totally
forgotten.
Buster Keaton made a film called Hard Luck,and when it was
restored by Kevin Brownlow, the beginning and end of each
two reels was missing.
We found the film complete in 24mm on Ozaphan base.
But think of it, that'’s the only surviving print with the missing
scenes of Buster Keaton! So, we had to set up a machine
and, eventually, we could read the images and Hard Luckis
back complete.
And then, of course, there was a little bit of stabilization
with 35mm as a standard.
Film historians were not interested in what happened
before the cinema. They said cinema was invented in 1895
and nothing relevant had happened before.
And that was a general view in the late 50s, when I first
became an archivist. I said: "No, this is not true."
There had been projection forms before. The most famous
of which, of course, is the Magic Lantern.
A lot of the stories that were used in the early cinema were
also Magic Lantern slide stories. And, of course,
a lot of the techniques used in the Magic Lantern:
the dissolve from one image to the other,
the animated slides, slides with moving parts so you could
create movement. There was a lot of the techniques that were used
in early cinema that were there already.
Today, when we film with the cell phone, we instantly have
color and sound. Because it'’s so easy, it is not so valuable.
But in the early days of cinema, to get color on a screen,
what you had to do is to take a black and white film,
take a brush, take dyes or paint, and paint every single
frame of the film to get the impression of a color film.
It was hand colored or stencil colored films.
Alongside with hand coloring and stencil, there are very
popular techniques such as tinting and toning.
You would dip the films in dyes, or you would bleach
out the silver halides and added new color to it.
This is toning. It'’s no longer black and white.
It'’s actually blue and white.
And then we have tinting. And the different colors would
represent different scenes. The blue shows the ocean
or the lake, the amber is more what'’s happening on earth,
on the ground. Every time the tint changes, you have
what'’s called a splice here.
Black and pink, blue and pink, and a splice in-between where
they'’ve been connected and joined.
These films are kept in the vaults and are usually
only inspected by a few film archivists, and maybe some
lucky film historians. And we felt with this book
we could give a sense of what it is to inspect
an original colored film frame and you can see all the details.
As part of working with Martin Scorsese, I have
had the pleasure and the honor of being able to help make
documentaries, produce documentaries. And one
of the things that Marty does is cultural preservation.
I remember on No Direction Home,Marty'’s first film
about Bob Dylan, we were looking for the screen test that Warhol
shot of Dylan. We went to MoMA, we went to the Warhol
Foundation, and it existed. It'’s a wonderful moment in the film
because Dylan is revealing his restlessness, but he'’s
also quite aware of himself. And then later, I just was reading
about this extraordinary filmmaker, Barbara Rubin, who
worked with Jonas Mekas. And she was this really kind
of legendary figure who'’s not that well known. And
she introduced Dylan to Warhol, she introduced Lou Reed
to Andy Warhol. She was very close with Allen Ginsberg.
And she actually shot that Dylan screen test,
she was running the camera. Preservation has that added
benefit of learning more about the history of film.
In 1982, I was one of the founders of a very small
film festival in the city of Pordenone. We showed silent
films we could find. Eight people came
to the first festival. Those eight people talked
to other people. So, the number grew over the years.
And so the festival became what it is today.
In the meantime, I was learning where the films are, what can be
done or should be done in order to preserve them. And I started
visiting film archives and museums. It was a little
bit like being in the Far West, but it was a great ride.
Last year, I nearly didn'’t go to Pordenone, because I looked
at the list of films, and I didn'’t recognize very many
of them. And I'’ve been in this business 60 years,
and I thought if I didn'’t recognize them, they can'’t be
any good. Well, fortunately, I went. And the Pordenone team
had done the usual miraculous thing they do, producing films
you'’ve never heard of, which turn out to be very often
masterpieces.
As a historian, I feel rather ashamed not to have discovered
them for myself and made them better known. But this is
one way of doing it.
Film is this amazingly collaborative art form,
every step of the way, whether you'’re just dealing
with the production, the creation of the script,
trying to get it funded, and then you get it
funded and you'’ve got to come to the laboratory, you'’ve got
to rely on the alchemy of processing, the mechanics
of the machines, the scanning...
Just like filmmaking is collaborative, the archival
process is deeply collaborative.
No single entity can solve this question
of preservation alone.
The restored version of Abel Gance'’s Napoleonmade
a sensation.
And in the 80s, they restored A Star is Born,the 1954
version with Judy Garland. And that set off what
they called '’The Decade of Preservation.'’
You have three things: you'’ve got access, you'’ve got
preservation, you'’ve got restoration. A lot
of people are throwing a huge amount of money at restoration,
while we have all this stuff that should be preserved.
Especially in countries like Asia, Africa, where we don'’t
have that kind of money to be able to restore films in that
manner. For us, we need to first save it. Restoration is
a First World concept.
So where do we begin? We begin with first finding the lost
films, looking at what has survived.
Cineteca di Bologna is doing: reprint, restore, refine.
And, after, it'’s supposed to be preserved.
So it becomes: immagine ritrovataand restaurata
and preservata.Not only restored, but also preserved,
that'’s the most important thing.
We produce new elements, new conservation Elements, and store
them in a way that that film is safe and its life is extended
for another 100 years.
Everybody who'’s interested in film preservation is
interested in answering the question: "How do I transmit
to the next generation the work done by the prior generation?"
Film preservation is an expensive proposition and not
many people are helping. Thanks to Scorsese and to a few
others that understand the need for it.
Scorsese created The Film Foundation
for that very purpose.
He saw these wonderful films that were not really being
properly preserved. He said: "Well, I'’ll do it."
Most people knew him. They knew he was a filmmaker.
But he explained film preservation
to the general public.
Originally, he was joined by passionate advocates like
Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg.
This started as him being personally upset that the films
he loved all his life were turning magenta,
the colors were going...
One of the reasons that Marty made Raging Bullfamously
in black and white was because he just didn'’t want
to have to worry about the film fading within ten years
and becoming magenta.
It was a problem, a big problem. And Scorsese was
the person that put a lot of pressure on Kodak to make
it better. Yeah.
So, Marty wrote this impassioned letter,
and this campaign gathered letters from filmmakers around
the world who immediately signed on and became part of this
movement to help encourage Kodak, who, by the way,
were in the process of trying to develop this low fade stock,
but the urgency was kind of amplified.
When Martin Scorsese and The Film Foundationstarted
to advocate on behalf of film directors for film
preservation, that was a huge step forward.
I was very intrigued that a filmmaker of his stature was
preserving films.
Marty and Bob Rosen would go to the Studios and deliver
these lists, typewritten... It was the 80s, so it was
typewritten, these typewritten lists, and talk to them about:
"These are the films you own. And here is a guide to preserve
them." It was just something that he did while he was making
movies, in his spare time.
But this is not his job. It'’s not his job. You have
a country called US. You have a government that has a budget,
that could portion part of this budget to devote
it to film preservation. And let Scorsese make his films.
When The Film Foundationwas first started, 30 years ago,
that brought a keen awareness to everyone in the industry
in terms of the importance of film preservation.
As this foundation progressed, they now have restored close
to 900 films, from all around the world, through funders
that they find. After saving a good amount of American films,
they wanted to reach out to a lot of other countries
and a lot of other cultures.
Martin Scorsese was able to be here. And for that, I think
it'’s really the meeting of the two great kind
of inspirations in film preservation internationally,
Marty and the Cineteca di Bolognaand this festival.
It'’s very exciting for me to join all of you in a really
spectacular celebration of films, past, present
and the future and to introduce this restoration of Enamorada
by the great director Emilio Fernández.
Around the world, there'’s not an even distribution of archival
infrastructure. You know, you have enormous resources
in France, for example.
The experience in Brazil, you fight against bureaucracy
and you fight against ridiculous politics, and against
ministers who come in and don'’t know what they'’re doing,
and they start to destroy what you built up.
And so you say: "Okay, we'’ll try to build it up again."
That'’s what we do all the time.
There'’s a lot of rich heritage. And one of the things
that you notice in film is the liberation struggle,
because African countries were under colonial rule.
Looking even at the Nelson Mandela archives,
their own collections will show you the struggle against
the apartheid era. And Nelson Mandela is an icon,
but it also shows his struggle and the struggle of the South
African people. Many countries came to help South Africa,
so the footage that you see at these archives is very
important. It shows struggle, but it shows unity. It shows
the oneness of the people of Africa.
I tried to show some of the films in the archive
to senior personnel in the nation, so that they see
the importance of the archives by projecting to them important
films, like announcing the independence of the Sudan.
As a Zimbabwean, I love watching films, working
for the National Archives, the songs, the speeches made
by great men and women of the struggle, the construction
of Lake Kariba, which is one of the biggest constructions
that was done not only in Zimbabwe
but in Southern Africa, and the way they would preserve
the animals during the building of that dam.
All this footage is very important for us.
There'’s also Africa in its relationship to its former
colonial powers. You also have the Cold War, some of these
countries had to develop their prints in the former
Soviet bloc. Some were processed in China, Romania,
Czech Republic, Poland. So, you have to go to Yugoslavia,
to Russia, to look for some of these films.
So, we find ourselves with what you may call a kind
of dismembered memory, because it'’s all over the place.
The vaults are the perfect example of store it in a cool,
dry place. But this is what happens when you store it
in a warm, damp place.
I distinctly remember till this day, that very afternoon
that I opened the door to the archives and I saw piles
and piles of rotting films. And that'’s when I really
discovered the amazing men and women who throughout
the decades have been fighting this uphill battle of trying
to preserve my country'’s cinematic heritage and trying
to build the film archives from scratch.
I was then further exposed to almost a similar narrative
across the region: from Thailand to Indonesia, to Malaysia,
to Singapore, of this ragtag group of archivists that are
just trying to make do, with very limited resources,
but with an unimaginable level of passion.
The weather in Taiwan is warm and humid, so the humidity
and the temperature control is very important for us.
And we spend a lot of money to make the environment
in a good condition.
The Myanmar film industry was started in 1920. We lost
the first feature film of Myanmar and also the 90%
of the black and white films.
My grandfather is a filmmaker and also my grandfather'’s first
feature film was lost. So, this is a sad story
of Myanmar cinema.
I think I have the responsibility to keep not only
my family films, but also the Myanmar cinema.
If I had a chance to visit the Canadian archive,
Library and Archives Canada. They'’ve been complaining about
cuts. And it'’s true, there were cuts under the conservative
government, that has really slashed the staff. But when
you go inside the vaults, you have to really say: "Respect."
The way they can move from a set of temperature levels...
You'’re like: "Wow." In our context, energy is
a big problem. No African country has reliable electricity
100%, not a single one.
Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai were the three places where
the film industry started and they were all port cities,
the wrong places in terms of film preservation,
because you were close to the sea. The humidity levels
were too high. And by the time we came to the starting
of the National Film Archive, in 1964, we had already lost
70% to 80% of our heritage.
You had a very imposing figure, P. K. Nair. He was sort
of something like Henri Langlois to all of us. And P. K. Nair was
not only the director of the archive, but he was
the founder of the National Film Archive.
And I found him just outside the Archive. He had retired,
he was old. I never knew I was making a film called
Celluloid Man.I was just recording P. K. Nair.
And I walked in with him to the National Film Archive,
and we saw the state of the Archive. It was the most
emotional moment for me, because here were films lying completely
as if they are lost souls. You know, for me films are
like souls. It'’s like reincarnation. They can be born
anytime. You just have to show the film and it starts
living again.
It was in 2014 that I started the Film Heritage Foundation.
I didn'’t know at that point the mammoth size of the film
industry we'’ve got to deal with. It'’s too huge, nine or ten
film industries. We are making films in about 36 languages.
When you start a foundation of that kind, it'’s more
of an emotional plea to do something.
Action!
Nollywoodcinema is seen everywhere today, on line,
in the stores, both in Africa and beyond, there'’s a very huge
presence in the Diaspora. I'’m just coming back
from Burkina Faso, and there were two channels
devoted exclusively, 24 hours a day, to Nollywoodcinema.
So by that standard, of course, you cannot say that it'’s
difficult to see African cinema, if you think of African cinema
as Nollywoodcinema.
But if you think of African cinema as, also, what you can
call a kind of auteurist cinema, then you have complications.
If you think about Ousmane Sembène, Djibril Diop,
some of the major figures of African cinema, when
they were making films, it was not profitable
for the exhibitors to show African films because they could
get Hollywood films for cheaper.
What we were realizing is that there really needs to be
a very focused program to address the issue
of restoring and preserving films made on the African
continent.
So, the African Film Heritage Projectwas created
in partnership with FEPACI, the leading organization
of African filmmakers, scholars, historians, and then also
reached out to UNESCO.
What we'’re trying to do is really bring these films
back to the awareness of new generations, new audiences,
simply, across the world.
As a film student, you only know American films and French
films, and some German films and Japanese films, and that'’s it.
We run the risk of sort of falsely educating future
generations that there was only this.
We not only follow the canon of the established film history,
we try to rediscover those hidden histories.
They are buried in the film material.
I would say that I was surprised that Fragment
of an Empire,its restoration, is so successful. I think
it is one of the absolute masterpieces of silent
cinema in general. But there is a canon which is extremely
difficult to change. In Soviet cinema, I'’m used to everyone
talking about Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Vertov,
and nobody else. Ermler was somebody who really had
this wonderful ability to combine Soviet montage
with very sophisticated acting. We contacted many film archives
and we ended up finding nine different versions of the film.
I wanted to find a print with the original Russian
intertitles, and I did find it, in Switzerland. The font
of the letters changes all the time and it becomes
an important element of editing.
Why isn'’t this film better known? I don'’t know why.
I cannot go and tour the world with it. Maybe I should.
That'’s kind of why I got into this field, to try and find
unique films from the past that, for whatever reason,
have been forgotten about, and reintroducing them to sort
of broaden our film knowledge.
Sometimes a miracle happens, and this miracle usually has
somebody behind that miracle, somebody who is
active enough to advocate for a specific film or filmmaker.
This canon could be expanded.
Man, the cowboys always win.
The cowboys don'’t always win.
Yeah, they do. The cowboys always win.
Look at Tom Mix. What about John Wayne?
Man, he was about the toughest cowboy of them all, ain'’t it?
You know, in all those movies, you never saw John Wayne'’s
teeth. Not once. I think
there'’s something wrong when you don'’t see a guy's teeth.
We have a mandate to really look for films that have been
overlooked by the canon.
The L.A. Rebellion, independent African American
cinema in Los Angeles. Those were mostly students from UCLA.
And many of those filmmakers, like Charles Burnett,
and Julie Dash, and Billy Woodbury, Haile Gerima,
Larry Clark, became quite well known and had careers
as independent filmmakers.
One of the little masterpieces that we discovered was a film
called As Above, so Below, made by Larry Clark.
And this film visualizes a revolution of African
Americans against the white power structure.
When we asked Larry about the film, he said: "Oh,
last time I heard it was in a lab, but that was about 1975."
Well, we searched through every lab we could find,
and we actually found the original negative and were
able to preserve that film. For the first time, since
the early 70s, that film was actually shown.
In 2007, we finally released Charles Burnett'’s Killer
of Sheep,it had taken us six years to clear the music rights.
The response was so overwhelming. When it was shown
in the communities, African Americans recognized themselves.
They saw themselves on a screen, not as drug dealers,
not as murdering thieves. They were real people
with integrity and striving to just get a job
and feed their family.
We want the canon to include all kinds of artists,
not just white men.
People seeing themselves or seeing other people,
and understanding them.
Lunar Orbiter was an impressive advance in lunar
photography. One Orbiter got an exceptional shot.
What we think of as film history is largely determined
by what we have access to. And until the 2000s, we didn'’t have
access to most industrial and educational film.
The Congress recognized that not all films are made by Studios
in Hollywood and created the National Film Preservation
Foundationso that orphan films can be preserved,
they are so-called '’orphan films,'’ they're not owned
by commercial rights-holders.
I work specifically on short films, with student films,
documentary films. I feel like a lot of times shorts are
kind of underrepresented.
We have quite a large collection of student films,
including in that are films made by Ray Manzarek
and Jim Morrison, who were the founders of The Doors.
One of the first times The Doors ever played publicly was
at a student film festival.
We are working on a project with UCLA on the Hearst
Newsreels, and that was a collection that originally was
over 100 million feet of film, and only 27 million feet
survives. I'’d like to find these missing newsreels.
I'’d like to see something that was shot 80 or 100 years
ago of some historical person, place, or thing, and have
that come back so that they'’re not just a dry name on a piece
of paper. It brings that person closer
to the reality of the present.
When we think about film production in the United States,
we usually think about Hollywood, New York,
possibly Chicago. But in reality, on one
of the most active centers of film production was Detroit.
The myth is that more film was shot in Detroit than in New York
and Hollywood combined. And in Detroit there were a number
of very large production companies who specialized
in making corporate and industrial film.
Huge Studios, companies like the Jam Handy Organization,
an incredibly active studio, with two orchestras.
Many people who were exiled from Europe during World War II
ended up coming to Detroit, to make films, to do animation,
to be composers, to be cinematographers.
This was a dull day, a flat day. The weather was a bit
of misty, and so I finished by around 4:00, started to put
things back into the trucks, and the sun came out.
And I raced back saying: "Put it all back down, get it all out,
I'’m going to reshoot it." It was perfect, because the hill was
like that, and the sun was kind of setting back, it was
like marvellous...
Last stop on round would be Old Ma Peggoty'’s place.
It was like taking bread to the top of the world.
It was a grand ride back, though.
I knew baker would have a kettle on and doorsteps
of Hovis ready.
Often the medium itself might play some role in the work
itself. Gloves can actually be an impediment to feeling
in a more sensitive and nuanced way what'’s going on
with the film. If there'’s a broken perforation or a tear,
and it snags on the glove, it could make the damage worse.
So, when we talk about preserving a Brakhage painted
film, it'’s almost always preserving the film
from the negative, because the negative is really
the finished master. The painted film is production material.
It'’s amazing, one of a kind production material, but it'’s
not something we could remake the film from.
And you can see this was actually painted over a faded
70mm print of Irma la Douce, the Billy Wilder movie.
You can see a little bit of the faded color print underneath.
I don'’t really see how the world could be if nobody
could see Stan Brakhage films, Germaine Dulac'’s films.
Those are masterpieces. They exist and they have
to circulate, and they have to be seen. Without them,
the world would be very different.
Especially things that are underrepresented, because
if it'’s not preserved, then it will disappear
from people'’s memories.
And these are films that I think are the most
at risk, because in many instances, the filmmakers had
one copy of the film.
Even Maya Deren'’s original coffee cans, Medaglia D'’Oro,
in which she kept her unfinished films and outtakes, are here.
And so are Bruce Baillie'’s and Kenneth Anger'’s and Brakhage
and many, many countless others.
If we had treated cinema seriously from the very
beginning, we would have a very different history of cinema.
And there are really remarkable films which are not
really properly known.
We don'’t necessarily know about them because they'’ve
never been written about or shown since the time
they were made.
And there are some films that we'’re always looking for.
Hitchcock'’s, The Mountain Eagle, we wait to see if that will
one day resurface. We hope not, in a way, because it sounds
like it wasn'’t his best film, but it'’s Hitchcock.
So we look for it.
We tend to think of African cinema as beginning with people
like Sembène until the present. But of course, if you study
the colonial period, you see that there were actually
filmmakers in the colonial period from Africa as well.
One of the good examples was somebody called
Albert Samama Chikli. He was of equal stature to somebody
like the Lumière, Thomas Edison... He adopted
cinema in its very first days, started projecting some
of the Lumière films in early 1897. I think by 1903,
he was already trying to film from within a submarine.
So, took his camera inside a wooden submarine, in Tunisia,
and tried to film water, underwater. These are
the early, early years of cinema, or he was filming
from a hot-air balloon, for example. He was interested
in astronomy, he was a photographer as well.
He was part of the French army film unit with people
like Abel Gance. And if you look at his footage of World War I,
it'’s absolutely fantastic. Now here'’s somebody who played
an important role in the history of cinema in general,
but whose name does not exist in the history books. Or when
it does, it'’s really as a mention, there'’s not
a genuine recognition of him as one of the major pioneers.
Film preservation is a main, I would say, tool for filling
in these gaps.
It'’s just one of the things that every film archivist wants
to do, to be able to write, rewrite history and celebrate
people who have long been forgotten.
The Visual History Archiveis the online system for accessing
the USC Shoah Foundation'’s collection of 55,000 testimonies
from nine different genocides.
My background is in computer engineering, and as an engineer,
you are told and taught you should build things
that matter. So, being able to build technical equipment
that preserves these stories and teaches others to be better
is one of the best things that I could be doing as an engineer
in this world.
It seems to be something ingrained in us.
If we dehumanize another human being, we make them seem
like an object. All of a sudden, their life is not as important.
Our job is to humanize one set of people to others so that
they will have empathy and not hurt someone who'’s different
than them.
This area is where the International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda was, that'’s where we are now going.
This is where they were located.
The archives of all this information has been kept
and saved, so that people can learn more of the issues
of genocide.
And the lessons that we'’re learning from all of these
various genocides now will hopefully be around for people
to learn about in the future, so that the reminder will be here
of what the effect is of intolerance of others.
One of my favorite artists is Bob Marley, and he has
this song, which I think you'’ll know, No Woman, No Cry.
He says: in this world, if you do not know your history,
you don'’t know where you are coming from.
So, you have to know your history. And I feel
film captures history. It captures the true
emotions of people.
One of my favorite sayings or mottos has always been
a quote by George Santayana: "Those who do not remember
history are doomed to repeat it." So, for my part, I'’m
making sure that that history is there, so people can see it
and people can understand what is going on.
And that also can be seen with film preservation.
When people feel that nothing ever changes, and nothing is
ever getting better for everybody. If you just watch
some of these old movies, you can say, okay, things have
improved, things have gotten better.
That was the thing about celluloid. It'’s about light,
and the enlightenment, and the use of light,
both literally, the use of light, and metaphorically,
shedding light on a situation, on characters, on relationships.
Actually, Cinema Enlightensis from Dome, the director,
because he said: "Cinema is not only entertainment."
Enlighten is the aim of Buddhism, to be enlightened.
That'’s why he put it that way.
If you watch a film, you should learn or you should see
something else, not only entertain.
There'’s a metaphor at the heart of cinema,
which is about light: light that comes through the window
and the light in our minds.
When I was a teenager, I read a series of articles
by Milan Kundera and in one of those, he talks about
his father, how when he was passing away, at the end
of his life, he would only say two words: "It'’s strange."
And the way he talks about it, he says: "That was the essence
of his life. His life came to those two words: It'’s strange."
So, we talked about these two words, what the essence of each
person'’s life would be. I think 24 Frameis the essence
of what Abbas did. He loved simple things. He always said
it'’s much more difficult to be simple because there'’s
nothing to hide behind it.
Up until 1912, there was no statute in the American
Copyright Law to cover motion pictures, but there was
for photographs.
So, producers would hit upon this brilliant strategy
of making a long, continuous photographic print that then
they could file as a photograph. And they just kept getting
shoved back further and further into the collections,
until they ended up in a closet where they were rediscovered
in the 40s. And this is like at the time that many
of these films no longer existed in any form, except these
paper rolls.
It'’s one reason why we know so much about the work
of D. W. Griffith, it'’s because so many of his films were
registered for Copyright.
It looks just like a 35mm film print. But, see,
it is a roll of paper with sprocket holes in it.
And this last frame says: "Copyright 1903 by American
Mutoscope and Biograph Company."
We are scanning them now and stabilizing those digital
images and outputting them back to film, which is
using our very latest technology on our very oldest material.
I think it'’s amazing they have lasted as long as they have.
When they made a film, they never realized that there could
be an afterlife of film in terms of video or television. And so
a lot of the rights of the films are very messed up and it gets
very difficult to trace.
And sometimes we cannot show a film because of that,
because the rights are not cleared and we don'’t have
the authorization to show some films, which is very sad.
All those tracks I put in innocently at the time
in 1971, thinking I'’d clear the music rights later.
I used a lot of my favorite music, from Elvis
to Roy Orbison, to Van Morrison. What do you do? Either you say:
"Okay, the film can'’t be shown anymore because I don'’t have
the music rights." Or you have to replace it.
I'’ll never let you fall
Now we are...
So now we can remix The Goalie'’s Anxiety,own all
the music rights. And, actually, after 30 years of being dead
in the ground, the movie can be shown again.
The Film Foundationwas really fortunate to be able to work
with George Romero to finally restore Night of the Living
Dead,which was a film that had fallen into the public domain,
immediately upon its release, because the title card was
changed at the last minute and the Copyright was overlooked.
So, what it resulted in were all of these bastardized versions,
the wrong aspect ratio, terrible copies of the film.
So, working with George Romero and his team at Image Ten
in Pittsburgh and, of course, with MoMA and Cineric labs
in New York, the film was meticulously restored,
and George even went to L.A. to supervise the sound restoration.
So, he wanted to address some of the sync that had been off.
Some of those gunshots were happening before the smoke
appeared on the rifle.
When we finally were able to do that, he was like:
"That'’s why I wanted to restore this movie!" That has bugged
him for years that, every time he had seen it, there were
a couple of scenes where you didn'’t hear a gunshot, but
you saw a gun being shot. So...
He also wanted to address the crickets.
Some of the internal shots had cricket sounds and some didn'’t.
So he wanted to make that more consistent.
But, in general, I think it sounds really good.
You wouldn'’t just say that because George Romero is
in the room? No!
But, George, you use the crickets as a device as well,
not only for... I always loved old movies
where the crickets were important!
It looks beautiful. And now it sounds great.
So, I mean, we'’re cooking with gas!
It'’s a great feeling to know that you'’ve preserved something
that is going to last for a long time. This was his first film,
and sadly, he passed away less than a year after we completed
it. So one of my pivotal times here was working with him
and restoring that movie.
And what a fun experience that was, you know.
Every restoration project has a different path, although
usually it begins with the research.
You look for the best element in existence.
Original camera negative, that'’s often the point
of departure. If that doesn'’t exist anymore,
then you go on to the next generation of elements.
Duplicates, duplicates, and duplicates.
You'’ve got to compare each of these elements frame by frame
by frame by frame.
And you take the best you can find.
Here we have a 1913 version of Macbethfrom a 1916 28mm print.
This is the only known copy of the film.
Now we'’re cleaning it up digitally. These scans will go
back to the Haghefilm laboratory in Amsterdam, where they will
then put it back out to 35mm black and white negative.
And from that they will make color prints that will
replicate the tinting that'’s in the original 28mm copy.
Well, how come this still looks so bad? It'’s like...
you don'’t know what it looked like before.
And you'’re looking at a brand new copy of a film that
you couldn'’t have seen before they did all this work.
This is the Edison Frankenstein,the thing has
been around for a long time, but it'’s never looked this good.
You can actually see people'’s faces now.
And now there is a very big risk of over restoring the film.
Because we don'’t want to restore to perfection.
We want to restore as close as possible the look that
the film had when it came out.
The great thing about my job at the moment is using
these two different sets of techniques, so you can use
the photochemical technique and the digital scanning.
When we were restoring The Great White Silence,which was
the feature film made out of the footage of a famous
Antarctic exploration with Captain Scott and his team,
we had to use some film techniques and some digital
techniques in order to restore the color to the black
and white footage. And it is a silent film.
So we were able to do new live music. And this is
another thing that brings people in.
And, of course, silent is really silent. There'’s nothing
there. There'’s nothing to help you. There'’s no reference
to sound at all. And it became obvious pretty quickly, once
I'’d seen the film, that it was a fairly terrifying task to take
on, to tell you the truth.
We'’d never seen penguins in the beginning of the 20th century.
We didn'’t know really what a penguin looked like.
So Herbert Ponting spent a lot of time filming penguins.
Hence, there'’s quite a lot of penguins in the film.
How do you score a penguin?
For instance, the bell from the ship. Somebody said one day:
"Oh, we'’ve got the bell." I mean: "The bell, the bell?"
But she said: "The bell from the ship that took Captain Scott
to the Antarctic."
We went to get the authentic bell, and we sat there
with a little recording device and recorded it.
And it just introduces this rather melancholic note
into the film. But if you know that it'’s the real bell,
it somehow adds something extra. I think restoring films is
a complicated job. It requires a team of people, actually.
I'’ve never restored a film in my life by myself.
On Lawrence of Arabia,because of the nature of that film,
large format film, every frame was split into quadrants.
There were individuals who worked on one quarter
of the frame of every frame of that film, and there are
well over 200,000 frames in that film. And then all
of that had to be stitched back together.
At the Academy, our connection to Satyajit Ray started
in the early 1990s. Ray was going to get an honorary Oscar.
People started to say: "Why are we giving him recognition
for his work and not preserving the work?"
The prints they found were beat up, scratched, mangled.
So, a coalition of the Academy and non-profit foundations
started an effort to preserve Ray'’s films.
Now, at the same time, there was a tragic fire in a lab
in London. And just before the preservation work was started,
those negatives were destroyed at the Henderson Lab.
Luckily, the director of the Academy Film Archive
asked for all of the film to be shipped from London
to Los Angeles.
But when Criterion approached us a few years ago, we thought:
"Should we go back to the material from the fire?"
We were able to scan at L'’Immagine Ritrovata,
in Bologna, much of the film and use the original negative
when possible.
I would say 40% of the surviving original
negative from Pather Panchali, and about 60% of the surviving
original negative for Aparajitowere usable.
There were color grading issues, stabilization issues.
There were dirt and scratches, stealing information
from different parts of adjacent frames.
By far, the biggest job we'’ve ever done.
No one perceived that there could be this digital technology
that would save film that was badly warped and shrunken
and damaged from the fire. So, that'’s a perfect lesson about
keeping things.
Cuba was a particularly significant experience.
How do you transfer 120 kilos of elements from Cuba
to Italy?
It took 23 signatures to get the negative of Memorias
del Subdesarrolloout of Cuba.
It became a sort of international
relationship operation.
We discovered that, when we got the negatives, that those
negatives probably had six or seven months of life,
they were deteriorating so much that had we started
the restoration six or seven months later, there wouldn'’t be
any negative anymore.
So the films in Havana have suffered mold damage, they'’ve
suffered humidity damage, and the acetate deterioration has
accelerated.
After we restored the films, we went to Cuba, and there were
huge lines of people, unbelievable! There were
like 200 people out of the cinema, and the cinema was
packed, and people were so emotional to watch it again.
It was incredible.
Their work is back and living again. That'’s the most exciting
part, is when you see that I can take this and it can finally
be available again.
We'’ve encountered just about everything you can imagine
being wrong with motion picture film, but we'’re always
surprised. You never know what you'’re going to encounter until
you crack open the cans and have a look at what you have.
There are so many physical repairs that need to be
made to a film, and it'’s really frame by frame.
And now with digital we scan a film, and each frame
of that film is now a digital file that we can pull up
on a screen, and then we can make repairs to it.
For a short film, you end up working a couple of years.
And this is before you even start restoring the film.
If the director or the cinematographer is still alive,
we try to get their comments.
They have a unique viewpoint in terms of, not only what was
achieved, but what they intended to achieve.
When we were restoring Sunset Blvd.,Billy Wilder wasn'’t
alive, and nobody was alive from the making of that film.
But the Library of Congress had a vintage original print,
and that was incredibly helpful because we could see how dark
the cinematographer had really wanted to go.
Little Alice in the Citieswas shot in 16mm. And with that film
I became a filmmaker. We were inexperienced, so we made
from that negative more than 100 prints. And then it was
basically shredded to pieces. Lots of really ruptures
in the negative, scratches, funguses, and God knows what.
I mean, everything bad in the book had happened
to that negative. I was really heartbroken when we made a new
print of it to see what shows up on it. And it looked
like disastrous.
Arrireally started to clean those 50,000 little frames.
When I saw the restored Master, I don'’t even know how
to describe it, I sat there in awe. Yeah, that'’s the film
we wanted to make.
One quite large project I'’ve been really honored
and excited about working on are the films of Barbara Hammer,
the pioneering lesbian feminist experimental filmmaker.
Everything about her was so vital and so full of like
life-affirming energy and positivity. And to put
her films in an archive kind of seemed funny to her because
she was like: I still have so much I gotta do." I emailed
her and said: "Hey, you don'’t have to put your films
at the Archive, but let'’s start actually restoring them."
And she said: "I'’d like to do it now," because her cancer had
come back... Just in these last two years of her life, we were
able to do a ton of work. And it was just really
a fantastically, exciting experience, and it still
continues to be. I'’m still working on her films,
even though she'’s gone now.
When I'’m restoring a film by Ermler, or by Lubitsch,
or by Chaplin. And when I'’m trying to do what they intended
to do, I'’m part of their team. This is quite a remarkable
feeling.
But it'’s really to represent the men and women, the artists
who made these pieces. It'’s their legacy that we'’re
representing.
The satisfaction you have is you'’ve done something you know
is worthwhile, to enable the memory to survive.
After we released I Am Cuba, it had a real impact,
which was amazing to us.
People in Hollywood would buy it because every DP had to watch
it, because of the crazy camera work.
There'’s an I am Cubashot in Martin Scorsese'’s Casino,
and Paul Thomas Anderson has a very clear homage to I Am Cuba
in a swimming pool scene in Boogie Nights.
The fact that artists are being inspired by the work that we'’re
doing just gives us the sense that these films are getting
out there and changing the way people see the world,
which is what films can do and what films have done for us
over the years.
It does not help to just preserve films without then
making them accessible in one way or another.
There'’s a sort of myth, I think, about archivists that
we like to hide everything away, like hoarders or something.
And there probably are people like that. But it really
couldn'’t be more far from the truth.
No wonder there were several waves of wonderful filmmakers
who came from film archives.
There would be no French New Wavewithout film preservation.
It was through going to see the films at the Cinémathèque
Françaisethat they were able to see: "Oh, cinema is
different." Henri Langlois did the work of preservation
for them.
And then there are the things that always surprise us.
Like one of the projects I got to work on were these films
called Edison Kinetophones. They were shot with sync sound
in 1913, and they'’re absolutely astonishing.
Hollywood would have you think The Jazz Singerwas the first
talking picture, but no, 14 years earlier, they were
doing these little talking films. It wasn'’t successful.
But now, again, with the digital processes we have, we were
able to perfectly synchronize them so people can see how
they intended them to look.
You bet it won'’t happen again
No, you bet it won'’t happen again
It'’s just like our eyes. Our eyes are very keen
at detecting motion. Our ears are very keen at detecting
change. I worked with the International Olympic
Committeeto restore all of their official sound films,
and that was like a seven year project.
I knew nothing about the films of the Olympic Games except
the films of Leni Riefenstahl, the film of Kon Ichikawa
of the Tokyo Olympics. I didn'’t know the Olympic Charter
since 1930 had obligated the host cities of the Games
to make a film record. This film collection didn'’t exist.
You have a four year snapshot...
From early sound all the way up to modern sound, a wide
variety of source elements, all on the same subject.
Seeing these Olympic sports change over the years,
get more graceful, seeing culture change, seeing
filmmaking change, that was really a rewarding project.
And all kinds of challenges.
We built a collection that was preserved, conserved,
and completely accessible. The Olympic film history had
been recovered from 1912 all the way through to the 1990s.
And we determined the best course, as time continued
to progress, was digital capture, digital restoration,
but analog preservation.
And I think that is the key, is the going back to film
at the end of it.
Right now, a 35mm film copy
is still the best way to preserve it.
That material will last much longer than the digital files.
If you made something, say, 10 or 12 years ago,
and your highest form of delivery was an HDCAM tape,
what are you going to do with that now?
And that'’s why Studios still require some form of film
element for their bigger films that they can store. Because
you'’ve got a permanent record of that image on that film.
I think it is interesting that in this digital age, where
everything is generated digitally, and edited digitally,
and rendered digitally, and now even projected digitally,
that the archival format is film.
Something crucial has changed. We have all become filmmakers
and film archivists. We make films with our Smartphones
and we store them in our Smartphone.
The entire worldwide industry is making a major mistake,
thinking that digital means permanent. Completely wrong.
Digitization is not preservation. You actually have
to do preservation on digital materials for it to stay.
We have lost a lot already. People started going digital
in filmmaking, they didn'’t care for the files...
When people say that something is on YouTube or maybe:
"Oh, there'’s a DVD of it. It's safe. Don'’t worry about it."
I mean, that'’s terrifying.
YouTube is an amazing phenomenon. It'’s not
an archive. It doesn'’t do preservation. It doesn'’t
guarantee longevity. And, yet, YouTube is kind of an example
of the archives that we should have built.
Not a week goes by that something doesn'’t appear
on YouTube or the Internet Archive that I presumed was
a lost film.
And we'’ve seen so many examples of interesting clips
that you might want to preserve for future generations because
it meant something to society. And it was only posted
on the Internet.
Everything rots. The conservative numbers are
that you have about 50 years before you start to see
age-based damage in film, 20 years before you see
age-based damage in videotape, five years on hard drive,
three years on data tape, as low as two years on optical,
like DVD. The newer the technology, the faster
it'’s rotting.
The analog film cans, films that we see here, you can
store and you can ignore it. It can just go on a shelf.
You put it in good cold storage, and it will be fine in 500
years. The problems with digital preservation is: you have
the format itself, if it becomes obsolete. And then the file
itself, that'’s sitting on something, and then
that something, that carrier, must be migrated.
We call that preservation through migration, and we'’ll
do that until someone invents something that they can
prove we can store content on and it won'’t degrade over time.
So we have to build systems that gather new content,
gather old content, get it into a digital form, but then make
sure that digital form doesn'’t disappear over time.
And so you just have to be able to schedule that very
carefully, so that you can migrate that data from one
server to another. Or if it'’s on LTO tape, LTO is a type
of data tape that files can be stored on.
Magnetic tapes, which is really quite ironic.
But then, every two generations of that LTO,
which is roughly every five years, you need to migrate
those files off that older generation and put it on
the newer generation. So you always have to migrate
the data.
Here'’s just one plain server doing all the work.
And the robot.
Part of digital preservation now is making sure that
there are backups and that we are constantly monitoring.
We do a digital fingerprint of every file. So if anything
changes in the file at all, we know. And they'’ll look
at those fingerprints, when the content is on tapes
in these robots. Let'’s say they find an error, they will load
a new tape in, go to one of the other robots somewhere
else in the world, and grab the exact same content out
of there, copy it to a new tape, and then take the data tape
that has the failing material on it and throw it
in the garbage. And also, we don'’t trust any media
more than three years.
And now it'’s a matter of moving the data around
to make sure that these data flow into platforms where
people can access it. So I always say we'’re not
in archiving, we'’re in IT. We are in technology.
I'’m a fan of IT, but it is making things more complicated
in a way, because now we have to use big systems, it costs
a lot of money. But still, this is a good solution.
It'’s very reliable compared to other media, like hard
drives or clouds, for instance.
Do you need to store it all up in the cloud?
Do you need to store it all in spinning disk? No, it'’s
horrible for the environment because of all the energy
that'’s being used and all of the horror stories about
what we'’re doing, the toxicity to the environment and using up
all those rare-earth metals and heavy metals that go into
servers and into hard drives.
In the future there'’s going to be something better, which
is why I'’m looking at DNA, because that just has
the potential to be able to store so much.
Some people think that storing data in DNA is science fiction.
But, no, it'’s just science. And there'’s a lot of benefits.
It'’s permanent. It's a very small size. It uses a lot less
energy, we lower the damage to the planet.
And then, finally, the format never changes.
There needs to be new ways to store data.
Losing the information is not acceptable. You want to have
it on something that you can know you can trust, and put
it on a shelf and know that it will still be there
when you'’re done.
So this building is reminiscent of a monastery.
But, in a way, the people who do this profession, and maybe it'’s
overreaching a bit to say that it'’s kind of a monastic like
profession, because people are dedicated and doing work
in many ways for generations of people not born yet.
Before the printing was invented, the monks used
to transcribe and make copies. That'’s why we still have books,
manuscripts from centuries before Gutenberg. But film,
if we just have digital...
They'’re sort of mirrors of what'’s going on at the moment.
And we can hold that mirror up to nature and say: "Look,
think about the world you live in, and why it is the way it is,
and what you can do to change it."
How one could view the world differently, how one could
imagine the world differently.
We desperately need to find a new explanation. Why
do we save this material? How can it help us change
the world for the better?
To be able to do this, I think is worth seven lifetimes,
ten lifetimes...
I can think of no country in the world where there isn'’t
a perpetual queue of material waiting to be preserved.
So I don'’t think that the battle is completely won.
It is an ongoing battle.
It'’s as simple as that. If you love something,
you have to do everything to preserve it.