Film Preservation 1993:
A Study of the Current State of American Film Preservation
Volume 1: Report
June 1993
Report of the Librarian of Congress
Note: This is an "HTML" version of volume 1 of Film
Preservation 1993 originally published in June 1993. This
version contains most of the text and footnotes but no charts, or
tables from the report. Limited complimentary written copies of volume
1 can be obtained from sleg@loc.gov.
The full 4-volume, 748-page report (including transcripts from public
hearings and written submissions) can be purchased from the Government
Printing Office for $47.00 (U.S. postage included); the report's
order number is 030-000-00251-2. GPO can be reached by phone at 202/512-1800;
fax:202/512-2250; Internet via the
Superintendent of Documents Home Page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Film preservation 1993 : a study of the current state of American film
preservation : report of the Librarian of Congress.
p. cm.
"This report was written by Annette Melville and Scott Simmon under
contract with the Library of Congress. Their independent research was
conducted between December 1992 and June 1993"--Pref. material.
"June 1993."
ISBN 0-8444-0803-4
------ Copy 3. Z663.36 .F55 1993
1. Motion picture film--preservation and storage--United States.
I. Melville, Annette. II. Simmon, Scott. III. National Film
Preservation Board (U.S.)
TR886.3.F53 1993
778.5'0973--dc20 93-21925
CIP
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Executive Summary
1. Scope of the Study
2. Urgency
3. What is "Preservation"?
4. Technical Background
A. Film Bases
B. Emulsions and Color Fading
C. Storage
D. Technology and the Future
5. Film Preservation in Practice
A. Studios with Large Film Libraries
B. Independent Producers and Distributors
C. Stock Footage Libraries
D. Large Public Archives
E. Specialist Archives
F. Public Institutions with Small Film Collections
G. Collectors
H. Foreign Archives
6. Federal Funding of Film Preservation
A. Preservation Copying and the Copyright Law
B. Direct Support of Preservation Copying
1. AFI-NEA Film Preservation Grants
2. The Library of Congress and the National Archives Programs
3. The Role of Commercial Laboratories
C. Support of Preservation-Related Activities
7. Foundations Funding Film Preservation
8. Public Access
9. Who Benefits from Publicly Funded Film Preservation?
10. Redefining Preservation
11. Toward a National Program
List of Figures
(not included in this online version)
1. Survival Rates of American Silent Feature Films
2. Effect of Temperature and Humidity on Acetate Film:
When Will Vinegar Syndrome Begin Under Varying Storage Conditions?
3. Effect of Temperature on Color Fading
(Holding Relative Humidity at 40%)
4. Film Libraries of Studio Respondents
5. Collection and Access Programs of Public Archive Respondents
6. AFI-NEA Film Preservation Grant Distribution, 1979-92
7. What Types of Films Are Preserved with AFI-NEA Grants?
8. AFI-NEA and LC Funding for Film Preservation Copying, 1979-92
9. Cost of Preserving a Black-and-White Silent Feature, 1980-92
10. Privately Controlled Nitrate Preprint at Public Archives:
How Much Would It Cost in 1993 To Store This Material Commercially?
11. American Feature Films (1919-28) in U.S. and Foreign Archives
Acknowledgements
This report could not have been completed without the research of Steven
Leggett, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library
of Congress.
The writers of this report--Annette Melville and Scott Simmon--would
like to thank those submitting statements or participating in the hearings.
We would particularly like to single out the following for their open
discussion of preservation issues and of their organizations in interviews
by phone or in person:
- Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: Michael Friend
- American Archives of the Factual Film, Iowa State University: Glenn
McMullen
- American Association for State and Local History: Jay Richiuso
- American Film Institute, National Center for Film and Video Preservation:
Margaret Byrne, Susan Dalton, Jean Firstenberg, Alan Gevinson, Patricia
King Hanson, Gregory Lukow, John Ptak
- American Zoetrope: Catherine Craig
- Anthology Film Archives: Robert Haller, Jim Hubbard, Jonas Mekas
- Bishop Museum Archives: DeSoto Brown
- Canyon Cinema: Dominique Angerame
- Chace Productions: Robert Heiber
- Department of Education, Office of Library Programs: Linda Loeb
- Film Forum: Bruce Goldstein
- The Film Foundation: Raffaele Donato
- Film Preserve: Robert Harris
- Film Technology: Ralph Sargent, Alan Stark
- Fort Lee Film Storage: Larry Wehrhahn
- Sam Gowan
- Grand Rapids Public Library: Gordon Olson
- Hollywood Vaults: David Wexler
- Human Studies Film Archives, Smithsonian Institution: John Homiak
- Image Permanence Institute: Douglas Nishimura, James Reilly
- International Museum of Photography and Film at George Eastman
House: Jan-Christopher Horak, Edward Stratmann
- Japanese American National Museum: Karen Ishizuka
- John E. Allen
- Library of Congress: David Francis, Gerald Gibson, Barbara Humphrys,
Patrick Loughney, Madeline Matz, Eric Schwartz, Pat Sheehan, Paul
Spehr
- Lucasfilm: Deborah Fine
- John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation: Patricia Boero
- Louis B. Mayer Foundation: L. Jeffrey Selznick
- Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Gray Ainsworth
- Miljoy Enterprises: Milton Shefter
- Moviecraft: Larry Urbanski
- Museum of Modern Art: Mary Lea Bandy, Eileen Bowser, Peter Williamson
- National Air and Space Museum Film Archives: Mark Taylor
- National Archives and Records Administration: Alan Lewis, Charles
Mayn, William Murphy
- National Center for Jewish Film: Sharon Rivo
- National Endowment for the Arts: Richard Teller
- National Endowment for the Humanities: Jeffrey Field
- National Historical Publications and Records Commission: Laurie
Baty
- Nebraska Historical Museum: Paul Eisloeffel
- New York Public Library: Mary Boone Bowling, Marie Nesthus
- New York State Council on the Arts: Deborah Silverfine
- Northeast Historic Film: Karan Sheldon
- Victor Nunez
- Oregon Historical Society: Michele Krips
- Pacific Film Archive: Stephen Gong
- Paramount Pictures: Philip Murphy, Mike Schlesinger
- Prelinger Associates: Richard Prelinger
- Republic Pictures: Ernest Kirkpatrick
- Society of American Archivists: Teresa Brinati
- Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers: Sherwin Becker
- Southwest Film/Video Archives: Rebecca Rice
- Sony Pictures: Grover Crisp, William Humphrey
- Television City: Ana Ramirez
- Turner Entertainment: Richard May, Roger Mayer
- Twentieth Century Fox: Alan Adler, Roger Bell
- UCLA Film and Television Archive: Robert Gitt, Edward Richmond,
Robert Rosen
- Universal City Studios: Bob O'Neil
- Walt Disney Company: Harrison Ellenshaw, Scott MacQueen
- Warner Bros.: Peter Gardiner
- Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research: Maxine Fleckner-Ducey
- YCM: Pete Comandini, Richard Dayton
Executive Summary
What are we doing to save America's film heritage for future generations?
The following study, mandated by the National Film Preservation Act of
1992, describes the current state of preservation in the U.S. film industry
and in public and nonprofit archives. Information was gathered at hearings
in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., (transcribed in Volumes 2 and 3)
and through written comments from the field (Volume 4), as well as through
interviews and published documents. The first of two submissions to Congress
by the Librarian of Congress, this study lays the framework for a national
film preservation program.
Film is a fragile medium, and motion pictures of all types are deteriorating
faster than archives can preserve them. Preservation practices slow
film's inevitable decay by environmentally controlled storage and by
copying endangered works onto more durable film stock. Today's film
preservation crisis is not merely the result of substantially decreased
public funding but also arises from a growth in the types of films
now valued and requiring preservation. Newsreels, documentaries, avant-garde
works, anthropological and regional films, advertising shorts, and
even some home movies (especially of ethnic groups invisible in the
mainstream media) are now seen as important records of America's social
memory.
Fueling the crisis is the deterioration of films from the last 40
years, films previously thought not-at-risk. Preservation efforts were
once directed solely at copying nitrate- base film, an older, unstable
film stock. "safety film" replaced nitrate in the early 1950s,
and now preservationists must deal with recently discovered problems
of this less flammable substitute--the fading of color film and "vinegar
syndrome", an irreversible film base decay--in addition to the
still-pressing task of nitrate conversion. Research is increasingly
demonstrating the critical role of low humidity and low temperature
storage in extending film life. As technical expertise grows, better
copies are being made from older film materials. Film preservation
is increasingly perceived as an ongoing activity, not a one-time copying "fix".
These factors point to the need to re-think the current approach.
Film preservation in practice. While many types
of organizations have motion pictures of cultural interest, preservation
efforts vary greatly with funding and commercial rights. Studios
with large film libraries, once little interested in "last-year's
pictures," now earn less revenue from a film's theatrical release
than from later ancillary distribution by cable, network, and home
video. Although industry practices vary, most studios are now investing
in sophisticated storage facilities and restoring older features for
which they own commercial rights. Independent producers and
distributors, owners of films financed outside the large studios,
generally lack the resources and organizational continuity to mount
such expensive "asset protection" programs. The works of
avant- garde and documentary filmmakers are among those most at risk.
In the public and nonprofit sectors, the defining problem for film
preservation is funding. For the largest archives,
the priority has long been the duplication of nitrate film. For more specialized
archives--smaller archives that collect films relating to
a specific region, subject or ethnic group--the first preservation
task has been to bring endangered film into archival custody.
Fearing legal action, foreign archives, like U.S. collectors,
have been reluctant to reveal their holdings of American films. A large
number of "lost" American films of the 1910s and 1920s survive abroad
in unique prints.
Federal programs. Federal film preservation funding
has supported the copying of deteriorating film in tax-exempt institutions.
The major conduit has been the grant program funded through the National
Endowment for the Arts and administered by the National Center for
Film and Video Preservation at the American Film Institute. Between
1979 and 1992, 37 institutions received a total of $5.5 million in
matching federal grants, stimulating at least double that dollar amount
in laboratory copying. This AFI-NEA program provides a limited safety
net for films unlikely to receive preservation by commercial interests--particularly
silent films, older independent features, ethnic films, dance documentation,
and avant-garde works. Federal funds also support the preservation
programs of the National Archives and the Library of Congress.
Through critically important, these programs merely chip away at
the film preservation crisis. When adjusted for inflation, federal
funding for the AFI-NEA and Library of Congress programs has fallen
to half its 1980 level. The diminished funding is more strikingly seen
in terms of the amount of laboratory work federal dollars can support.
In 1980 the AFI-NEA grants of $514,215 (not counting matching funds)
could support the preservation copying of the equivalent of 159 black-and-white
silent features; in 1992 the AFI-NEA awards of $355,600 could fund
copying for fewer than 26.
Other federal programs support preservation-related activities on
a project-by-project basis, although none specifically addresses the
need for improving storage conditions. Certain types of films--most
documentaries and newsreels, for example--fall between the cracks of
existing programs. Some foundations have become preservation funders,
though very few support projects in this area.
Access. Preservation is incomplete without public
access to the preserved film. For public archives, access must be balanced
against the need for physical preservation and the rights of the copyright
owners. Archives share films with the public through screening programs,
museum exhibitions, educational distribution, and on-site study. Materials
unrestricted by copyright and donor agreements can be made more widely
available through sale or licensing. Film preservation also brings
benefits to the copyright holders. Public archives store early generation
nitrate film for many studios (generally at no expense to the donors),
provide technical preservation assistance, and locate missing film
materials in foreign archives.
How can we measure success in film preservation? Standard
quantitative measures-- feet of nitrate film copied and safety film
produced--presume that the preservation battle centers exclusively
on nitrate film and that the earliest nitrate-to-safety conversions
are still acceptable by today's standards. Better indicators of success
are the increased number of institutions with archival programs, the
change in industry attitude toward the value of film libraries, the
growth in public-private partnership projects, the shift from quantity
measurement to quality standards in laboratory work, the repatriation
of "lost" American films, and the growing recognition of importance
of film types beyond the Hollywood fiction feature.
Toward a national program. This report recommends
several topics to be explored and integrated into a national program,
to be developed over the next twelve months:
- Securing a viable and ongoing source of public funding for preserving
films of cultural and historic value, particularly those not preserved
by commercial interests.
- Re-framing physical preservation as an integrated "whole film" activity,
recognizing the trade-offs of storage and film-to-film copying, examining
the adequacy of electronic transfer for some films, and planning
how technology will change preservation processes within the next
decade.
- Developing mechanisms to coordinate public-private ventures and
to facilitate communication among archives, industry and technical
experts, as well as legal incentives for stimulating such preservation
ventures.
- Creating a framework for providing greater access to publicly preserved
films, and for educational use of others currently inaccessible.
The Librarian of Congress and the National Film Preservation Board invite
written suggestions for the program as well as comments on the study.
Responses received by September 30, 1993, will be folded into the next
stage of the planning process.
1. Scope of the Study
A hundred years after the birth of motion pictures in the United States,
this report asks: What are we doing to save America's film heritage for
future generations? Film Preservation 1993 is a snapshot
of film preservation as it is practiced today in the U.S. film industry
and in public and nonprofit organizations. Mandated by the National Film
Preservation Act of 1992,1 it is the first of two submissions to Congress by
the Librarian of Congress and his advisory panel, the National Film Preservation
Board. By describing the current state of film preservation, this report
lays the framework for a planning document, which will present to Congress
a national strategy for coordinating film preservation, developed in
consultation with archivists, copyright holders, educators and others
concerned with the survival and accessibility of American film.
This report has modest parameters. It describes only the current
state of preservation and its problems, not future solutions (which
is the goal of the Librarian's second Congressional submission). It
is an outline of key issues, rather than a history of American film
preservation, and chronicles the past only to the extent that comparisons
to former practices, assumptions, and funding help illuminate the contemporary
situation. Although video and film are increasingly interdependent,
this report adheres to the legal directive of the National Film Preservation
Act of 1992 and confines itself to preservation issues relating to
film, not to television or video. It defines film narrowly as moving
images captured on motion picture stock and intended for exhibition
or documentation, not broadcast. (There are indeed serious preservation
problems confronting America's television materials, and it is hoped
that these might be the subject of another fact-finding effort.)
Information was gathered through interviews and library research,
as well as through the public testimony and written statements--from
over 100 organizations and individuals-- that form the core of this
four-volume study. In a sense, the report in Volume 1 serves as a preface
to those public comments. Transcripts of the two National Film Preservation
Board public hearings, held in Los Angeles on February 12, 1993, and
in Washington, D.C., on February 26, are reproduced in their entirety
in Volumes 2 and 3. All written statements received before April 1,
1993 are reprinted in Volume 4. (The written statements include responses
from those unable to testify in person as well as additional comments
from participants in the hearings.)
2. Urgency
Now that the movies have reached their centennial, the idea that they
deserve saving requires little defense. Films are not simply the province
of "buffs" or exercises in nostalgia, but this century's most
vital social memory and its most distinctive art form-- one at which
the United States has excelled.
For all the evident values of film, one fact is clear: The battle
for their preservation is being lost, despite certain inspiring efforts
and hopeful signs. There are ways to quantify this failure, particularly
in terms of public funding and of uncopied, decaying nitrate-base footage.
But put most simply, the problem is this: Films of all types are deteriorating
faster than archives can preserve them.
Film is a fragile medium, generally intended for a brief commercial
life. Preservation tries to slow film's inevitable decay by controlling
storage conditions and by copying endangered works onto more durable
film stock. The director Peter Bogdanovich recalls writing in 1960
an article entitled "Who Cares?" about the importance of
film preservation and having its title ironically borne out by being
unable to get it published.(2) Because
such articles and published expressions of concern are more common
now,3 one might presume
that the problems are well in hand. If, instead, film survival is at
a crisis point, it is because three critical changes--conceptual, technical,
and financial--have conspired.
- More types of film are of cultural interest to scholars and the
public, and thus seen to merit preservation attention. Traditional
preservation efforts directed largely toward the Hollywood feature
seem shortsighted, in light of the relative neglect of other types:
newsreels, documentaries, experimental or avant-garde films, anthropological
and regional films, advertising and corporate shorts, dance documentation,
and even amateur home movies, especially of ethnic groups invisible
in mainstream media.4
- Serious physical deterioration has been discovered in films produced
within the last four decades. The traditional preservation efforts
of public archives directed almost exclusively at copying volatile
pre-1951 nitrate- base film may also be shortsighted, in light of
two more recently discovered problems in "safety film":
color fading and "vinegar syndrome," an acetate-base decay
(issues discussed further in Section 4).
- While public interest in saving older films seems never to have
been higher, federal funding continues to decline and is now less
than half of what it was in 1980. In that year, the AFI-NEA Preservation
Program, the principal conduit for federal funds to the nation's
archives, distributed an amount sufficient to copy the equivalent
of 159 black-and-white silent features; in 1992 the grants could
support the copying of fewer than 26.5 The
Library of Congress' film copying funding has experienced a similar
decline, in spite of the growth of its motion picture collections
(as discussed further in Section 6).
That the United States is fighting a losing battle to save its film heritage
is clearest from a sobering, often-noted historical fact. Current efforts
of preservationists begin from the recognition that a great percentage
of American film has already been irretrievably lost-- intentionally
thrown away or allowed to deteriorate.
Exactly how much of America's film production has already been lost
remains difficult to say. The most familiar statistic, which has attained
its authority primarily through repetition, is that we have lost 50%
of all titles produced before 1950.6 This
estimate may not be inaccurate so long as one qualifies it in three
ways. First, it would apply only to full-length fiction films. Anecdotal
evidence suggests that survival rates for other film types, even major
studio newsreels and shorts, are lower. Second, among those studio
features, there is a sharp break in survival rates at 1929, the year
that sound film became the industry standard. Features of the 1930s
have been recently documented to survive at a rate of no less than
80%, probably closer to 90%.7 However,
fewer than 20% of the features of the 1920s survive in complete form;
for features of the 1910s, the survival rate falls to slightly above
10% (and those in copies generally made from projection prints, not
negatives, which are almost entirely lost). Figure 1 details approximate
survival rates for American silent features. Third and last, the familiarity
of that 50%-before-1950 statistic also implies, by omission, that there
are few preservation problems with films produced after that year--something
which is not the case, as will be discussed.
Figure 1: Survival Rates of American Silent Feature Films8 (Based on working lists of holdings
in U.S. and foreign archives)
There is in the testimony and submissions that follow a general recognition
among the industry and public/nonprofit sector respondents of the urgency
of these preservation problems. There is universal agreement that more
must be done in the few remaining years of this century if the next
generation is not to look back on current efforts as little more than
a tragic failure.
Where there is less agreement is in the balance of priorities and
responsibilities. Disagreements arise particularly over films which
are publicly experienced but privately owned. If there is a single
division that separates most of the preservation issues discussed in
this report, it is between two categories of films: those that have
evident market value and owners able to exploit that value; and the
other films, often labeled "orphans," that lack either clear
copyright holders or commercial potential to pay for their continued
preservation. In practice, the former are primarily features from major
Hollywood studios; the latter--numerically the majority--include newsreels
and documentaries, avant-garde and independent productions, silent
films where copyright has expired, even certain Hollywood sound films
from now defunct studios. For these films the urgency may be greatest.
3. What Is "Preservation"?
Films are ephemeral and fragile products. For the technical reasons outlined
in the next section, even the most durable of films can become unusable
in less than a single human lifespan, although some types have proven
to deteriorate more rapidly and spectacularly than others. While preservation
can be thought of as any effort to keep a film in a viewable form, most
archivists consider a film preserved only when it is both (1) viewable
in its original format with its full visual and aural9 values retained, and (2) protected
for the future by "preprint" material10 through which subsequent viewing
copies can be created.
In practice and in casual language, preservation has usually been
synonymous with duplication. The archival rallying slogan for the last
two decades has been "Nitrate Won't Wait," and the primary
preservation task--still far from accomplished--has been to copy unstable,
nitrate-base film without significant loss of quality onto more durable "safety" stock.
For a variety of reasons, this definition of preservation is being
rethought and broadened to include the costly issue of storage conditions,
as well as the apparently contradictory issue of public access. Preservation
is increasingly being defined less as a one-time "fix" (measurable
in footage copied) than as an ongoing process.11
Related terms needs to be distinguished from preservation. "Restoration" goes
beyond the physical copying of surviving material into reconstruction
of the most authentic version of a film. Ideally, this requires comparison
of all surviving material on a given title, consultation of printed
records of the production and exhibition history, and then decisions
regarding the film's "original" state.12 Also
distinguishable from preservation is "conservation," which
requires no physical copying, only the decision to treat film material
with greater care because of its perceived use as a future preservation
source. Typically, a print which has been regarded as an access or "reference" copy
becomes a conservation copy when it is suspected to be the best surviving
material on that title.13
In the widest sense, preservation is the assurance that a film will
continue to exist in something close to its original form. Thus, to
the extent that preservation is a commitment made to the future, it
has further complexities. The issue has often been put this way: Can
a film be considered "preserved" if it is physically protected
but held only under private ownership? That question has surfaced in
a number of widely publicized contexts, including the "colorization" controversy
of the late 1980s14 and
the concerns in 1989 and 1990 over foreign purchases of American studio
film libraries.15 Recently,
it has been reasonable for studios to suggest that films to which they
hold copyright are their own preservation responsibility and that public
archives might direct their resources elsewhere.16 It has also been reasonable for public archives
to point to the studios' poor record of saving their films, alongside
a commercial history of "lowest-bid" preservation quality.17 However, several new public-private partnerships
suggest that these positions are not so intransigent or contradictory
as they once seemed.
In what sense preservation is now also understood as a trust to the
present as well as to the future is a question taken up in Section
8, "Public Access."
4. Technical Background
A few technical notes may be useful before turning to current preservation
practices. Some of these facts relate to longstanding preservation problems;
others have taken on new prominence.
Physically, all motion picture film consists of two primary layers
with a binder to hold them together: emulsions (which carry the image)
and a transparent support base. Film preservation is necessary because
of the very nature of these materials: emulsions fade, the binder breaks
down, and the plastics of the support base decompose.
A. Film Bases.
Historically, motion-picture bases have been of three main types: (1)
cellulose nitrate (usually called simply nitrate), in commercial use
through the early 1950s; (2) cellulose acetate (usually called acetate),
available for some uses since the 1910s but widely employed only after
1950;18 and (3) polyester, available since the mid-
1950s but still in only scattered use. Both acetate and polyester are
sometimes called "safety" film, in distinction from nitrate.
Nitrate base had certain excellent qualities, but
its chemical composition destabilizes over time. As it ages it has
a tendency to shrink, to give off gasses that destroy the emulsion,
and to become highly flammable at relatively low temperatures. Once
a nitrate fire begins, it is nearly impossible to extinguish, since
in burning it creates its own oxygen. It was a rash of fires in the
late 1940s that led to the industry's conversion to triacetate safety
film. More recently, large nitrate fires have occurred in the United
States (notably at vaults of the National Archives in 1977 and 1978
and at the George Eastman House in 1978) and in foreign archives (most
disastrously at Mexico's Cineteca Nacional in 1982, and at a warehouse
for the Cinémathèque Française outside Paris in 1980).
The hazards of nitrate should not be minimized but it is also possible
to exaggerate them. Under the right conditions, nitrate film can have
a long useful life, as demonstrated by surviving 90-year-old examples,
such as an original negative for The Great Train Robbery (1903).19 In some stages of decomposition, nitrate can
ignite spontaneously, though not so easily as is sometimes feared.20
For many years nitrate was considered discardable after being copied
onto safety stock, but increasingly archives are rethinking this policy.
The chief reason for retaining usable nitrate is that it is closer
to the original, often carrying a shimmering visual beauty lost in
even the best new copies, whose emulsions are incapable of reproducing
nitrate film's tonal qualities. The nitrate retained is then available
for reuse as duplication technology improves, as well as for color-tinting
records and for special public screenings.21 It
is also increasingly expensive to dispose of nitrate in a way that
meets environmental and health standards.22
Acetate-based film solved the fire hazard and was
long considered an ideal preservation material. Kept properly stored,
it may still be that. But the discovery in the 1980s of what is popularly
called "vinegar syndrome," from the acetic acid smell given
off when acetate base begins to decay, is currently giving film preservationists
serious pause. There is increasing scientific evidence that, kept under
identical conditions, acetate film decays at approximately the same
rate as nitrate, though with nothing of nitrate's volatility. This
is not illogical: Both are cellulosic plastics and apparently deteriorate
at similar speed. The later stages of acetate decay do not destroy
emulsions in the same way as does nitrate but nevertheless renders
the film unusable.
One basic archival principle is that preservation is not accomplished
unless the new medium has a considerably longer life than the original
from which it is copied. On the surface, continued copying onto acetate
base would seem to violate that principle. But there are two reasons
to qualify such a conclusion: First, the original nitrate print is
older and usually well into its decomposition cycle; and, second, the
new acetate print can be given proper storage right from the start.
Thus vinegar syndrome has not been detected in films duplicated under
archival conditions and put into ideal storage immediately. The implications
of vinegar syndrome in acetate have not yet been fully assimilated
into preservation practice, but scientific research into its causes
has also been accompanied by compelling evidence that it can be delayed
by proper storage.23
Polyester base seems to promise a significantly
longer lifespan than acetate, although archivists have been reluctant
to embrace it. Only after the evidence of vinegar syndrome in acetate
was there much renewed consideration of polyester, especially because,
at least in its early manufacture, it showed problems with the binder
separating from the emulsion, leading to loss of the image. It also
was long unavailable in the 35mm intermediate stocks needed for preprint
copies.24 Among the largest public archives, only
the George Eastman House and the National Archives have made limited
nitrate conversion onto polyester stocks. Institutions dealing primarily
in 16mm have had wider access to polyester; the New York Public Library's
Donnell Media Center has ordered all its film copies on polyester since
1980.
B. Emulsions and Color Fading.
One other current preservation concern rivals that of uncopied nitrate
in significance: the fading of the color dyes in "dye-coupler" films--
better known as "Eastmancolor"--which won over the industry
in the early 1950s. It is the least quantifiable, least easily solvable,
and probably most expensive of current preservation problems. Among theatrical
prints and home movies of the 1950s through the 1970s, the problem is
often painfully obvious in color images that have turned a low-contrast
brownish pink. The technical irony is that earlier color prints--in the "Technicolor" process--have
essentially retained their original hues, though of course those before
1950 are on unstable nitrate base. This problem with color emulsions
parallels that facing libraries in the preservation of twentieth-century
books on acetic paper, which deteriorates much more rapidly than older
papers. In both cases new technology created a less expensive product--and
a nightmare for the future.
The Technicolor system differed from Eastmancolor at both the negative
and the print stages. To produce its negatives, the
bulky "three-strip" Technicolor camera (in use from 1933
through the early 1950s) filtered the visible light spectrum to capture
the blue, red, and green portions on three separate black-and-white
negatives, not subject to fading because they involved no color dyes.
(A two-strip Technicolor system, in use from 1922 to 1933, functioned
similarly but caught less of the full spectrum.) Eastmancolor's supreme
commercial advantage came in producing a "monopack" multilayer
emulsion that captured color on a single negative, although the complex
chemistry that allowed for this also made the vegetable dyes, when "coupled" in
developing, unstable. Technicolor release prints for
theaters--known also as "imbibition" or "dye-transfer" prints--were
created by the transfer of previously manufactured coal-tar dyes onto
blank film through matrices, in a way roughly comparable to printing
with inks on paper. In Eastmancolor's dye-coupler prints, the dyes
are created, as they are in the negative, through a chemical processing
that again leaves certain colors unstable.
There are several complications about the relationship of color fading
in negatives and in release prints that are worth mentioning. Technicolor
prints continued to be made until 1974, or for twenty years after the
Technicolor negative process was abandoned (the three matrices necessary
for prints being created by filters from the single dye-coupler negative).25 Thus
it is possible for the color in Technicolor projection prints to look
superb even while the original negative is in danger. Contrarily, it
is common for dye- coupler prints to fade to that dull purple even
while preprint material exists that allows for the striking of excellent
new prints. There remains, however, dispute about the state of the
original studio negatives from this era and of preprint backup material
made from those negatives. (Although the fading rate is slower in some
preprint material, restoration expert Robert Harris in his submission
claims that "we have lost the original negatives to almost every
[color] film of the 50s into the 60s.")26 Undoubtedly
there is great variation in the rate of fading depending upon when
the original stock was manufactured and the quality of the original
processing.
Over the last two decades, the Eastman Kodak Company has introduced
a number of lower-fading preprint and print stocks.
27 These have found use in both public archives
and private preservation programs (such as the Turner Entertainment Company's
recent recopying of MGM duplicate negatives, originally copied in the
1970s). If Kodak's lower-fading stocks were long ignored by the industry,
it was essentially for economic reasons (the low-fade stocks of the late
1970s cost about 10% more).
Despite a few imaginative experiments, there remains only one proven
method to prevent color fading: through what are known as "separations." In
this widely used process, color film is copied through red, blue, and
green filters to create three separate black- and-white records (roughly
equivalent to what the Technicolor process created in the camera),
each of which holds one of the three color records and which cannot
fade because no dyes are involved. In theory, it is then a simple matter
to recreate the color by combining the separations. In practice, there
have been frequent problems, especially since most separations are
not tested at the time of their creation to see if they can be recombined.
Such a full testing would essentially double the initial cost of making
separations, currently running at least $25,000 for two-hour feature.28 Even
if tested, separations can develop their own preservation problems;
shrinkage differences among the three rolls can prevent their alignment,
creating a hazy, unfocusable image in the new color print.29
Only one other method is known to reduce, if not completely prevent,
color fading: cold-and-dry storage.
C. Storage.
Several of the technical matters described above--especially vinegar
syndrome, color fading, and the retention of nitrate after copying--have
conspired to give a new prominence in current preservation practice to
storage conditions. The combined effect of lowered temperatures and lowered
relative humidity in retarding both vinegar syndrome and color fading
is startling and increasingly well documented. The one encouraging finding
about these deterioration processes is how significantly both can be
slowed by the right storage conditions.
The variations are complicated, but to take one example, the lowering
of storage temperatures by 20 degrees Fahrenheit, from 80 degrees to
60 degrees, while lowering relative humidity by 20 percent, from 65%
to 45%, delays the onset of vinegar syndrome from approximately 15
years after filmstock manufacture to 100 years (as illustrated on Figure
2). The effect of storage conditions on color fading is less easy to
quantify because fading depends so much on the initial stock and processing
quality, but the effect of cold-and-dry storage on relative rates of
fading are equally dramatic. For instance, by lowering temperature
from 75 degrees F to 45degrees, the color fading which would have occurred
in 10 years will take 100 years (as illustrated on Figure 3).
For such reasons, several large and specially designed storage vaults
have recently opened or are under construction both at private studios
(Paramount, opened in 1990; Warner Bros., opened in 1993) and public
archives (the Museum of Modern Art and the National Archives, both
due to open in 1994).30 For such reasons too, recommended storage temperatures
and relative humidities from the national organizations ANSI (American
National Standards Institute) and SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture
and Television Engineers) have been lowered in the last few years.
SMPTE's pending proposal for "extended term" storage of color
prints suggests a maximum of 35 degrees F and of 20-30% relative humidity
and of black-and-white prints a maximum of 70 degrees F and 20-30%
RH.31 For public
archives particularly these are difficult and expensive proposals.
In its 1986 survey of public collections, the National Center for Film
and Video Preservation found only 11 of the 28 responding institutions
able to maintain their safety film at temperatures of less than 61
degrees F, and only 8 institutions could maintain a relative humidity
of 45% or less.32 Still,
since any lowering of temperature and humidity has major impact on
film longevity, the SMPTE storage proposals can be thought of as goals.
In practical terms, it has proven easier and cheaper to lower temperature
than to lower humidity.34 For
certain types of films (especially local history and ethnic culture
on 8mm and super 8mm) where laboratory copying is essentially unavailable,
proper storage is the only viable preservation alternative.
[Chart: Average Storage Temperature]
Figure 2: Effect of Temperature and Humidity on Acetate Film: When
Will Vinegar Syndrome Begin Under Varying Storage Conditions? (Based
on data from The Image Permanence Institute Storage Guide for Acetate
Film)33
Figure 3: Effect of Temperature on Color Fading (Holding Relative
Humidity at 40%) (From proposed SMPTE RP 131)
Storage is not the simple or full solution to current preservation
problems: The start-up costs are huge (the Museum of Modern Art's two-building
facility will cost around $12 million), the ongoing electrical expenses
are considerable (Paramount's electric bill for its new vault alone
runs to several hundred thousand dollars annually),35 and
access to the films becomes problematic (since major changes in
temperature and humidity may also be damaging to film).36 Nevertheless,
storage is increasingly regarded as the critical factor in film longevity
and is still not adequately integrated into public preservation plans
and funding programs.
D. Technology and the Future.
Although this report is concerned only with current practice, it is worth
commenting briefly on upcoming regulations and evolving technologies.
Within the next few years, two chemicals routinely used in film preservation
are expected to be banned for environmental reasons. Laboratory experts
have not yet found adequate substitutes for use in film cleaning (essential
in preparing older film for copying) and wetgate printing (a method which
fills in scratches and other flaws, also essential for copying from older
film).37
It also needs noting that there is no reasonable-cost electronic
preservation solution on the immediate horizon, for two reasons: (1)
a 35mm frame of film holds a huge amount of information, nearly 5 million
pixels, expensive to capture electronically without loss; even the
currently proposed digital standard for high definition television
(HDTV), which should begin to be publicly available in the United States
in 1995, will capture less than half of the visual information on 35mm
film;38 and
(2), should a reasonably priced method of electronic preservation develop,
archivists would need to be cautious in its adoption because of the
history of rapid obsolescence of electronic technologies. (Already
a central problem in video preservation is the difficulty in constructing
equipment to play recordings made only a few years ago; at least six
major incompatible formats have evolved into obsolescence the last
20 years.)39 Clearly,
an electronic preservation medium will develop sometime in the future--and
that expectation reinforces the importance of proper storage--but while
the technology evolves and the experiments continue, there is general
agreement that film remains its own unrivaled preservation medium.
5. Film Preservation in Practice
While film base decay and color fading affect all motion pictures, the
approach for addressing these problems varies greatly across the film
industry and public/nonprofit organizations. The approaches reflect the
funding available for preservation as well as the commercial rights owned
by the repository. To compare the approaches, those holding film materials
have been grouped below into broad categories: (A) studios with large
film libraries, (B) independent producers and distributors, (C) stock
footage libraries, (D) large public archives, (E) specialist film archives,
(F) public institutions with small film collections, (G) private collectors,
and (H) foreign archives.40
A. Studios with Large Film Libraries
41
Film studios traditionally captured their revenue from exhibiting
new films. For the industry's first 60 years, there was no mass audience
for "last-year's pictures"; after a film's theatrical release
cycle, most prints were destroyed and the preprint material, if still
useable, was shelved and perhaps used as a source for clips.42 The
advent of television brought a new market for some older sound films
but still left studios with many other titles of little apparent commercial
value. Confronted with limited markets, rising storage costs, and increasing
insurance premiums for keeping nitrate film on the backlot, most studios
either sold their libraries or copied more valuable titles onto safety
stock, disposing of the nitrate. During the 1960s and 1970s some major
studios, such as Columbia, MGM and United Artists, deposited their
nitrate materials with public film archives.
The growth of secondary markets over the past decade has reversed
the industry's traditional revenue sources. After their theatrical
run, films now have several additional lives through licensing to cable,
network television, home videotape and laserdisc (and can be expected
to have more as new electronic delivery technologies develop).43 For
an "average" major studio feature in 1990, revenues from
these ancillary markets outstripped those from domestic and foreign
theatrical release by about a million dollars, and the balance continues
to shift.44 With
films generating revenue over an extended time span, the studio library
has become a key corporate asset. (For diversified corporations, film
libraries also serve as "software" for other operations.45 For
example, after purchasing MGM/UA in 1986, Ted Turner sold off the production
operations but retained the MGM library for broadcast on his cable
networks.)
The actual value of film libraries has been hotly debated by industry
analysts.46 Each
title's evaluation depends on anticipated audience interest over time
and ownership of the exploitation rights as well as new technological
applications. Commercial rights can be divided among different parties
by geographic market, time period, distribution medium, language, and
other factors. The approximate size of the libraries of industry respondents
participating in the Los Angeles hearing is shown in Figure 4.
[Figure 4: Film Libraries of Studio Respondents]47
Since the beginning of the "home video era" around 1980,
most studios have come to recognize the potential long-term value of
their film libraries and some have embarked on ambitious "asset
protection" programs. Paramount is a case in point. In the last
five years it has spent over $35 million inspecting its negatives,
audio tracks and color separations, doing film repair, and printing
new preservation materials. In 1990 it opened a new $11-million archives
building, with low-humidity cold vaults for preprint and color materials.
Paramount stores second master printing copies in an underground facility
in Pennsylvania and tracks its 750,000 items worldwide through an automated
inventory system. By investing in the physical care of its collections,
the studio expects to extend the shelf life of film elements and expedite
retrieval.48 Industry
storage practices, of course, vary. For example, two studio respondents
store most film material at commercial vaults; several are in the process
of automating their film inventory.
Most large studios now routinely keep preservation masters49 of
films they produce as well as additional materials--such as foreign-language
soundtracks or edited airline versions--required for ancillary markets.
For each title, the studio may keep many different preprint and sound
elements. For films distributed by major studios but produced by an
independent company, the situation is somewhat different. Studios usually
hold sufficient materials to generate release copies, but not the preservation
back- up of color separations or the original camera negative. The
depth of preservation protection depends on the scope and duration
of the studio's commercial rights and the film's expected value over
time. Films in which studios hold limited commercial interest generally
do not receive the same depth of protection as the studio's own productions.50
Post-1950 safety films made before the introduction of studio asset
protection programs present other complicated problems. According to
some witnesses, the preprint materials of many well-known films of
the 1950s and 1960s have deteriorated through color fading and soundtrack
decay.51 The inherent
physical problems were aggravated by substandard laboratory work, poor
storage conditions, and inadequate inventory control. To redress past
archival practices and capitalize on public interest in older titles,
some studios have mounted well-publicized restoration campaigns. In
1990, for example, Warner Bros. announced the restoration of 26 "classics," including Rebel
Without a Cause.52 Disney,
Paramount, Sony and Universal have undertaken similar efforts.53 One
central question remains about studio preservation: Will the secondary
markets stimulate high-quality preservation of all studio-held
films, including newsreels, 54 shorts
and B-pictures?55 While
industry sources see that potential, others wonder if efforts will
be extended beyond the more commercially viable titles and urge public-private
programs to verify the quality of preservation materials for privately
owned American film titles.56
B. Independent Producers and Distributors
The film preservation practices of independent producers and distributors
are as varied as the types of organizations in this catch-all category.
Independents range from corporations that produce outside the major studio
structure to single avant-garde artists distributing films from their
basements. In general, these operations are alike in lacking the resources
and organizational continuity to mount the aggressive asset protection
programs of the larger studios. Several examples suggest the range of
practices.
Lucasfilm, founded by director George Lucas, has gone to great lengths
to preserve film, paper records and artifacts related to its productions.57 To
use Star Wars (1977) as an example, Lucasfilm's distributor
keeps the usual master cut negative and printing materials in a climate-controlled
vault but, in addition, Lucasfilm has retained all other production
elements. The firm has built its own archives building to house these
materials.
Filmmaker Victor Nunez, whose Ruby in Paradise shared the
1993 Sundance Festival best picture award, represents the other end
of the feature-production spectrum. To Nunez's independent company,
raising funds is of more immediate concern than preserving past works.
Nunez pays for storage of some preprint materials at a commercial lab,
and discards outtakes and the original camera negatives. He does not
own prints of his features. In fact, since the distributor of his 1984
feature A Flash of Green went bankrupt, he has been unable
to get a print for theatrical screenings and cannot legally make a
new one. He suspects that the Library of Congress copy, deposited for
copyright protection, is one of the few prints in existence.58
Problems with distributors have led some independents to store and
release films themselves. Documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman distributes
through his own company, Zipporah Films, and has retained the full
record--outtakes, preprint, one- quarter-inch tape, magnetic soundtrack
and prints--for his 26 films. This amounts to roughly 16.5 million
feet of film, tape and track and a $7000 yearly storage bill.59
The works of avant-garde and documentary filmmakers are among the
most at risk--due to the conditions under which the films were originally
made, the limited number of release prints, and inability of filmmakers
to pay for adequate storage for preprint materials.60 For
many years laboratories filled a gap by storing films free of charge
to clients that used their services. Lab closings in New York City,
however, left filmmakers and archives scurrying to rescue abandoned
films and revealed the shortcomings of this arrangement.61 Filmmaker
cooperatives and media centers sometimes house and distribute the only
known print of contemporary avant-garde works.
As witnesses in Los Angeles point out,62 probably
the first step is educating filmmakers about the preservation needs
of their works. Canyon Cinema, a filmmaker-run distribution cooperative
in San Francisco, recently recognized that some of its prints were
rare works on color reversal stock and initiated a preservation program,
funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation, through which filmmakers supervise
the making of preprint material and new prints of their own works.63 The
Estate Project for Artists with AIDS now assists filmmakers with AIDS
to plan for the orderly disposition and archival housing of their films.64
The point to be gleaned from these examples is that independently
made films are much less likely than studio productions to be maintained
under conditions that will prolong their survival. Nationally distributed
independent features present a particular problem, as their print and
preprint materials may be scattered and controlled by different commercial
interests who have limited rights and hence little incentive to invest
in long- term preservation. Most smaller independents who maintain
rights to their own films lack the resources, information, and scale
of operations to develop comprehensive archival programs.
C. Stock Footage Libraries
Stock footage libraries are as open-ended a category as independent producers.
The term "stock footage" refers to any sort of existing moving
images sold or licensed for reuse in another context. Footage 89,
the most extensive guide to American footage sources, estimates that
there are 160 American companies characterizing themselves as stock footage
libraries and hundreds of producers who license footage for reuse on
an occasional basis.65
Stock footage libraries have, in some cases, the only known copy
of films of historical interest and fill a special niche by their documentation
of regional lifestyles, popular pastimes and daily life and work--activities
generally considered too ordinary for national newsreels but whose
documentation has increased in value over time. As market-driven operations,
such businesses pay for their own preservation work and generally give
priority to the most salable footage.
Moviecraft, Inc., is a typical example. Moviecraft specializes in
abandoned films-- educational, industrial, and advertising shorts produced
for specialized audiences, discarded after use and no longer under
copyright protection. The firm licenses footage to researchers and
copies its nitrate, preprint and print materials as income permits.66 Moviecraft
and other commercial archival respondents point out that the Copyright
Amendments Act of 1992, which effectively extends the initial copyright
term of all post-1963 titles to 75 years, has had the result of discouraging
stock footage libraries from salvaging and copying abandoned films
of that era.67
D. Large Public Archives
The largest U.S. public archives--the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the
International Museum of Photography and Film at George Eastman House
(GEH), the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and the Library of Congress
(LC)--have among them 224,000 film titles (see Figure 5). Adding the
collections of the National Archives, these five institutions hold an
estimated 89% of the total film footage in public repositories.68
These archives began collecting film before the industry took an
active interest in preservation. MoMA, the oldest U.S. fiction film
archive, started collecting films in 1935 to guarantee that copies
of important titles would be preserved as a cultural record; it reached
special agreements with studios to distribute films for educational
use. The George Eastman House, opening in 1949 with the support of
Eastman Kodak, formed a study collection of silent and independent
films as part of its documentation of the history of photography. UCLA
Film and Television Archive, founded in 1965 as part of the University
of California, has developed extensive holdings of Hollywood fiction
film and newsreels to support academic research and study.
The two federal film repositories began as collections of government
and cultural record. The National Archives retains preprint and print
material for U.S. government-produced films as well as actuality footage69 documenting
U.S. history. In a sense, the National Archives serves as the "studio
archive" for the federal government. 70 The
Library of Congress selects prints of films deposited for U.S. copyright
protection and has extensive holdings of American film productions
of all types.
In their early years, these archives acquired culturally significant
films in whatever form was available. Prints were obtained for in-house
study and exhibition, but preprint material was also sought, as its
acquisition assured that the title could be preserved and eventually
made available to the public. In the 1960s and 1970s studios transferred
to MoMA, GEH, UCLA, and LC extensive nitrate preprint collections;
many newsreels, notably the series Universal News and The March of
Time, were donated to the National Archives which completed conversion
of its nitrate to safety film in the mid-1980s.
The four large fiction film archives now house a wide range of preservation
source materials--nitrate preprint, nitrate prints representing the
best surviving copy, vintage theatrical prints on safety film, and
preservation masters created by the archives. In terms of number of
titles, these collections are far larger than industry collections
(compare Figures 4 and 5). But for each feature title, particularly
for the post-nitrate period (post-1950), the public archives have less
depth and variety of preservation source material. To return to the
Star Wars example, the Library of Congress has copyrighted release
prints and reference videodiscs, but the distributor Twentieth Century
Fox holds extensive preprint materials and some circulation copies,
and Lucasfilm maintains other production elements.
The preservation priority for the large public archives has been
the duplication of nitrate film, particularly from the silent and early
sound periods. Specialists have learned to restore films by working
backward from the surviving prints and piecing together preprint elements.
All five archives share information on preservation activities through
International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and have on-going
programs to copy deteriorating film.71 UCLA,
for example, has five full-time preservation employees as well as vault
attendants who inspect and service its collections. The UCLA preservation
staff coordinate restoration projects and physically prepare film for
copying at specialized commercial laboratories. Like most archives
outside of the federal government, UCLA contracts out for photographic
and sound recording services (see Section 6.B.3).
The defining problem for public archive preservation programs is
funding. The increasing difficulty in securing funds for routine film
copying was a recurrent theme in the interviews, written submissions
and hearings. While the federal institutions support most preservation
copying internally, MoMA, UCLA, and GEH are heavily dependent on outside
fund-raising and piece together their preservation budgets from many
sources. MoMA's $350,000 1992 laboratory copying budget, for example,
came entirely from endowment income, grants, and donations.72 In
1992 UCLA funded nearly 92% of its laboratory expenditures of $292,694
from outside sources.73 With
federal grants and state arts council support decreasing (see Sections
6.B.1 and 7), these archives are increasingly turning to high profile
preservation projects to generate income for more routine work.
Can the sale and distribution of films by these tax-exempt archives
become a funding source for preservation? Only to a limited extent.
It should be remembered that the large fiction archives hold copies,
but not the rights to most films in their collections. In cases where
the films are in the public domain or the rights have been transferred,
the archive may sell footage to help sustain its program. In 1992 UCLA
raised 29% of its entire operating budget though revenue-generating
activities, principally the licensing of footage from the Hearst Metrotone
News, the rights to which, along with the physical copies were donated
to the University in the early 1980s.74 George
Eastman House preserved and distributed through Kino International
the Josephine Baker film Princess Tam-Tam (1935), netting
some $20,000 for other projects.75 To
judge from the submissions, however, this funding option seems more
immediately feasible for regional archives holding primarily news and
amateur footage.
With recent research reinforcing the importance of environmentally
controlled storage, many archives are now working to improve vault
conditions. MoMA's facility now under construction consists of a 28,000-square-foot
building for safety film and a separate 9000-square-foot structure
for nitrate. Aside from a small studio vault since converted to other
uses, this is probably the first U.S. building specifically designed
for nitrate storage in the last three decades.76 Archives
II, the new National Archives building nearing completion in College
Park, Maryland, will store color film at 25 degrees Fahrenheit and
30% relative humidity and black-and-white preprint at 65 degrees F,
30% RH. The vaults feature an air filtration system to strain out pollutants.77
Other archives are struggling to retrofit existing buildings to meet
to new storage standards. LC has spent several years upgrading the
mechanical systems in two of its three vault facilities, at Suitland,
Maryland, and Dayton, Ohio. Within the next few years, UCLA will place
its acetate film in the University of California southern library storage
facility, now under construction. Its nitrate, however, will remain
in commercial storage, built over forty years ago and lacking mechanical
humidity and temperature controls.78
[Figure 5: Collection and Access Programs of Public Archive Respondents]
E. Specialist Archives
The specialist archives acquire and preserve films relating to a specific
subject, region, ethnic group or genre. Taking root in the 1970s and
1980s, specialist archives answered the public's growing interest in
independent, documentary and avant-garde film and brought together source
materials in emerging areas of film and cultural studies. Some have become
international leaders in their field. Founded in 1970 as an exhibition
space for alternative film, the Anthology Film Archives, for example,
has built one of the major avant-garde film collections in the world.
Specialist archives may be units within larger libraries, museums
or universities, such as Iowa State University's American Archives
of the Factual Film, or autonomous nonprofits such as Northeast Historic
Film, a regional collection devoted to the moving images of northern
New England. Fifteen specialist archives submitted comments for this
study; the range of interests is suggested in Figure 5.79
Newer to the field, these specialists generally do not have as well-established
(or as well- funded) preservation programs as the five large public
archives. With several significant exceptions,80 these
archives are primarily safety-film collections, and thus have not been
compelled by the nitrate threat to focus energies on film copying.
Indeed, as is pointed out in the submissions, their first preservation
task is identifying endangered material and bringing it into archival
custody.81 The
Southwest Film/Video Archives at Southern Methodist University rescued
from disposal entertainment films made for African American audiences;
the Japanese American National Museum has located home movies of Japanese
American daily life in the 1920s-1940s (including film clandestinely
shot in World War II internment camps) through ties with the Japanese
American community; the National Center for Jewish Film has searched
several continents for films relating to the Jewish experience. It
should be mentioned, too, that some collections, such as the New York
Public Library's Donnell Media Center, were never intended as archives.
They were started as film screening and study centers and were pressed
into a preservation role, as titles dropped out of distribution and
prints became increasingly rare. Others--particularly the regional
archives like the Oregon Historical Society--hold small gauge stock
(8mm and super 8mm), reversal film for which there is no economical
and practical means of film copying.
The common thread for these organizations is an "as-funds-permit" approach
to preservation. Usually they support preservation copying through
a patchwork of funding sources, and their small staffs juggle many
other duties. Among the specialist archives participating in this study,
only half received funds from their own institution for laboratory
work in 1992; most supported film preservation primarily through outside
grants or gifts. To offset operational expenses, some collections of
amateur and documentary film are turning to licensing footage. The
Bishop Museum Archives promotes itself as one of two sources of Hawaiian
actuality film in that state. The National Center for Jewish Film (NCJF)
helps subsidize preservation through the sale of videotapes and the
rental of exhibition prints as well as the licensing of footage for
which it controls the rights. The NCJF likens these operations to its "museum
store," a means of raising money while increasing public access
to its collections.
Increasingly concerned by vinegar syndrome and color fading, specialist
archives are stepping up efforts to improve storage conditions and
regularize film inspection. A few, like the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences, have new environmentally controlled facilities;
others, like the American Archives of the Factual Film and the Pacific
Film Archive, are refitting storage areas in their parent institutions.
Large and small alike, public archives generally see their fundamental
preservation problem as funding: As films decay and public demands
increase, how can they raise the funds to accelerate copying and improve
storage?82
F. Public Institutions with Small Film Collections
Hundreds of government offices, historical societies, museums, universities,
libraries, and nonprofit associations hold films scattered among their
own organizational records or among collections of personal papers and
educational resources. Just how many public institutions hold the best
surviving copies of films of historic or cultural interest is difficult
to say. Neither the American Association for State and Local History
(AASLH) or the Society of American Archivists has surveyed members regarding
film holdings in recent years, although the AASLH notes an eight-fold
growth since 1959 in the number of local history collections, some of
which could have amateur footage or locally produced films.83 In
his survey of stock footage sources, Richard Prelinger identified 1,750
public and commercial collections holding "unique moving image material
(or material not easily accessed through other sources)" and allowing
some form of public access. At the Washington hearing, Prelinger concluded
that for films scattered in U.S. repositories, the "the state of
information is pretty terrible;...decentralization makes it very difficult
to have a broad picture of what actually still exists in this country."84
In terms of film preservation, the major problem for these disparate "non-film" organizations
is simply finding out what to do. The Grand Rapids Public Library submission85 describes
the effort required by smaller generalist organizations to save deteriorating
films found in their collections. Receiving the Blissveldt Romance
as a gift, the public library discovered through research that the
locally produced 1915 nitrate film contained the earliest known footage
of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and represented a rare surviving example
of a type of regional fiction filmmaking common to the Teens. After
the city historian made numerous contacts, the library eventually received
an AFI-NEA grant to cover part of the laboratory copying costs. Using
this $1,100 in federal money as leverage, it then worked to raise an
additional $5,000 locally to cover the full preservation of Blissveldt
and a second early nonfiction film. The copies have since been shown
in Grand Rapids and reproduced in several productions. The point here
is that most small public organizations with historically valuable
films are not equipped to preserve them without expert technical advice
and support.
G. Collectors
The most shadowy part of the U.S. film-holding community is the private
collector. Collectors range from filmmakers with prints of their own
works to film buffs. Although the vast majority hold poorer copies of
films also held in studio or public collections, some hold rare materials,
like the recently discovered tinted, silent Frankenstein (1910)
or the scenes censored from King Kong (1933).86 Some
public- spirited film collectors have donated their personal collections
to archives.87
Studios have long argued that collectors are a major market for pirates
trafficking in unauthorized prints. The industry-funded Motion Picture
Association of America, through its Film Security Office, has investigated
film collecting activities. Several well- publicized law suits in the
1970s discouraged collectors from openly discussing their holdings.88
Studio restoration projects, however, have spurred new interest in
working with private collectors. Seeking lost stereo sound tracks for
some its 1950s films, Warners Bros., for example, put out a call to
borrow stereo release prints in private hands. The studio guaranteed
immunity from legal prosecution to those who lent the prints for copying.89 Several
studio archivists privately admit to obtaining copies from collectors
of titles the studio has lost. At both hearings, there was discussion
among industry representatives of the possibility of an amnesty for
collectors of Hollywood film.90
H. Foreign Archives
Foreign archives also hold valuable preservation source material for
American film. Particularly in the early years of distribution abroad,
foreign archives scooped up American release prints left over from theatrical
runs. Like their American counterparts, they also absorbed private collections.
Foreign archives have been especially reluctant to reveal their exact
holdings of American films, fearing confiscation and possible legal action.
It is known, however, that a large number of lost or damaged American
films exist in copies held abroad, particularly in Eastern Europe.
For the film production of the 1920s, for example, approximately 35%
of complete American features survive only in foreign archives (see
Figure 11). In an international survey of archival holdings of films
listed in the National Film Registry, foreign archives, when guaranteed
anonymity, reported holding some form of preprint material for about
50%. There were three European archives that each had 20 to 25 titles,
roughly equal to numbers found at the Museum of Modern Art or the Library
of Congress.91
6. Federal Funding of Film Preservation
A. Preservation Copying and the Copyright Law
The public funding of film preservation brings up questions of film ownership.
Public archives are limited legally in the ways they may use most films
in their collections. U.S. copyright law distinguishes between ownership
of copyright (or of any of the exclusive rights of copyright) and ownership
of the "material object" in which the work is "embodied."92 For
motion pictures, the original work can be embodied and distributed in
35mm film, 16mm film, videotape, laserdisc and other formats. Thus the
owner of a physical copy, such as a videotape, might watch it privately
in the home but is generally prohibited from duplicating or publicly
exhibiting that copy without consent of the copyright holder. Public
archives hold the physical copies, not the commercial rights, to most
films in their collections.
The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee's discussions
preceding passage of the 1976 Copyright Act took note of the copyright
questions surrounding film preservation work and cited a "fair
use" exemption for archives copying deteriorating films for preservation
purposes.93 Archives,
however, are restricted in certain other uses of the copyright-protected
films they physically preserve. (They may make films available for
on-site study but without permission of the copyright holder or the
transfer of rights, archives generally cannot publicly exhibit copyrighted
films or distribute them for sale. For further discussion of these
access questions, involving copyright, fair use, and "public domain" films,
see Section 8.)
B. Direct Federal Support of Preservation Copying
1. AFI-NEA Film Preservation Grants.
The principal public funding mechanism for film preservation in tax-exempt
institutions is the American Film Institute-National Endowment for the
Arts (AFI-NEA) Film Preservation Program. This grants program is administered
by the National Center for Film and Video Preservation (NCFVP), a unit
within the AFI coordinating film acquisition, preservation and cataloging
among U.S. archives.94 By
terms of an agreement between the AFI and NEA, the NCFVP acts as a "pass-through" organization
for federal grants and deducts the cost of running the program from the
federal allocation.95 Since
1985, the annual federal allocation for the program has been frozen at
$500,000. The NCFVP's Washington Office distributes the grants and takes
about $144,000 yearly to operate the program and acquire films for placement
in American archives.
The AFI-NEA grants subsidize laboratory costs for copying deteriorating
film onto new stock.96 To
qualify for support, applicants must demonstrate the cultural value
and rarity of the films proposed for copying, give evidence of a sound
implementation plan (including laboratory estimates), and match the
federal money with local funds on at least a one-to-one basis. Like
many federal arts grants, the AFI-NEA awards are decided through a
peer review panel.
[Figure 6: AFI-NEA Film Preservation Grant Distribution, 1979-92]97
Program scope and participation. The AFI-NEA program
grew from the AFI's effort to collect and copy nitrate films in the
late 1960s. Since 1979 about 85% of the funds have gone to the largest
nitrate archives: the Museum of Modern Art, the International Museum
of Photography and Film at George Eastman House, and the UCLA Film
and Television Archive, which, taken together, report approximately
97% of the uncopied nitrate in public hands (not counting the Library
of Congress).98
The AFI-NEA grants now fund copying of decaying acetate as well as
nitrate film in a broad range of non-federal institutions. (Major recipients
are shown in Figure 6). Between 1979 and 1992, 37 archives, historical
societies, libraries, and universities received grants; 99 overall 65% of the yearly applicants are
awarded some amount of support. Recipients of smaller awards emphasize
that the value of the federal grants goes far beyond the actual dollars.100 The
grants help validate the cultural interest of the preservation projects
and thus attract matching funds from local donors. From 1979 to 1992,
the program awarded over $5.5 million in grants, stimulating at least
double that dollar amount in film preservation expenditures. (For yearly
totals, see Figure 8.)
What types of films are copied with federal grants? The
AFI-NEA program provides a preservation safety net for lesser-known
American films of cultural and historic value. The overwhelming number
of titles copied with grant funds are silent, factual, avant- garde,
or dance films--film types less likely to receive asset protection
in the industry or to attract preservation donations to public archives.
The program has consistently worked to preserve America's oldest motion
pictures. Over 50% of the titles copied between 1979 and 1992 were
made before 1929, the year that "talkies" became common (see
Figure 7). Without the AFI-NEA program many American silent films would
not survive today.
[Figure 7: What Types of Films Are Preserved with AFI-NEA Grants?101 (Based
on grant records for titles copied, 1979-92)]
The remaining titles are a diverse group. The studio sound features
on nitrate were largely funded in the early years of the program, before
the industry began its major retrospective preservation efforts. Roughly
2% of the total are nitrate sound features by smaller or now-defunct
independent producers. Most of the post-nitrate era films are experimental
or dance works. Since 1979 three specialist archives--the National
Center for Jewish Film, the New York Public Library Dance Collection
and Anthology Film Archives--have received roughly 10% of the total
funding, thus assuring a certain threshold of preservation copying
in these recipients' subject areas. All told over the last 14 years,
the AFI-NEA program has funded copying of over 3,300 films.
The gray area for AFI-NEA grants is nonfiction film. The AFI-NEA
grants are administratively linked with the NEA's Media Arts, a unit
mandated to support works of "artistic excellence" and the
AFI-NEA grants are expected to follow the general principles of the
larger program.102 In
practical terms, this means that the AFI-NEA program is asked to distinguish
between films of "artistic" and purely factual interest.
Working within these guidelines, it has awarded preservation funds
to nonfiction film and actuality footage, some 16% of the total titles
copied.103
Declining funding. Though interest has expanded,
the AFI-NEA preservation funding has declined markedly since 1979,
in both actual and inflation-adjusted dollars (see Figure 8). Federal
support has not kept pace with rising laboratory costs (see Section
6.B.3) or with the growing list of film preservation problems documented
in recent scientific research. In 1980 the program distributed $514,215
in federal grants, an amount sufficient to copy the equivalent of 159
black-and-white silent features (not counting the matching funds provided
by recipients); in 1992 the $355,600 in awards could support copying
for fewer than 26.104 Thus
U.S. film archives have been competing for decreasing federal preservation
money that buys decreasing amounts of preservation copying. In 1979,
the AFI-NEA program funded 82% of the preservation project dollars
requested by applicants; in 1993 it funded only 27%.
2. The Library of Congress and the National Archives Programs.
The federal government also supports preservation copying through the
programs of the two major federal film repositories--the Library of Congress
(LC) and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Each
has an in-house laboratory handling most internal film preservation work105 and
contracts with commercial labs for color film processing or complex soundtrack
restoration.
The Library of Congress established its own preservation lab in 1971,106 with
the funding assistance of the NEA, to manage conversion of its extensive
nitrate holdings to safety film. Now located at Wright-Patterson Air
Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, the conservation laboratory specializes
in black-and-white nitrate film, duplicating over a million feet yearly.
It has customized equipment to handle brittle and shrunken filmstock
and other problems common to deteriorating nitrate.
[Figure 8: AFI-NEA and LC Funding for Film Preservation Copying,
1979-92]107
By the mid-1980s the National Archives and Records Administration
had copied all federally held nitrate titles, outside of those in the
LC.108 Its
laboratory work now involves safety film and videotape. The NARA actively
promotes preventive measures to slow film deterioration; it has used
polyester-base film and low-fade color stock for copying projects and
encourages federal agencies to place government-made films under archival
conditions soon after production.
Like the AFI-NEA grants, the LC funds for film preservation copying
have markedly declined from their 1980 level. When adjusted for inflation
(see Figure 8), the LC 1992 film copying allocation109 was
less than half of the 1980 amount, although the size of its film collection
has grown by some 100,000 reels. Putting aside the NARA expenditures
for film preservation copying, which are difficult to isolate, 110 the
total federal funding for film preservation through the AFI-NEA and
the Library of Congress was $796,080 in FY 1992.
3. The Role of Commercial Laboratories
With the exception of LC and NARA, U.S. public and nonprofit archives
contract with commercial laboratories for most preservation copying and
restoration. Since the early 1970s a handful of commercial firms have
sprung up that specialize in this work.111 As
experts testified, film preservation differs substantially from routine
processing and printing. Most medium and large-sized commercial motion
picture labs make their profit from the mass production of new theatrical
release prints. Specialist preservation labs instead work on a much smaller
scale and concentrate on preprint preparation. Deteriorating film can
pose many types of technical problems, and specialist labs adjust their
approach to suit the job at hand. Thus, because of the scale and degree
of customization, film preservation is more like a craft than a mass
production operation. 112 In view of the concerns voiced by archival users--the
cost of preservation work, the capacity of preservation laboratories,
and lack of facilities for non-standard gauge film--it is worth examining
the vital role of these small business operations in national film preservation
efforts.
While serving both public and industry clients, commercial preservation
laboratories receive most of their work from the private sector. All
specialist labs responding to this study reported that 40% or less
of their business came from public and nonprofit archives. Generally
preservation labs employ fewer than 20 technicians. To fully train
an employee for film preservation work, one lab estimates, requires
two years.
Preservation laboratory work is priced by the labor and time required
for the task. The cost for even so seemingly standard a product as
a black-and-white duplicate silent-film negative varies with the condition
of the deteriorating film and the preparation work required. With more
complex reconstructions--sound, color, widescreen formats--costs increase.
Costs therefore vary within a range and are difficult to reduce to
a single price-per-foot measurement.
That said, average film preservation copying costs have indeed increased
over the last decade. Based on figures supplied by the UCLA Film and
Television Archive, the average cost for copying a 90-minute black-and-white
silent film has more than doubled over the last 12 years, even after
adjusting for inflation (see Figure 9). Preservation of sound film
or of two- or three-strip Technicolor is more expensive, due to the
greater amount of material examined and copied.113 With
the declining level of federal funding, these cost increases are more
difficult to absorb for public archives than for industry clients.
To put this in terms of the shrinking federal preservation dollars,
in 1980 the UCLA AFI-NEA preservation grant of $107,349 would have
funded the copying of 33 deteriorating black-and-white silent films;
in 1992 its $101,000 grant could only preserve 7.
[Figure 9: Cost of Preserving a Black-and-White Silent Feature (Based
on UCLA figures for a 90-minute 35mm film, copied from a print)]114,115
Specialist labs argue that their facilities are now operating below
peak capacity and could better serve public and nonprofit clients if
the flow of preservation copying work were regularized. To justify
investment in customized equipment or training additional staff, labs
have to be confident of receiving a certain threshold of work over
time.116 Publicly
funded projects are now a less reliable source of revenue than commercial
work. The very nature of the AFI-NEA grant program--its annual cycle
and project-by-project approach--discourages multi-year commitment
to broad initiatives with large start-up costs.117
C. Support of Preservation-Related Activities
In addition to funding ongoing film copying programs, federal money supports
other preservation-related efforts on a project-by-project basis.
AFI Catalog. The AFI Catalog of Motion Pictures
Produced in the United States, an authoritative description and index,
has over the years received research grants from the National Endowment
for the Humanities and the NEA. The project has completed volumes on
the features of the Teens, the 1920s, 1930s and 1960s, and begun research
on the earliest U.S. films (1893-1910) and the features of the 1940s.
It hopes to extend coverage eventually to American shorts and newsreels.
The AFI Catalog has many applications. For scholars of film and American
culture, the Catalog is a basic reference book and will probably become
even more accessible when issued on CD-Rom, as is currently under discussion.
For film archivists, the Catalog defines the baseline for U.S. film
production. It gives accurate information for identifying films acquired
without titles or credits, and verifies the length, technical processes
and versions of features as they were originally released. By recording
studio and independent production decade-by-decade, the Catalog provides
a statistical population against which film survival rates can be reliably
calculated.
National Moving Image Database. A project less
visible to scholars is the National Moving Image Database (NAMID),
launched in 1984 as means for sharing information on archival film
holdings. NAMID is conceived as a family of databases linking public/nonprofit
archives and studio collections through a common communication format;
the goal is to facilitate film preservation, scholarly research, and
shared cataloging. Between 1984 and 1993, the project received $1,370,000
in NEA support.118
NAMID currently operates as a data-purchase program. NAMID awards
selected tax- exempt archives "conversion funds" to organize
and automate their film catalogs and submit data to the National Center
for Film and Video Preservation in Los Angeles.119 The
program has been a major vehicle for introducing automated systems
to smaller archives. As of April 1993, it had collected data from 21
archives120 and
amassed a database of 165,000 records representing some 100,000 feature,
short, video and avant- garde titles.121
NAMID, however, has failed to become a regularly consulted preservation
tool among U.S. archivists. Little of the database is available for
direct, dial-in consultation. Access protocol complexities and the
delays in updating holdings information have discouraged use.122 To
find out if specific titles have been copied, most archivists still
prefer calling colleagues or requesting a search of the AFI-NEA grants
database, an in-house tool developed for tracking the distribution
of grants and AFI Collection materials.123
National Film Registry. The National Film Registry
was created by Congress in 1988 to single out American films of particular
cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance. Films listed in the
Registry are collected and preserved by the Library of Congress in
their original release version. Each year nominations to the Film Registry
are solicited from the public, and 25 selections are added by the Librarian
of Congress, in consultation with the National Film Preservation Board
(NFPB), an eighteen-member advisory group of film industry, academic
and archival representatives. The National Film Registry now numbers
100 titles. While some respondents fault the Registry for overrepresenting
studio-produced Hollywood features,124 the
Registry has moved toward greater coverage of independent and documentary
film.
The renewal of the National Film Preservation Act in 1992 reauthorized
the activities of the NFPB for four more years and expanded the role
of the Librarian of Congress and the National Film Preservation Board
in preservation planning.125 The
1992 law mandated this study and a national film preservation program,
both to be submitted to the appropriate Congressional committees. Congress
authorizes $250,000 yearly for the National Film Preservation Board
activities. In 1992 the funds supported the cost of National Film Preservation
Board meetings, the two hearings, preparation of this study, and acquisition
and preservation of several independent films listed on the National
Registry.
Other federal support. Other grantmaking agencies
play a lesser role in film preservation. The National Historical Publications
and Records Commission (NHPRC), a statutory body affiliated with the
National Archives and Records Administration, funds efforts to organize,
describe and preserve collections of paper and non-textual records
of documentary importance for American history. To date, among tax-exempt
moving image archives, NHPRC has funded largely television newsfilm
projects, although it has been open to proposals involving other types
of unpublished documentary footage.126 Motion
picture collections within large research libraries are eligible for
support through the "strengthening Research Library Resources
Program" (Higher Education Act, Title II-C). Administered by the
Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement,
this effort funds the cataloging and preservation of publicly accessible
collections; relatively few film-related applications are received.127
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), a long-time supporter
of the AFI Catalog, has no program specifically designed for film archives.
While traditionally deferring to the NEA in funding the physical preservation
of motion pictures, the NEH Division of Preservation and Access has,
as of June 1993, a pending grant for a newsreel preservation project,
its first for motion picture preservation in nearly a decade.
Summary. To sum up, federal funds, through the
in-house programs of the Library of Congress and the National Archives
and more recently the AFI-NEA grants, have sustained film preservation
copying for several decades, although support has decreased by half
in the last fourteen years. The NEA, NHPRC and Department of Education
also fund, on a more occasional basis, projects to collect and organize
motion pictures and film information in institutions that meet application
criteria. What is missing from this national framework is funding for
improving film storage conditions128 and
for the preservation copying of documentaries and newsreels produced
and circulated outside of the federal government.
7. Foundations Funding Film Preservation
As the level of AFI-NEA grants has declined and laboratory costs increased,
corporate and private foundations have helped bridge the gap in funding
preservation in public and nonprofit archives.129 Film
projects are usually supported through foundations' general cultural
or community outreach programs. A small number of foundations, however,
have made film preservation a primary concern.
Probably the foundation most actively supporting American film preservation
has been the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Between 1981 and
1992, the Packard Foundation distributed over $2 million for film copying,
exhibition, and research to the National Center for Film and Video
Preservation, the Library of Congress, the Pacific Film Archive, and
the UCLA Film and Television Archive. The Packard Foundation has been
a major funder of the AFI Catalog and the nitrate conversion of newsreels
and feature films of the 1930s. It is particularly concerned with the
quality of film access and has supported the striking of new 35mm prints
so that the public can experience films as they were originally intended
to be seen.130
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's principal film
interests are independent filmmaking and public affairs documentaries.
The MacArthur grants to media centers, $7 million from 1987-1991, support
a variety of local access, exhibition and preservation activities as
well as production facilities for independent filmmakers and videomakers.
The foundation has also funded public screening programs; in 1991,
for example, UCLA received a MacArthur grant to make prints of films
by Mexican directors for exhibition in the U.S. and Mexico.131
Several foundations developed from the estates of filmmakers are
involved in film preservation. The Louis B. Mayer Foundation is funding
a demonstration project to create new Technicolor prints from original
three-strip Technicolor negatives at the Beijing Film and Video facilities.132 Both
the Andy Warhol and the Mary Pickford Foundations have underwritten
preservation efforts in their respective areas of interest-- the avant-garde
and the Hollywood film.
The Film Foundation, begun in 1990 by Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen,
Francis Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Sydney Pollack, Robert
Redford, and Steven Spielberg, presents a very different profile. The
Film Foundation is, in a sense, a grassroots organization started by
successful filmmakers to increase preservation awareness within the
industry and cooperation with public archives. Scorsese has lobbied
studios to protect older films in their libraries and persistently
pushed to improve the quality of preservation laboratory work.
The Film Foundation has gone directly to the public to convey the
urgency of current preservation problems. This March it cosponsored
with the American Movie Classics (AMC) cable network a three-day festival
of film preservation. The AMC festival broadcast features, shorts,
and nonfiction films restored by the public archives as well as short
documentaries and celebrity interviews on film preservation, and solicited
preservation donations from the audience by means of an 800-number.133
8. Public Access
Increasingly, preservation is understood to be incomplete without access
to the preserved film.134 Laudable
as a principle, it raises many questions.
"Access"--as it is used in the hearings,
submissions, and elsewhere--is a catch-all term for a wide variety
of film uses, including study, public exhibition, distribution, and
footage licensing. Some of these uses are broadly educational, others
clearly commercial. A correspondingly wide array of public constituencies
seek access to preserved films, including scholars, classroom viewers,
telejournalists, filmmakers, cable operators, video distributors, filmgoers
and video renters. Access means different things to each of these groups.
Access to film also requires either on-site viewing or a method of
off-site delivery, and formats for both are also varied, chiefly 35mm
prints, 16mm prints, videotape, videodisc, and electronic transmission.
Among the institutions and businesses that hold film, the policies
regarding access are as multiple as the possible combinations of uses,
users, and formats suggest. For the major studios and other rights
holders, access is a key commercial decision. The Walt Disney Studio's
longstanding policy of regular seven-year theatrical re-releases of
its animated features is only the best known example of the way that
cycles of access and access-denial can prolong a title's commercial
life. A number of filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, John Wayne,
and John Cassavetes (and their estates), turned the withholding of
access into a tool for creating scarcity and audience anticipation
that probably adds to commercial value. No doubt the public's right
to view a privately owned cultural heritage needs to be factored in
here, but the commercial principle is fairly clear.
Access and the public archives. Where the question
of access is currently most contentious is in regard to films held
by public archives. For many of those seeking copies of films, archivists
can look as if they are perversely saving films for a posterity that
never quite arrives.135 The
frustration is understandable, but it needs also to be noted that archivists
are working under certain constraints, both legal and practical.
Access to a great many films held in public archives is restricted
legally in two ways: through copyright and through contracts. As mentioned
at the opening of Section 6, U.S. copyright law distinguishes between "ownership" and
the "material object" in which that ownership is embodied.
For film titles under copyright protection, public archives typically
hold only the material objects--the film copies--which "fair use" exceptions
allow archives to make available for on-site educational study and
to duplicate for preservation purposes.136 Other
rights to reproduce, distribute, and publicly exhibit the film are
generally retained by the copyright owner.
Films without copyright protection, and thus available for use without
licensing, are usually labeled "public domain," a sometimes
confusing term because of its application to several groups of films.
The term deserves a brief digression because of its frequent use in
the submissions and testimony.
Public domain. Titles most clearly in the public
domain are those created and distributed over 75 years ago--the greatest
length for which copyright is generally allowed. By the end of 1993,
therefore, films distributed before 1919 will have fallen into public
domain. (There are, however, exceptions even to this rule, notably
for so-called "unpublished" films.)137 Other
more recent films are also labeled "public domain," and for
them the determination of copyright status can become extremely complicated.
Under the 1909 Copyright Act, registered works could enjoy two terms
of protection, a 28-year first term and, if renewed at the end of that
term, a second 28-year term. In the 1960s Congress made various extensions
for works already in their renewal term, eventually adding 19 years,
thus bringing the total potential protection to 75 years. However,
if an owner neglected to submit a renewal at the end of that first
term, the film fell into public domain. Current law has simplified
this procedure so that, in effect, films registered after 1963 have
a single 75-year term.138
What further muddies public domain is the copyright status of "underlying
works," such as a film's literary source or music. Even if the
film itself lacks copyright protection, these underlying works may
have owners different from the film's owner and who may possess some
control over it. The current legal battle over two videotape versions
of John Wayne's 1963 film McLintock! suggests the complexity
of public domain issues. Although copyright for the film itself lapsed,
several copyrights involving the music score were renewed and the dispute
centers over those rights.139 Even
the most famous example of a film long presumed to be in the public
domain, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946) whose copyright
expired in 1974, is now claimed to be controlled by rights holders
of the original short story and soundtrack music.140 Public
archives have been reluctant to insert themselves into these legal
disputes by releasing films less than 75 years old, especially as archives
would be liable for copyright infringement should they exceed the narrow
fair use exceptions.141
In addition, the use of films at public archives is often governed
by legally binding instruments of gift or deposit. In certain rare
cases, these contracts give the archives the copyright ownership as
well as the physical material (as with the Hearst Metrotone News collection
at the UCLA Film and Television Archive). More often, the contracts
restrict the use of both the donated or deposited material and of the
preservation copies made from that material, even after the expiration
of copyright. (The contentious situation that has resulted from such
contracts is discussed more fully in Section 9.)
Balancing preservation and access. Beyond the legal
issues, public archives labor under practical constraints that also
hinder access. As is evident from the earlier discussion of funding,
archives are making do with considerably fewer preservation resources
than a decade ago, and recent calls for greater access have coincided
with the acknowledgement of such additional problems as color fading
and acetate-base degradation that have stretched basic nitrate-copying
and storage resources even thinner. Providing greater access to film
titles in public archives often requires not simply the diversion of
employees but the more difficult decision to carry copying to the viewable "reference
print" stage, a perhaps unjustifiable trade-off when it comes
at the cost of preprint preservation for nitrate in danger of being
lost forever.142
Access is thus less a matter of opening the vault doors than of balancing
responsibilities. In physical terms, access may be the opposite of
preservation. But archivists seek a balance. As Robert Rosen, Director
of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, puts it in his submission, "Preservation
without access is dead storage; access without preservation is destructively
short-sighted." Stephen Gong, General Manager of the Pacific Film
Archive, speaks of "the interconnectedness of collection, preservation,
access, exhibition and study of film."143
Film access today. It is difficult to generalize
about the current state of film access because of that extreme variety
of film uses, users, formats, and institutions. A decade and a half
into the "home video era," it is already hard to recall just
how greatly access to Hollywood features has improved--at least on
videotape and disc. The profusion of commercially available videos
has brought evolutions, too, in the kinds of access asked of public
archives; there are fewer requests for individual screenings of mainstream
films but more requests for archives themselves to make their public
domain titles available for video release. The National Archives and
Records Administration estimates that 70-80% of its researchers are
seeking footage or conducting background research for new productions.144 The
increased sophistication of film scholarship has brought greater published
use of and requests for "frame enlargements"--still photographs
made directly from film prints--an unresolved issue that touches on
both legal and physical constraints.145
Access in museums and local history organizations is often through
exhibitions that incorporate video and interactive displays.146 16mm
remains a vital format among independent filmmakers and distribution
cooperatives, but 16mm prints of feature films are becoming more difficult
to find for classroom rental, as studios and commercial distributors
abandon the format; currently unavailable are key works of American
film directed by Samuel Fuller, Alfred Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk and
many others. Theatrical screenings of 35mm prints of older titles in
repertory houses is a spotty proposition, with certain studios making
their library titles actively available (e.g., MGM, Paramount, Turner),
and others only rarely (e.g., Disney, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal).147 Public
archives are often pressed to fill the gaps in such requests for 35mm
prints but generally do so only for established non-profit theatrical
venues and film festivals. Users often must pay both fees to the copyright
holders and shipping costs to the archives.148
Each of the five largest public archives maintains a screening program
in their on-site theaters. (See Figure 5 for the number of screenings
in FY 1992). For such screenings of the archives' own physical holdings,
the major-studio copyright owners usually forego their fees, through
contract agreements and case-by-case permissions. For titles to which
public archives do hold rights or which are in the public domain, there
is that potential for developing revenue-generating ventures mentioned
earlier.
Generally speaking, access programs in the public archives have been
conceived more as public services than revenue sources. The Museum
of Modern Art's Circulating Film Library (the pioneer rental program
for educational institutions) of 1100 titles, primarily in 16mm, attempts
to operate on a break-even budget and pays royalties (generally 50%
of rental) to copyright holders.149 The
UCLA Film and Television Archive does earn funds from licensing its
Hearst Metrotone News collection. The George Eastman House distributes
about 30 titles through MoMA's Circulating Film Library and has begun
to distribute other restored titles on videodisc (through the Lumivision
company); thus far, the seven videodiscs released have not been a significant
source of income (although $20,000 was generated by the Josephine Baker
film, Princess Tam-Tam, mentioned earlier). The first six
videotapes in the "Library of Congress Video Collection," due
for public release in December, will make available six early silent
features and 29 silent shorts from the Library of Congress preservation
program. Largely unexplored has been educational access through newer
electronic and computer technologies.150
Access to cataloged information about titles held in the public archives
and the private studios also generally remains an unfulfilled potential,
as discussed earlier in connection with the National Moving Image Database.
Currently among the largest public archives, UCLA and the Library of
Congress have the most accessible databases. UCLA's is available nationally
by computer modem with payment of a fee.151 The main database of the Library of Congress' holdings
(LOCIS) became nationally available without charge through the Internet
in 1993, although this database currently includes only about a third
of the Library's total film holdings.152 Representatives
of each of the Hollywood studios participating in the hearings expressed
a willingness, if in general terms, to make information about their
holdings more widely accessible.153
9. Who Benefits from Publicly Funded Film Preservation?
Public benefits. Expenditure of tax dollars on film
preservation implies a wide public benefit from the activity. And indeed
those benefits are significant, because public funding assures that at
least a portion of what is saved as collective visual memory is not purely
determined by commercial markets. Some of this publicly preserved material
is disseminated second hand, so to speak, especially through writing
and scholarship about film art. Now that living recollection of early
film is rare, archives play an even more central role in making this
scholarship possible, and in expanding the range of topics available
for informed discussion at the 550-some U.S. colleges and universities
that now teach film as art and culture.154 Figure
5 details, for public and nonprofit archive respondents, the numbers
of study visits, film loans and on-site screenings that make films directly
available to the public. Publicly preserved actuality footage is also
incorporated into new documentary productions, history at its most immediately
compelling. With traditional publishing and electronic retrieval of visual
images becoming more interlinked--as in the Library of Congress's "American
Memory" interactive videodisc project--the educational and informational
value of this public preservation will only expand.
Benefits to rights holders. While the public benefits
of film preservation are relatively obvious, less frequently discussed
are the private benefits--advantages enjoyed by the rights owners of
films maintained and preserved by the public and nonprofit archives.
These benefits are part of the full preservation cost/benefit equation.
Before describing these benefits, it is helpful to return once again
to the legal context under which studios place their films in archives.
Studios either give physical copies of films to public archives outright
or place them on long-term deposit. In either case, the studios generally
retain the rights to their titles and negotiate the terms for archival
use. A major portion of the Hollywood preprint collections at the four
large nitrate archives are on long-term deposit; that is, the physical
copies are still owned by their studios. While the deposit agreements
differ from case to case, typically they allow the archive to show
films to individual scholars, screen them for limited in-house exhibition,
and, most importantly, make preservation copies for the archive's own
collections. Loans to film festivals and similar events generally require
the permission of the copyright holder. In return, the archive stores
the material and allows depositors access to the original nitrate elements
and, generally, one-time use of any new preservation masters made by
the archive. In most cases, the studio contracts carry prohibitions
against commercial use that do not expire when the term of copyright
ends.
Gift agreements generally carry similar provisions. With gifts, however,
the ownership of the physical property (although usually not the rights)
passes to the tax-exempt archive, thus opening up the possibility for
the donor to claim a charitable contribution for tax purposes. Transamerica
Corp. v. United States, an appeals court decision noted in some
submissions, explores the balance of private/public benefits from such
arrangements.155 In
1969 United Artists donated to the Library of Congress the earliest
surviving preprint material for 3000 Warner Bros. and Monogram films.
Under the instrument of gift, the donor retained full commercial exploitation
rights as well as the power to control access to the collection, aside
from preservation and on-site scholarly use, even after the copyrights
expired. The court found that the Transamerica (which at the time owned
United Artists) received "substantial benefit" from its transfer
and disallowed the charitable contribution.156
What are the private benefits of public film preservation? For donors
or depositors of nitrate materials, a key benefit is storage.157 To
appreciate the full value of this benefit requires some historical
perspective. Studios transferring films before the late 1970s generally
presumed their libraries had exhausted most of their commercial life.
Public institutions were a safety net, a means of warehousing the earliest
generation preprint without having to pay for its upkeep. Archives
recognized that culturally significant nitrate films might be lost
to the public if they did not provide this service. Now, of course,
the market has changed, and studios value their preprint differently,
but past agreements are still in force.
The public archives pick up the costs of storing and caring for the
nitrate preprint materials to which the studios have ongoing access.
Archives without their own nitrate vaults, such as UCLA, pay for commercial
storage in specially designed, explosion- proof vaults. The cost of
nitrate storage ranges from about $120 to $240 per month for 1 million
feet of film (one thousand 1000-foot reels), depending on the location
of the facility, features of the vault, services offered by the vendor,
and total quantity of film stored. At these 1993 rates, the combined
studio preprint nitrate currently housed by the Library of Congress,
for example, would cost the equivalent of $138,096 to $276,192 yearly
to keep in a commercial vault, not counting retrieval fees and other
service costs. 158 Figure 10 lists, by archive, the amount of the
nitrate preprint footage for which studios still maintain rights. For
this material, the yearly storage costs at average 1993 commercial
rates would total $275,730.
[Figure 10: Privately Controlled Nitrate Preprint at Public Archives:
How Much Would It Cost in 1993 To Store This Material Commercially?]159
In the 1990s the terms of these arrangements are being rethought.
In conjunction with its recent deposit agreement with the Library of
Congress, Disney is paying the salary of the technician who inspects
and services Disney preprint elements at the LC nitrate facilities
in Ohio. Similarly Sony has begun contributing to the upkeep of the
Columbia nitrate collection, donated to LC in the 1970s through the
American Film Institute, by paying for two support staff.
The restoration work done by archives contributes to another private
benefit. As the testimony suggests, restoration work is a costly, labor-intensive
activity involving careful comparisons of many generations of film
materials to identify the best surviving source for copying. Several
well-known film restorers work at public or nonprofit archives; their
reconstruction of films physically held by their archives can increase
the films' commercial value. Furthermore, the FIAF-member archives,
through contacts with foreign archives, are able to tap sources of
preservation material unavailable to the studios. The recent restoration
of the Spanish-language Dracula (1930) suggests the importance
of such contacts in restoring older titles. Dracula, shot with a Spanish-
speaking cast on the Universal backlot at the same time as the better-known
Tod Browning/Bela Lugosi version, was rumored to include sensational
lost scenes that would not have passed the U.S. censor. Undertaking
its restoration, Universal found a nearly complete version at the Library
of Congress, and, with the assistance of UCLA, located the missing
reel at a FIAF-member archive in Havana, Cuba.160 The
restored Spanish language Dracula has enjoyed specialized re-release.
A point of concern among film preservationists is that the archival
contribution to restoration projects is not routinely credited when
rights holders re-distribute the titles. Anthony Slide, in his submission,161 singles
out two videotape releases, MacBeth (1948) and Hell's
Angels (1930), which incorporate public restoration work without
acknowledgement. This hides from the film-viewing public the role of
public archives in film preservation.
Aside from the storage and restoration work, studios may also collect
royalty fees when the publicly minted prints are lent and exhibited
at film festivals. Bruce Goldstein, Director of Repertory Programming
at Film Forum, one the nation's oldest repertory film theaters, suspects
that rights holders net relatively little from the exhibition of these
prints. However, the screenings can increase public interest and have
the effect of boosting commercial videotape and laserdisc sales of
the exhibited film and of titles by the same director or with the same
stars.162 Like
studio re-releases, public screenings of archival prints can promote
ancillary market activity.163
10. Redefining Preservation
How are preservation success and progress measurable? It is not such
an easy question. The temptation is to measure the state of film preservation
in terms of one statistic: "feet of nitrate remaining to be converted
to safety film." Its corollary is "cost to convert this nitrate." Although
it is possible to calculate such figures--as is done two paragraphs below--one
wants to be wary of them for reasons both simple and fundamental.
The "uncopied nitrate" statistic ideally includes only
the best surviving material--worthy of the labor and expense of copying.
As it is currently difficult to disentangle primary material from duplicate
or secondary footage, both within individual collections and among
different collections, the figure can be only a very rough estimate
at best. Too, costs for conversion from nitrate to safety are extremely
variable (with a reasonable range for quality black-and-white work
running from approximately $1.50 to $3.50 per nitrate foot), depending
primarily on the physical state and generation of the nitrate.164 Also,
the footage of safety film produced does not correlate with footage
of nitrate copied.165
Assuming, however, that one could calculate a reliable footage figure
for unique uncopied nitrate and meaningfully estimate costs for its
copying (a ballpark estimate might be 97 million feet, costing perhaps
$243 million to copy adequately),166 the
question then becomes: What does that estimate tell us? For "uncopied
nitrate" to be the key statistic, one must first assume that,
once copied, nitrate is no longer a preservation concern. It would
be wonderful if that were so. But the hearings, submissions, and interviews
suggest otherwise, primarily because of the existence of old and unsatisfactory
copying: "preservation" that needs to be redone to approach
today's quality standards.
To some degree, recognition of the need to recopy is a measure of
increasing technical sophistication. Laboratory equipment and techniques
have improved, and knowledge about aging nitrate has increased. Too,
standards which slipped by in an era when 16mm was the major television
and educational format no longer apply.167 But
it also must be admitted that much earlier preservation copying was
poorly done, incompetent or slipshod. One needn't go so far as William
K. Everson, when he suggested back in 1978 that "lab work today
is, for the most part, of an order that should justify a war crimes
tribunal,"168 to
admit that too large a portion of previous work has been substandard.
Such work exists in copying done both in public archives and for
the major studios. Most of the Library of Congress's preservation copying
from the late 1950s to the early 1970s was by optical reduction onto
16mm through the Department of Agriculture, and LC has found other
early 35mm copying unsatisfactory by contemporary standards (including
a number of Frank Capra features now being redone). An ongoing project
(initially in collaboration with UCLA) to recopy the pre-1913 "paper
prints" onto 35mm arose from widespread dissatisfaction with image
loss in the earlier 16mm reduction preservation. The Museum of Modern
Art recently recopied various Douglas Fairbanks and Buster Keaton silents
whose initial preservation now also appears inadequate. Among the studios,
it is ironically those that had the greatest foresight about the importance
of preservation (such as Disney and the old MGM, now Turner) that found
their first pass at preservation needing to be redone.
The tragedy--which applies again to examples in both the private
and public sectors--is that a good portion of the original nitrate
has deteriorated or been discarded before new, satisfactory safety
copies could be made. The point here is not so much to cast blame for
the errors of the past. There is enough of that to go around. Rather,
what is important is that this body of unsatisfactory preservation,
even if impossible to measure, be factored into assessment of the current
state of preservation and into any plan for future quality control.169 An
exclusive stress on "uncopied nitrate footage" ignores this
unfortunate fact, widely whispered if not widely discussed. Indeed,
institutions first copy the material that they think is most important.
Thus the most valued film titles have usually had the earliest preservation
copying and may be most in need of reinspection and recopying.
Nitrate copying remains central to American film preservation, if
only because nitrate is the oldest film stock. At current public funding
levels, unique nitrate in archives is already rotting away. But finally
the problem with quantifying film preservation progress exclusively
in terms of uncopied nitrate is not so much that footage or conversion-cost
statistics are unreliable but that they distort the very nature of
the preservation problem. The hearing participants and respondents
generally agreed that preservation is an ongoing task that must be
reinterpreted in a wider framework, involving storage and access as
well as copying.
Progress. Although progress is difficult to quantify,
there are a several successes and reasons for hope that shine out of
the current preservation crisis. The most significant positive change
in the last decade is the almost complete realignment in the industry's
attitude toward the value of films in studio libraries, and thus of
their worth for preservation. This change is of course a function of
shifting revenues since the start of the "home video era," but
it has resulted in marked preservation improvements. In 1980 the following
economic logic (reported in Boxoffice), about making separations
for a color feature, seemed inarguable: "Just how many films are
going to be worth $40,000 to a studio?," Myron Meisel of Mel Simon
Productions asks frankly. "Alright, they are going to do it on Gone
with the Wind or another picture of that dimension. But a studio
executive who inherits 600 films in the vault, for example, won't spend
that kind of money."170
This logic is not yet dead, but in 1980--as industry executives admit
off the record--it was the rare studio that took adequate care of its
surviving library; today, it is the rare company that fails to protect
it, at least in overall terms, as the various programs to create separations
for older color titles and the new storage facilities attest. Indeed,
one measure of preservation progress may be the number of organizations
that maintain ongoing archival preservation programs. True, preservation
information on individual titles is not publicly available, and studios
still have a significant number of unprotected titles (Sony Pictures,
for instance, estimates that it still must convert to safety film about
50% of its 840 Columbia nitrate titles).171
One manifestation of the industry's attitude today are several partnerships
with public archives--possible models for the future--that begin to
answer some widely expressed concerns about a cultural heritage privately
held. Most promising may be Sony Pictures' "Film and Tape Preservation
Committee" which includes representatives from four archives (the
George Eastman House, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern
Art, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive) and which has implemented
a project to prioritize and restore Columbia Pictures titles.172 In
a departure from previous archival copying of Hollywood features, Sony
has paid the costs for laboratory work, generally including two sets
of preprint preservation elements, one retained at the public archives,
one at Sony. This cooperative project has shared skills held by the
public archives and has allowed them to work not simply with nitrate-era
material (as with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington [1939] at LC)
but to venture also into safety-era black-and- white preservation (as
with On the Waterfront [1954] at MoMA) and safety-era color
(as with The Guns of Navarone [1961] at UCLA).
Universal Studios has a similar program with UCLA, facilitated by
the Film Foundation, whose prominent filmmaker members have become
another link between archives and studios. UCLA has also begun working
with Sony/Columbia in evaluating the company's preservation holdings
or best remaining material on various titles--a rare and promising
instance of how the public interest can be represented in the preservation
of privately held material of cultural value. Likewise promising is
the Disney and Sony funding of Library of Congress staff positions
to service their deposited and donated nitrate. Another innovative
initiative, unusual in being directed at restoring independent film,
is the collaboration among the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Whitney
Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in the preservation and
non-theatrical distribution of Warhol's films.173
The best results--which are still too rare--seem to arise from what
Robert Rosen has cited as the "collaborative partnership for preservation...including
the studios, public film archives, private consultants, specialized
laboratories, government funding agencies, individual donors and support
groups such as Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation."174 Into
this mix, too, come private collectors and foreign archives, as is
evident from several international restoration projects, such as Ben-Hur (1925),
in which censored footage came from a collector in West Germany and
lost two-color Technicolor footage from the Czechoslovak Film Archive;
or the part-talking epic Noah's Ark (1928), where footage
for the UCLA restoration came from the Turner Entertainment Company,
the Library of Congress and the Cinèmathéque Française,
sound from Vitaphone discs found at Warner Bros., and supplemental
funding from American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) arranged through
the Museum of Modern Art.175 The
public benefits are obvious to anyone who views these restored works;
private benefits include the creation of much improved products (in
both these cases owned by the Turner Entertainment Company).
Such successes bridge the boundaries of public and private institutions.
In light of their funding reductions, the major success of public archives
may be their continued copying onto safety film of the most endangered
nitrate titles, if at a rate that bodes badly for the future. The number
of titles "rescued" in this sense does continue to grow.
Some archives have drawn attention to this work with public festivals,
notably UCLA's annual Festival of Preservation (in its fifth year)
and Anthology Film Archives' annual Film Preservation Week and Dinner
(in its second year).
Also being rescued are "lost," generally silent-era titles
that survive only in foreign archive members of the International Federation
of Film Archives (FIAF), repatriated into U.S. archives through the
critical and minimally funded efforts of the Washington, D.C., office
of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation (NCFVP). For
certain years (e.g., 1918 and 1923) the number of additional surviving
American features that still exist only in foreign archives (often
with no preservation back-up) almost matches the number that survive
in this country. Figure 11 compares these percentages for silent features
of 1919-28.
Since 1987, the NCFVP has negotiated and coordinated the repatriation
of 745,000 feet of nitrate, representing 460 American shorts and features.
Among the features were Maurice Tourneur's Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915;
recovered from Australia), the Clara Bow feature Capital Punishment (1925;
from the Netherlands), and the earliest surviving feature directed
by an African American, Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates (1919;
from Spain).176 The
opening up of former Eastern Bloc countries provides opportunities
in this regard but also urgency, because worsening economic conditions
are forcing their FIAF archives to scale back to only the most pressing
activities--which does not generally include copying American film.
Encouraging too is the formalization of cooperation among U.S. public
and private archivists (of both film and video) through the two-year-old
Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) which meets yearly and
publishes a bi-monthly newsletter to exchange information and expertise
about preservation.177
Other changes of attitude, discussed above, might be counted as progress.
Among these, the most important are (1) the shift away from quantity
measurements toward quality standards in archival laboratory work (and
a corollary interest in saving usable nitrate after copying), (2) the
increasing understanding of the importance of storage conditions in
preservation, and (3) the growing recognition of the value of film
types beyond the Hollywood fiction feature and of smaller-scale archives
to represent them. If public- sector archivists are understandably
reluctant to classify such changes as "successes," that is
because each of them brings new problems.
[Figure 11: American Feature Films (1919-28) in U.S. and Foreign
Archives (Based on working lists of FIAF-member holdings)]178
11. Toward a National Program
One hundred years after Edison's experiments with kinetoscopes, film
has evolved far beyond its initial role as peepshow entertainment. As
the over 100 submissions to this study have made clear, motion pictures
have become popular memory, art form, historical document, market commodity,
anthropological record, political force and medium for disseminating
American culture around the world. A narrow "entertainment" definition
of film no longer matches the diverse concerns of scholars, students,
advocacy groups, social planners, ethnic communities, and the broader
American society. To best serve the public interest, a national program
must recognize the evolving applications for American film as well as
current needs of users, copyright holders, and the many types of institutions
throughout the United States that have motion pictures of cultural and
historic significance. Further complicating the problem is that film,
far more fragile than stone monuments or even sixteenth-century printed
books, decays within a few years of its making, if it is not properly
stored. Thus any action to save older films for future generations has
to be taken soon, if it is to be taken at all.
Given the enormity and urgency of the task, the policy challenge
is not just figuring out how to pay for more laboratory copying of
deteriorating films but also addressing the changing context of film
preservation. The current level of support--a patchwork of federal
money, foundation grants, and donations--only chips away at the problem.
Present public programs, developed over a decade ago, have not been
rethought in terms of the expanding constituency for film.
There is no federal program, for example, working to enrich education
by improving the circulation of publicly preserved films for instruction
and scholarship. Similarly, there is no national framework for improving
film storage, the factor shown by recent scientific research to be
most critical in insuring the long-term life of film. Encouraging filmmakers
to take care of their own works, a preventive measure that would stave
off future preservation problems, fits nowhere in the current picture,
even in the federal grants to filmmakers. Current laws provide little
incentive for forging public-private partnerships to restore valued
films, or indeed for doing film preservation at all.
Recent asset protection efforts by the industry suggest the substantial
investment required to prolong film survival. But it also raises questions
of the duplication of effort among public and studio archives and the
redirection of public priorities now that the industry sees value in
preserving its own works. What should be done about films--the "orphans" singled
out in testimony--that are not now benefiting from such programs? The
orphans now left to chance include news footage, documentaries, independent
features, and avant-garde films. Existing public mechanisms are not
adequately capturing or preserving these materials, and it is unclear,
at this point, that commercial forces will ever fuel their preservation.
In 1991, the French government recognized the public responsibility
to preserve film culture and announced a $160 million package to restore
all surviving French nitrate films.179 As
Frederick Wiseman warns, the current U.S. efforts could be the equivalent
of documenting nineteenth-century America by collecting its best-selling
novels.180 We
may be neglecting what will be of most interest to later generations.
In mapping the current landscape of film preservation, this report
suggests several major themes to be explored, integrated, and prioritized
into a national film preservation program, to be developed within the
next twelve months:
- Securing a viable and ongoing source of public funding for preserving
films of cultural and historic value, particularly those not preserved
by commercial interests.
- Re-framing physical preservation as an integrated "whole film" activity,
recognizing the trade-offs of storage and film-to-film copying, examining
the adequacy of electronic transfer for some films, and planning
how technology will change preservation processes within the next
decade.
- Developing mechanisms to coordinate public-private ventures and
to facilitate communication among archives, industry and technical
experts, as well as legal incentives for stimulating preservation
ventures.
- Creating a framework for providing greater access to publicly preserved
films, and for educational use of others currently inaccessible.
The Librarian of Congress, and the National Film Preservation Board,
urge those interested in preserving America's film heritage to think
about imaginative but realistic approaches for addressing these broad
needs, as well as to provide additional information and perspective on
the topics addressed by this summary report, the public testimony, and
the submissions. Written comments received by September 30, 1993, will
be folded into the next stage of the planning process. Comments should
be addressed to: Steven Leggett, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded
Sound Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 20540.
Endnotes
(1)Public Law 102-307 (June 26, 1992), Title II, Sec.
203; codified as 2 U.S.C. 179.Return to Text
(2)Variety, February 17, 1988, p. 30.Return to Text
(3)See, for instance, Bob Fisher, "Are Movies
Forever? If Not, Why Not?" On Production 1 (March/April 1992):36-8;
Frank Thompson, "Fade Out: What's Being Done To Save Our Motion Picture
Heritage?" American Film 16 (August 1991): 34-8, 46; "Editorial:
Fade, Cut, Vanish," Los Angeles Times, June 29, 1983, Section
II, p. 4; "Editorial: The Lost Picture Show," New York Times,
January 30, 1981, p. A26.Return to Text
(4)Each of these film types has advocates. See,
for instance, written submissions from the Council on International
Nontheatrical Events (Vol. 4, pp. 112-18) and the International Documentary
Association (pp. 189-92) on newsreels and documentaries; from Anthology
Film Archives (pp. 21-2) and the Pacific Film Archive (pp. 323-5) on
experimental or avant-garde films; from the Bishop Museum (pp. 40-2)
and the Smithsonian's Human Studies Film Archives (pp. 174-80) on regional
history and anthropological films; from the American Archives of the
Factual Film (pp. 10-11) and Prelinger Associates (pp. 333-5) on advertising,
educational, corporate films; from the New York Public Library (pp.
297-312) on dance films; and from the Japanese American National Museum
(pp. 199-203), the Oregon Historical Society (pp. 321-2) and Northeast
Historic Film (pp. 315-20) on home movies.Return to Text
(5)In 1980, this program--funded through the National
Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and administered by the American Film
Institute (AFI)--distributed $514,215; in 1992, it distributed $355,600.
Over those same years, laboratory costs for copying a 90-minute black-and-white
silent film have increased from approximately $3,234 to approximately
$13,730 (according to UCLA Film and Television Archive estimates),
a two-and-a-half times increase after adjustment for inflation. For
discussion of the AFI-NEA program, see Section 6.B.1; for discussion
of laboratory costs, see Section 6.B.3.Return to text
(6)While the origin of this statistic is impossible
to trace, it was not pure invention. In the late 1970s, Larry Karr,
then archivist for the American Film Institute, loosely verified the
figure by comparing copyright statistics with surviving film lists,
including those from foreign archives. He concluded that of the approximately
21,000 U.S. feature films produced before 1950, 48% had been lost;
see Larry Karr, "The American Situation," in Problems of Selection
in Film Archives (Karlovy-Vary, Czechoslovakia: FIAF Symposium, 1980),
57, 73. See also Karr, letter to Anthony Slide (March 3, 1991), quoted
in Slide, Nitrate Won't Wait: A History of Film Preservation in
the United States (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1992), 5.Return
to text
(7)For research on The American Film Institute
Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States: Feature
Films, 1931-1940 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1993), the AFI Catalog staff were able to view 79% of the
5,250 feature films produced in America in those ten years and to
confirm the existence of more. Their experience reinforces the expectation
that losses in the sound era are most severe among independent productions.
Of the major studio features (from Columbia, MGM, Paramount, RKO,
Twentieth Century-Fox, Warner Bros., Universal, and the distributor
United Artists), 91% were viewed or confirmed to survive in U.S.
studio vaults or public archives. Among minor studios and independent
productions, 62% were confirmed to survive. These are minimum survival
figures. Additional titles certainly survive among private collectors
and in foreign archives. The quality of this surviving material
is another matter: A number of these titles probably exist only as
16mm television prints. (Figures provided by AFI Catalog editors
Patricia King Hanson and Alan Gevinson.)Return to text
(8)These rates are approximate percentages of
titles that survive in complete form, computed from unpublished working
lists of holdings of the members of FIAF (International Federation
of Film Archives). An additional 3.5% of silent feature titles (1914-28)
survive as fragments and incomplete prints. In a reversal of the situation
in the 1930s, the major studio features of the silent era seem to have
a lower survival rate than independent productions, whose frequent
distribution on a "state's rights" basis resulted in more opportunities
for prints to survive across the country.Return to text
(9)Soundtrack preservation, long neglected, is
an emerging area of concern. See the summary of the session "New Sound
Restoration Technologies" at the December 1992 Association of Moving
Image Archivists conference, AMIA Newsletter 19 (March 1993):
10-11.Return to text
(10)In this context, the term "preprint" refers
to any sort of film material used in the process of making a viewing
print. Archivists protect the earliest surviving generation by making
a duplicate ("dupe") negative for striking viewing prints (or a "fine
grain master positive" for making next generation duplicate negatives).
Especially for silent films, which generally survive only as projection
prints, archivists must work backward to create the preprint negative
or master positive. For color films, the master preprint negative is
often known as an internegative, the master positive as an interpositive.Return to text
(11)See, for instance, the submission from Michael
Friend, Academy Film Archive, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
pp. 1-4. Return to text
(12)Several submissions argue the need to include
paper records in preservation plans; see the letter (pp. 269-70) from
the AFI Catalog editors (Patricia King Hanson and Alan Gevinson) about
production records, and those from the International Film Music Society
(pp. 193-4) and Craig Spaulding (Screen Archives Entertainment; pp.
342-5) about film music manuscripts.Return to text
(13)See, for instance, the submission from
the New York Public Library (pp. 297-312) regarding films in its Donnell
Media Center. UCLA's collection of early 1930s Paramount prints became
conservation copies when MCA/Universal (the copyright owner) found
some of them to be superior to the studio's best surviving safety preprints
made in the 1950s (Bob O'Neil, interview, January 6, 1993). Similarly,
several Library of Congress copyright deposit prints from Warner Bros.
were found to hold "lost" magnetic stereo soundtracks; see L.A. hearing,
p. 93.Return to text
(14)For a thorough examination of colorization
issues, see the report by the Register of Copyrights, Technological
Alterations to Motion Pictures and Other Audiovisual Works: Implications
for Creators, Copyright Owners, and Consumers (Washington, D.C.:
Copyright Office, 1989).Return to text
(15)Sony Corporation of Japan purchased Columbia
Pictures with its film library in 1989. Matsushita Electrical Industrial
Company of Japan purchased MCA, Inc., including the back library of
Universal Pictures and many Paramount films, in 1990.Return
to text
(16)See, for instance, testimony by Gray Ainsworth,
MGM, and by Philip Murphy, Paramount, L.A. hearing, pp. 54-5, 59-60.Return
to text
(17)See, for instance, Bob Gitt, "Preservation
of Early Color Film: Introduction, An Overview of Preservation," in Four
Tasks of Film Archives (Tokyo: Film Center of the National Museum
of Modern Art, 1990), 145.Return to text
(18)There is a confusing array of technical
names for acetate. It is of several types, notably the older cellulose
diacetate (almost never used professionally in the United States and
primarily found in 16mm amateur films after 1923 and in other unusual
silent-film gauges, especially 28mm) and cellulose triacetate (in 35mm
professional use from 1948). Acetate is also sometimes called cellulose
ester, although this can be misleading in two ways: Nitrate and polyester
film are also esters (a compound resulting from the reaction of an
acid with an alcohol), and "Estar" is Eastman Kodak's trade name for
its polyester-base film. See William E. Lee and Charleton C. Bard, "The
Stability of Kodak Professional Motion-Picture Film Bases," SMPTE
Journal 97 (November 1988): 911-14; Karel A.H. Brems, "The Archival
Quality of Film Bases," SMPTE Journal 97 (December 1988):
991-3.Return to text
(19)A negative for The Great Train Robbery held
at the Library of Congress includes portions of Edwin S. Porter's original
camera negative, although other portions have been replaced, probably
a few years after 1903 but before edge-coding allows for precise dating
(Paul Spehr, interview, May 3, 1993).Return to text
(20)Spontaneous combustion in a reel of decomposed
nitrate film has been achieved at temperatures as low as 106oF but
only after keeping the film wrapped in insulation to retain the heat
of decomposition for 17 days; see James W. Cummings, Alvin C. Hutton & Howard
Silfin, "Spontaneous Ignition of Decomposing Cellulose Nitrate Film," SMPTE
Journal 54 (March 1950): 268-74. In the world outside of laboratory
tests, most nitrate fires have occurred through human carelessness.Return to text
(21)UCLA Film and Television Archive, for
instance, regularly screens nitrate copies for the public; see Jess
Daily, "The Care and Handling of Hazardous Nitrate Film at UCLA's Unique
Projection Facilities," SMPTE Journal 99 (June 1990): 453-6.
For discussion of the pros and cons of saving nitrate after copying,
see the L.A. hearing, pp. 38-40, 96-100. For discussion of this issue
among international archivists, see "Panel Discussion," in Four
Tasks of Film Archives (Tokyo: Film Center of the National Museum
of Modern Art, 1990), 123-5.Return to text
(22)Currently it costs over $1,100 to dispose
of a 15-gallon drum (holding 80% water and 20% nitrate film) in a way
that meets national environmental (EPA) and health (OSHA) regulations.
Thus, at least in small quantities, nitrate can cost over $40 a pound
just to throw away. (A 1,000-foot reel weighs about five pounds but
loses weight as it deteriorates.) These costs are dramatically higher
now than at the start of the 1980s, when disposal of the same 15-gallon
drum cost about $300. (Paul Spehr, interview, May 3, 1993; 1991 estimates
from an Eastern Chemical Waste Systems bid to the Library of Congress.)Return to text
(23)Study of vinegar syndrome was begun
in Great Britain at Manchester Polytechnic; see N.S. Allen, and others, "Degradation
of Historic Cellulose Triacetate Cinematographic Film: Influence of
Various Film Parameters and Prediction of Archival Life," Journal
of Photographic Science 36 (1988): 194-8. (This study notes a
link between the onset of vinegar syndrome and metal ion contamination,
reinforcing anecdotal evidence among archivists that the most serious
vinegar syndrome is occurring first in magnetic soundtracks.) Continued
research in the United States has been conducted at the Image Permanence
Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology; see P.Z. Adelstein, J.M.
Reilly, D.W. Nishimura, and C.J. Erbland, "Stability of Cellulose Ester
Base Photographic Film," SMPTE Journal 101 (May 1992): 336-53.
See also the testimony from James M. Reilly, Director, Image Permanence
Institute, D.C. hearing, pp. 115-20.Return to text
(24)For discussion of the early problems
with polyester, see Ralph N. Sargent, Preserving the Moving Image (Washington,
D.C.: Corporation for Public Broadcasting/NEA, 1974), 12-13. On its
availability, see discussions at the L.A. hearing, pp. 37-8, 42-3,
and at the D.C. hearing, p. 121. Polyester also meets some resistance
because it requires heat splicing, not solvent splicing.Return to text
(25)Adding to the confusing terminology
is the fact that Technicolor, as a company, switched to producing dye-coupler
prints since shutting down U.S. dye-transfer processing in 1975. The
only currently operating Technicolor dye-transfer plant was built in
1977 in Beijing, China. See the submission from L. Jeffrey Selznick
(pp. 220-4) about the Louis B. Mayer Foundation's interesting experimental
efforts to employ this plant in American film preservation.Return
to text
(26)Robert Harris submission, pp. 163-9.Return to text
(27)See the written submission from Eastman
Kodak, pp. 127-37.Return to text
(28)This is the approximate estimate from
two industry executives. Bob Gitt, of the UCLA Film and Television
Archive, suggests a figure closer to $40,000 for correctly timed master
positive separations for the same length feature. Full testing, by
making an internegative from the separations and a first answer print,
would double these costs. It is also possible--and much more common--to
make a sample test print of a few hundred feet, to "inspect" the separations
(for about $700), or to combine them on a video telecine. Making a
new print from separations is also not inexpensive, involving the same
procedures and costs as full testing. (Bob Gitt, interview, May 17,
1993.)Return to text
(29)The best discussions of color fading
remain those published more than a decade ago. See Bill O'Connell, "Fade
Out," Film Comment 15 (September/October 1979): 11-18; Paul
C. Spehr, "Fading, Fading, Faded: The Color Film Crisis," American
Film 5 (November 1979): 56-61; and Richard Patterson, "The Preservation
of Color Films," American Cinematographer 62 (July 1981):
694-720 [Part 1] and (August 1981): 792-822 [Part 2].Return
to text
(30) The Library of Congress' first cold-and-dry
film storage vaults, in Landover, Maryland, have been in operation
since 1976. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science's smaller
facility opened in 1991.Return to text
(31) SMPTE has no current motion picture
storage "standards"; these proposals--revisions of SMPTE RP 131--are
expected to be published for comment in the September 1993 SMPTE
Journal (Sherwin Becker, interview, June 16, 1993). See also ANSI
IT.19-1992, "Imaging Media--Processed Safety Photographic Film--Storage."Return
to text
(32) Stephen Gong, "National Film and Video
Storage: Survey Report and Results," Film History 1 (1987):
132.Return to text
(33) By the Image Permanence Institute
definition, vinegar syndrome is reached at a free acidity level of
O.5. Calculations begin from newly manufactured film stock. See The
IPI Storage Guide for Acetate Film (Rochester, N.Y.: Image Permanence
Institute, 1993).Return to text
(34) Humidity can also be managed in the "microenvironment" by
sealing reels of film in airtight bags. There are, however, questions
about this process as well, since the bags also trap gasses given off
by deterioration.Return to text
(35) Testimony from Philip Murphy, D.C.
hearing, p. 112.Return to text
(36) Accelerated aging studies by the Image
Permanence Institute suggest, however, that limited time out of storage
is not in itself damaging. For instance, at the 60 degrees F /40%RH
example noted on Figure 2, five days or less per year out-of-storage
(into 75 degrees F/60%RH conditions) has no measurable effect on the
onset of vinegar syndrome; but with 90 days out-of-storage per year
vinegar syndrome appears in 50 instead of 100 years. See The IPI
Storage Guide for Acetate Film. Removing film from sub-freezing
storage is also not necessarily harmful, according to D.F. Kopperl
and C.C. Bard in "Freeze/Thaw Cycling of Motion Picture Films," SMPTE
Journal 94 (August 1985): 826-7.Return to text
(37) Current federal law will prohibit
the primary film cleaning solution, called "1,1,1 trichloroethane," at
the end of 1995, and, practically speaking, it will become unavailable
by mid-1994. The water-based substitutes that have been produced can
be harmful to nitrate film. The wetgate printing solution "perchloroethylene" remains
in use (and has an active lobby because of its importance to the dry
cleaning industry) but is a known carcinogen and can also be expected
to be banned (Pete Comandini, interview, April 15, 1993). See also
testimony by Bob O'Neil, Universal, L.A. hearing, pp. 89-90; and John
L. Baptista, "Motion Pictures," SMPTE Journal 102 (March 1993):
289-90.Return to text
(38) Current videotape carries even less
information; see Paramount Pictures' demonstration videotape, D.C.
hearing, pp. 113-15.Return to text
(39) See the submission from Sony Pictures
Entertainment, pp. 352-5.Return to text
(40) The focus here is on organizations having
original or best-quality film materials. Excluded, for the most part,
are organizations that carry only commercially acquired copies. For
the remainder of this report, the term "public archive" is used to
refer to archives in either the public or nonprofit sector.Return
to text
(41) Industry sources generally divide film
studios by size into (1) the "majors," companies that produce, finance
and distribute their own films as well as those by independent filmmakers,
(2) the "mini-majors," firms that handle a smaller number of films,
and (3) the independents. This report instead looks at studios with
film libraries of several hundred titles or more, and includes firms
not actively engaged in new theatrical production.
In 1991 the majors produced 150 features, roughly one-third of the total U.S.-produced
35mm theatrical releases for the year. For production statistics, see 1993 International
Motion Picture Almanac, Barry Monush, ed. (New York: Quigley Publishing
Company, 1993), 19A.Return to text
(42) With the widespread introduction of
sound to motion pictures in 1929, silent films seemed particularly
out-of-date. Film lore is spiced with stories about silent films, discarded
or abandoned by their owners, that survive only through prints salvaged
by collectors. See, for example, Ch. 4, "Thanks to the Film Collectors," in
Anthony Slide, Nitrate Won't Wait: A History of Film Preservation
in the United States (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1992).Return
to text
(43) In May 1993, Wax: Or the Discovery
of Television Among the Bees (1992) became the first film transmitted
on the Internet, a global computer network linking millions of academic
and scientific users (John Markoff, "Cult Film Is a First on Internet," New
York Times, May 24, 1993, p. C3).Return to text
(44) Harold Vogel, Entertainment Industry
Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysts (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), 48-9.Return to text
(45) With the release of videogames developed
from films such as Hook and Bram Stoker's Dracula,
Sony's library is becoming literal software; see Peter M. Nichols, "Home
Video: More Data and More Speed Are Letting Real Movie Stars Do More
in the World of Interactive Games," New York Times, May 13,
1993, p. B4.Return to text
(46) See in chronological order: Stephen
J. Sansweet, "Fox, Latest To Put a Value on Film Library, Appraises
1,000 Movies at $375 Million," Wall Street Journal, November
26, 1982, p. 7; Sandra Salmans, "The Value of Film Libraries: A Takeover
Attraction," New York Times, April 3, 1984, p. D1+; Laura
Landro, "Value of MGM/UA's Library of Films Is Center of Dispute Over
Price of Unit," Wall Street Journal, February 20, 1985, p.
26; Alan Citron, "Value in the Vault," Los Angeles Times,
May 29, 1990, p. D1+; "Analysts Bullish on Pic Libraries," Daily Variety,
August 15, 1991, p. 16; and Kirk Honeycutt, "Classics Pay Their Way
in Pre-Vid Theatrical Runs: After P&A, Old Films Crank Out New Profits," Hollywood
Reporter, June 4, 1992, p. 1+.Return to text
(47) As reported in studio interviews,
submissions, and testimony. The count excludes television programming.Return
to text
(48) Joseph McBride, "Par Dusting Off Its
Heritage: Studio Mounts Re-Release Campaign Following Program To Restore
Its TV, Pic Classics," Daily Variety, April 27, 1990. p. 1,
34, 43; Charles Fleming, "Paramount Negatives Hit New Low," Variety,
June 10, 1991, p. 1; and testimony by Philip Murphy, Paramount, D.C.
hearing, pp. 111-13. Return to text
(49) For a Paramount-produced color film,
for example, the "preservation master set" generally consists of the
original camera negative, color separations, an interpositive, and
a separate sound track recording.Return to text
(50) See discussion at the L.A. hearing, pp.
61-3.Return to text
(51) See Robert Harris, D.C. hearing, pp.
59-62, and George Stevens, Jr., D.C. hearing, p. 11.Return
to text
(52) Paula Parisi, "Warners Spending Millions
to Revive 26 Classic Films," Hollywood Reporter, May 11, 1990,
p. 1+.Return to text
(53) Kirk Honeycutt, "Sony's Preservation
Push on Display at UCLA," Hollywood Reporter, September 28,
1992, p. 6, 17-18; Thomas M. Pryor, "Pic Preservation Must Be of Paramount
Importance," Daily Variety, May 3, 1990, p. 2, 24; Bruce Haring, "Film
Preservation Efforts Retarded by Lack of Coin," Daily Variety,
September 28, 1990, p. 8.Return to text
(54) Clearly time is running out for the
oldest material. At the 1992 conference of the Association of Moving
Image Archivists, Twentieth Century Fox confirmed plans, announced
in Daily Variety (October 10, 1992), to digitize (transfer
to electronic form) its Movietone News (1919-1963), some 60
million feet of nitrate and acetate film. To convert the collection
to safety film, the studio estimated, would take the better part of
a decade, by which time some of the footage would have decomposed.Return
to text
(55) For the new value of outtakes and trailers
for videotape and laserdisc releases, see "Restored Material from Cutting-Room
Floor," Los Angeles Times, August 2, 1991, p. F24.Return
to text
(56) See discussions at the L.A. hearing,
pp. 63-4.Return to text
(57) See written submission by George Lucas,
Lucasfilm, pp. 213-4.Return to text
(58) Victor Nunez, interview, April 16,
1993, and Sam Gowan (executive producer for Ruby in Paradise),
interview, April 15, 1993.Return to text
(59) Frederick Wiseman, D.C. hearing, pp.
12-13, 14-18.Return to text
(60) See Jonas Mekas, "Notes on the Preservation
of Independently Made Films," Report: The 1979 National Conference
of Media Arts Centers (New York: Foundation of Independent Video
and Film, 1979), 15-16.Return to text
(61) Gordon Hitchens, "Anthology Film Archives'
Heroic Task To Save Old Pic Negatives," Variety, August 5,
1978, p. 6. See also written submission by Samuel Sherman, Independent-International
Pictures, pp. 186-8.Return to text
(62) See testimony at L.A. hearing by Stephen
Gong, Pacific Film Archive, pp 11-14, and by Betsy McLane, International
Documentary Association, pp. 108-10. A similar point was made in The
Independent Film Community: A Report on the Status of Independent Film
in the United States, Peter Feinstein, ed. (New York: Committee
on Film and Television Resources and Services, 1977), 71.Return
to text
(63) With positive reversal stock the film
in the camera, when processed, may be used as a release print (that
is, no negative is needed, thus cutting down the cost). The project
has enabled Canyon Cinema to strike new prints of eight films; the
filmmakers retain new preprint material. At this date, no continuing
source of funds has been found. (Dominique Angerame, interview, May
11, 1993.)Return to text
(64) For more information on the estate
planning for artists with AIDS, see the booklet Future Safe (1992),
available from the Alliance for the Arts, 330 W. 42nd St., New York,
NY 10026.Return to text
(65) Footage 89: North American Film
and Video Sources, Richard Prelinger and Celeste R. Hoffnar,
eds. (New York: Prelinger Associates, 1989), A-7.Return
to text
(66) Larry Urbanski, interview, April 26,
1993, and written submission from Moviecraft, pp. 233-6.Return
to text
(67) Before this 1992 amendment, U.S. copyright
holders had to file an application for copyright renewal (see Section
8). For a discussion of the possible impact of the 1992 copyright legislation
on stock footage operations, see Rick Prelinger, "Automatic Copyright
or Wrongs," The Independent 15 (June 1992): 8.Return
to text
(68) Computed from total footage statistics
reported in Stephen Gong, "National Film and Video Storage: Survey
Report and Results," Film History 1 (1987): 128-9. This study
gives the total footage held by the 28 responding archives as 1.03
billion feet; the five largest report 917 million feet.Return
to text
(69) Actuality film is unstaged footage
shot on location as the event occurs.Return to text
(70) After the current transfer from the Department
of Defense is completed, the National Archives expects to acquire few
additional government films. Government agencies have, for the most
part, switched to video production.Return to text
(71) FIAF (Federation Internationale des
Archives du Film), founded in 1938, is an international organization
through which public film archives share information and develop standards
for cataloging and preservation practices. The four fiction film archives
have long been active in FIAF as full members. The U.S. archives participating
on a provisional or associate basis are the Academy Film Archive of
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Anthology Film Archives,
the Human Studies Film Archives of the Smithsonian Institution, the
National Archives and Records Administration, the Pacific Film Archive,
and the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.Return
to text
(72) Mary Lea Bandy, interview, April 28,
1993.Return to text
(73) Edward Richmond, letters to authors,
April 22 and May 24, 1993.Return to text
(74) Edward Richmond, letter to authors,
April 22, 1993.Return to text
(75) Jan-Christopher Horak, interview,
May 6, 1993.Return to text
(76) MoMA's new nitrate facility of 34
vaults is designed to store film at 45 degrees F and 35% RH (Mary Lea
Bandy, interviews, April 28 and June 14, 1993). Storage expert David
Wexler reported that Lorimar built a small nitrate vault in the 1980s,
but that the storage area was converted to other uses (interview, April
28, 1993).Return to text
(77) See NARA's written submission, pp.
247-68, and testimony, D.C. hearing, pp. 88-90.Return
to text
(78) Edward Richmond, interview, May
3, 1993. The thick walls of the nitrate facility provide some degree
of natural insulation. UCLA's preservation masters are currently housed
in a state-of-the-art commercial facility.Return to text
(79) The exact number of specialist archives
with programs devoted to film is difficult to estimate. The Association
of Moving Image Archivists attracts participants from some 50 tax-exempt
organizations. Looking at the pool of AFI-NEA preservation grant applicants
from 1979-90 yields a larger figure: 77. The 1992 Member Directory of
the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (Oakland, CA: NAMAC,
1992) reports that 90 members (68% of the 132 respondents) have collections
of films, videotapes or library materials.Return to text
(80) Nitrate holdings are shown in Figure 5.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Anthology Film Archives,
National Center for Jewish Film, Oregon Historical Society, Pacific
Film Archive, Southwest Film/Video Archives, and Wisconsin Center for
Film and Theater Research have some nitrate film.Return
to text
(81) See, for instance, the written submission
from Paul Eisloeffel, Nebraska Historical Society, pp. 294-6.Return
to text
(82) See, for example, the testimony by
Jan-Christopher Horak of the Association of Moving Image Archivists,
D.C. hearing, pp. 68-72, and by John Ptak of the National Center for
Film and Video Preservation, L.A. hearing, pp. 17-20.Return
to text
(83) Jay Richiuso of the American Association
for State and Local History bases these estimates on the number of
local history organizations reported in the regularly published AASLH
Directory. In 1959 the Directory listed 1,566 organizations;
in 1990, over 13,000. The Directory includes a small number
of Canadian organizations. Teresa Brinati of the Society of American
Archivists recalls no recent survey of members' film collections. (Interviews,
April 29 and April 30, 1993.)Return to text
(84) Richard Prelinger, D.C. hearing, p.
19-20. Prelinger's guide includes some Canadian and Mexican coverage,
but is heavily weighted toward the United States. In preparing Footage
89 and its supplement, Prelinger and Hoffnar surveyed every "actual
or suspected repository of moving image material that we could think
of in North America," excluding media centers and public libraries
with commercially acquired videotapes and films. Counting 500 to 600
corporate archives, Prelinger suspects that there are some 3000 American
sources with footage of documentary or cultural interest (Richard Prelinger,
interview, May 5, 1993).Return to text
(85) Written submission by Gordon Olson,
Grand Rapids Public Library, pp. 158-61.Return to text
(86) "Restoration...Slowly But Surely," American
Cinematographer 67 (April 1986): 128. Dale Pollock ("Collectors:
Film Heroes or Villains?" Los Angeles Times, September 16,
1983, p. 1) estimates that there are 30,000 to 50,000 film collectors
in the United States.Return to text
(87) See, for example, written submission
by Dennis Atkinson, pp. 37-9.Return to text
(88) Stephen Rebello, "State of Siege," American
Film 9 (May 1984): 41-4.Return to text
(89) Paula Parisi, "Warners Spending Millions
To Revive 26 Classic Films," Hollywood Reporter, May 11, 1990,
p. 1+.Return to text
90 See hearing transcripts for L.A., pp. 67-8,
93-4, and for D.C., p. 8.Return to text
(91) This 1992 Library of Congress survey
attempted to locate among members of the International Federation of
Film Archives (FIAF) preprint materials for the first 75 titles chosen
for the National Film Registry. No attempt was made to evaluate the
quality of the preprint materials.
The Washington Office of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation
at the American Film Institute, through FIAF, has begun to identify lost American
silent films in foreign archives and arrange for their transfer to U.S. archives
(see Section 10).Return to text
(92) 17 U.S.C. Sec. 202. See also Melville
B. Nimmer and David Nimmer, Nimmer on Copyright: A Treatise on
the Law of Literary, Musical and Artistic Property, and the Protection
of Ideas (New York: Matthew Bender, 1991) vol. 1, Sec. 2.03[C].Return
to text
(93) The discussions specifically allowed
the archival copying of nitrate film. Through misinformation or transcription
error, the report printed "1942" as the year ending the nitrate era.
The language has been interpreted as extending to any archival film
preservation.
- A problem of particular urgency is that of preserving for posterity
prints of motion pictures made before 1942. Aside from the deplorable
fact that in a great many cases the only existing copy of a film
has been deliberately destroyed, those that remain are in immediate
danger of disintegration; they were printed on film stock with a
nitrate base that will inevitably decompose in time. The efforts
of the Library of Congress, the American Film Institute, and other
organizations to rescue and preserve this irreplaceable contribution
to our cultural life are to be applauded, and the making of duplicate
copies for the purposes of archival preservation certainly falls
within the scope of "fair use." (House Committee on the Judiciary, Copyright
Law Revision, 94th Cong., 2d sess., 1976, H. Rept. 94-1476,
73.)
Return to text
(94) Formed within the AFI in 1983, the
NCFVP began operations the next year, with Robert Rosen as its first
director ("National Center Launches Initial Film & TV Preservation
Efforts," Variety, May 29, 1985, p. 2). The NCFVP coordinates
all preservation programs affiliated with the AFI. These include: (1)
administrating the AFI-NEA grants program, (2) acquiring films for
the AFI film collection (the custody of which is split among U.S. archives,
with the Library of Congress holding the largest portion), (3) developing
the National Moving Image Database (NAMID), and (4) preparing the American
Film Institute Catalog of American films. The NCFVP also serves
as secretariat for the Film Foundation and the Association of Moving
Image Archivists. Excluding funds administered through the AFI-NEA
preservation grants program, the NCFVP has received, over the last
10 years, $2.6 million in federal support. Like the AFI, the NCFVP
has offices in Los Angeles (handling coordination, NAMID, the AFI
Catalog) and Washington, D.C. (administering preservation grants
and AFI film acquisition).
The American Film Institute, founded in 1967 to promote American film, also
supports a film school, exhibition programs, and other public outreach operations.
Its activities are funded by federal and foundation grants, private donations,
and revenue-generating activities. For background on the AFI, see its em>Annual
Reports and George Stevens, Jr., "The Founding Director Grades the Film Institute
at Age 12-1/2," New York Times, January 6, 1980, p. D11. The AFI has
not been without its critics; see, for example, Emily Yoffe, "Popcorn Politics," Harper's 267
(December 1983): 13-22, and Amy Taubin, "Burnt Bridges: Why Our American Film
Institute Doesn't Work," Village Voice, December 8, 1988, pp. 83-92.Return
to text
(95) Thus the NCFVP functions as an agent
or contractor for the NEA; it is not required to raise additional "matching" dollars
for the preservation grant program.Return to text
(96) Grants funds cannot be applied to film-to-videotape
transfer.Return to text
(97)All grant dollars are unadjusted for
inflation. The institutions abbreviated in the header are: Anthology
Film Archives, the International Museum of Photography and Film at
George Eastman House, the Museum of Modern Art (Department of Film),
the National Center for Jewish Film, the New York Public Library Dance
Collection, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. For a complete
list of institutions receiving funding, see footnote 99. Institutional
percentages total over 100% due to rounding.Return to
text
(98) Based on data collected during interviews
with archivists, January-May 1993. Similar results were obtained by
Stephen Gong, "National Film and Video Storage: Survey Report and Results," Film
History 1 (1987): 127-36, and a 1989 unpublished NCFVP survey
by Gregory Lukow.Return to text
(99) Recipients are: The Academy Foundation
(Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), Anthology Film Archives,
Archivo General de Puerto Rico, Astoria Motion Picture & Television
Center, Center for Southern Folklore, Chicago Historical Society, Colorado
Historical Society, Duke University, Florida A&M University Black Archives,
Grand Rapids Public Library, International Film Foundation, Institute
for Intercultural Communications, International Museum of Photography
and Film at George Eastman House, Iowa State University's American
Archives of the Factual Film, Louis Wolfson II Media History Center,
Memphis State University, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern
Art, Museum of New Mexico, National Center for Jewish Film, New York
Public Library Dance Collection, Northeast Historic Film, Oregon Historical
Society, Puerto Rico Department of Education, Rhode Island Historical
Society, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research,
Southwest Film/Video Archives, University of Alaska, the UC Berkeley's
Pacific Film Archive, UCLA Film and Television Archive, University
of Delaware, University of Kentucky Library, University of South Carolina,
University of Texas at Austin, Wayne State University, Whatcom Institute
for Jewish Research, and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Return
to text
(100) See, for example, the written submission
from the Grand Rapids Public Library, pp. 158-61.Return
to text
(101) These estimates were provided
by Susan Dalton, NCFVP Washington Office. The Washington Office supplied
all grant information in this section. The categories avant garde,
documentary, Yiddish-language, and dance include some silent films.
Data for titles copied before 1979 were not available.Return
to text
(102) Testimony by Brian O'Doherty,
National Endowment for the Arts, D.C. hearing, p. 44.Return
to text
(103) On the need for broader guidelines, "without
the art strictures," in federal film preservation funding, see the
written submission from Northeast Historic Film, pp. 315-20.Return
to text
(104) These rough estimates are based
on average laboratory cost figures for 1980 and 1992, provided by the
UCLA Film and Television Archive. See Section 6.B.3 for details on
the laboratory operations and assumptions that these figures reflect.Return
to text
(105) The NARA in-house laboratory
also handles duplication requests from the public.Return
to text
(106) The LC film preservation efforts
began in the late 1940s in a project with the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences to convert the "paper prints" to 16mm film. The paper
prints, some 3000 of the earliest surviving American films, were printed
on paper as photographs for deposit as copyright protection largely
before 1912 (when the first copyright provisions for motion pictures
were enacted). The first LC appropriation specifically for film preservation
was in 1958. (Paul Spehr, memo to authors, April 16, 1993.)Return
to text
(107) All figures in dollars. The
inflation-adjusted figures are in constant FY 1983 dollars (calculated
using the GNP implicit price deflator).Return to text
(108) After fires at its Suitland,
Maryland, storage facility in 1977 and 1978, the National Archives
received support to accelerate copying of federal nitrate holdings.
On the importance of expediting preservation of federal agency film,
see the Comptroller General's report to Congress, Valuable Government-Owned
Motion Picture Films Are Rapidly Deteriorating (Washington, D.C.:
General Accounting Office, June 19, 1979), LCD 78-113. For industry
coverage of the nitrate fires, see "Can Valuable Historical Films Be
Entrusted to U.S. Archives?" Variety, January 3, 1979, p.
52; and "U.S. Film Archive Fires: Neglect & Goof," Variety,
January 22, 1980, p. 7.Return to text
(109) These figures reflect laboratory
costs only and exclude staff and facilities (Paul Spehr, memo to authors,
April 16, 1993).Return to text
(110) NARA does not have a specific
budget line for film preservation copying. NARA supports film-to-film
copying and video transfer from the same funds, and moving image preservation
is subsumed within the overall institutional preservation allocation.
The 1992 NARA expenditure for laboratory copying of film and videotape
was $775,000. (William Murphy, interview, April 19, 1993.)Return
to text
(111) There are probably fewer than
ten recognized specialist preservation labs now operating in the United
States, although other firms have expressed interest in this field.
The Association of Moving Image Archivists is currently compiling a
directory of commercial preservation laboratory facilities.Return
to text
(112) See testimony by Ralph Sargent,
Film Technology, L.A. hearing, pp. 29-32.Return to text
(113) UCLA estimates that, in
1992, preserving a 90-minute sound film (from a print) averaged $4000
more than a silent film. The estimate includes transfer time, re-recording
the optical track negative, and an extra tracking pass of the final
print, bringing the total to $17,700. The duplication of original picture
and track negatives averages roughly $25,000 to $30,000 but can be
more. For the recent Museum of Modern Art/Sony restoration of On
the Waterfront, a black-and-white acetate film, the cost was $49,000
(Peter Williamson, interview, January 13, 1993).
Color costs are generally higher. In 1991, George Eastman House estimated the
cost of their Northwest Mounted Police Technicolor project at $45,000
[Frank Thompson, "Fade Out: What's Being Done To Save Our Film Heritage?," American
Film 16 (August 1991): 37]. For the technical complexities of the UCLA-YCM
restoration of Becky Sharp (1935), the first three-strip Technicolor
feature, see Robert Gitt and Richard Dayton, "Restoring Becky Sharp," American
Cinematographer 65 (November 1984): 99-106.Return to text
(114) The inflation-adjusted figures
are in constant FY 1983 dollars (calculated using the GNP implicit
price deflator).Return to text
(115) Estimates are for an 8,100-foot
film requiring eight hours of preparation work; the dupe negative is
step printed, one light (Edward Richmond and Bob Gitt, letter to authors,
April 22, 1993).Return to text
(116) Written submission from Film
Technology, pp. 145-8.Return to text
(117) For example, no U.S. preservation
lab now has equipment for reproducing non-standard 28mm film onto standard
35mm; there has not been the sustained archival demand to support investment
in this equipment. Single 28mm preservation copying jobs are now sent
to Canada or Europe. Eastman House reports having 380 titles in 28mm.
(Jan-Christopher Horak, interview, April 26, 1993.)Return
to text
(118) Gregory Lukow, memo to authors,
April 27, 1993. Return to text
(119) See the NCFVP's leaflet, The
National Moving Image Database (November 1992) and the consultant's
report on NAMID to Shirlee Haizlip (March 1, 1990).Return
to text
(120) The public archives are: the
American Archives of the Factual Film, Anthology Film Archives, Arts
on Television, Canyon Cinema, Electronic Arts Intermix, Film-Makers'
Cooperative, George Eastman House, Haleakala--the Kitchen, Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Human Studies
Film Archives, Long Beach Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the
Museum of Modern Art, Southwest Film/Video Archives at Southern Methodist
University, UC Berkeley Extension Media Center and Pacific Film Archive,
UCLA Film and Television Archive, Video Data Bank of the Chicago Art
Institute, and the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.
NAMID has also received data from Turner Entertainment and Whole Toon
Access.Return to text
(121) Margaret Byrne, interview,
April 26, 1993.Return to text
(122) Data exchange is not automated;
archives send machine-readable records by mail for uploading at the
NCFVP. As of late April 1993, about one-third of the participants did
not permit access to their records without prior permission.Return
to text
(123) See testimony by Jan-Christopher
Horak, D.C. hearing, p. 83, and the written submission from Edward
Richmond, UCLA, pp. 362-5.Return to text
(124) See, for example, the
written submission of the International Documentary Association, pp.
189-92.Return to text
(125) PL 102-307 (June 26,
1992), Title II, Sec. 201 and following, codified as 2 U.S.C. 179.Return
to text
(126) The NHPRC grants are intended
for unpublished archival materials, and thus are generally unavailable
for collections of publicly distributed documentary films. It has funded
a handful of projects involving documentary or actuality footage. (Laurie
Baty, interview, April 19, 1993).Return to text
(127) Linda Loeb, interview,
April 20, 1993. Iowa State University (American Archives of the Factual
Film is in the library) and the Research Libraries of the New York
Public Library have received grants for film collections.Return
to text
(128) The NEH's new National
Heritage Preservation Program, established in 1990, gives grants to
improve housing, environmental control, security, lighting and fire-prevention
systems for three-dimensional objects in "material culture collections
important to the humanities." The program does not target libraries
and archives. (Interview with Jeffrey Field, NEH Division of Preservation
and Access, April 14, 1993.)Return to text
(129) State arts support is
also waning. The National Center for Jewish Film reports that last
year's grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council was one-twentieth
of past levels. The New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), which
until 1991 designated grants for preservation copying, is now, with
its own support cut, switching to giving smaller amounts of unrestricted
program funds. Thus while receiving fewer dollars overall, arts organizations
can use them more flexibly. Program Director Deborah Silverfine fears
that film preservation may be neglected as organizations struggle "to
keep the doors open" (interview, May 5, 1993, and submission, pp. 313-19).
For the general decline in state arts budgets, see Quynh Thai, "State
Funding Fiasco: NY's Cuomo Singles Out Arts Budget for 56 Percent Cut," The
Independent 14 (May 1991): 4, 6; Jon Burris, "No Silver Lining:
States Announce Declining Arts Budgets," The Independent 14
(November 1991): 12, 14-15. Return to text
(130) See the Annual Reports of
the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.Return to text
(131) To encourage greater educational
access to documentaries, the MacArthur Library Program distributes
videotapes of public affairs documentaries to public libraries. (Interview
with Patricia Boero, program officer for the Foundation's media program,
April 20, 1993.) On the MacArthur Foundation's interest in independent
film, see its submission, pp. 215-16.Return to text
(132) Written submission from
L. Jeffrey Selznick, Louis B. Mayer Foundation, pp. 220-4.Return
to text
(133) Raffaele Donato, interview,
May 5, 1993. See also written submission from Martin Scorsese, Film
Foundation, pp. 141-4, and testimony by Josh Sapan, AMC, D.C. hearing,
pp. 126-9.Return to text
(134) Among the many written
submissions that discuss preservation under these terms, see, for instance,
Tom Gunning's (for the Society for Cinema Studies), pp. 346-51.Return
to text
(135) See, for instance, written
submissions from members of the Committee for Film Preservation and
Public Access, pp. 52-109.Return to text
(136) "Fair use" was developed
in case law and first codified in the 1976 Copyright Act. It is a limitation
on the rights of copyright owners when a work is used for certain purposes, "such
as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching...scholarship, or research";
17 U.S.C. 107. Despite the codification, fair use exceptions are complex
and ultimately determined by courts on a case-by-case basis after looking
at several factors, including the effect of the use on the potential
market value of the work.Return to text
(137) Where no copies have
been sold and no theatrical or "trade release" of a film has taken
place, it may be "unpublished." This is the status, for instance, of
most home movies. Such films were protected in perpetuity under common
law until the 1976 Copyright Act, which brought to unpublished works
the same terms as published ones, but in no case could the copyright
of a previously unpublished and unregistered work expire before 2002,
or until the end of 2027 if published between 1978 and 2002.Return
to text
(138) The Copyright Act of
1976 (effective January 1, 1978) established a single 75-year term
of protection for works made for hire (e.g., studio films) and a lifetime-of-the-author-plus-50-years
term for works created and owned by individuals. The 1992 Copyright
Amendments Act (PL 102-307) provided an automatic 47-year second term
for works copyrighted between 1964 and 1977, giving them full 75-year
protection. (The 1992 act did provide incentives to make renewal advisable
but without loss of copyright if it were not filed.) For a useful discussion
of copyright as it relates to the preservation of printed materials,
see Robert L. Oakley, Copyright and Preservation: A Serious Problem
in Need of a Thoughtful Solution (Washington, D.C.: Commission
on Preservation and Access, 1990).Return to text
(139) John Stanley, "Showdown
Over McLintock! Rights," San Francisco Chronicle,
May 2, 1993, p. D48.Return to text
(140) David Landis, "Wonderful
Life Won't Air As Often," USA Today, June 15, 1993,
p. A-1.Return to text
(141) The records of the U.S.
Copyright Office in the Library of Congress, containing over 25 million
entries, are open to the public. On request, the Copyright Office will
search its records regarding the copyright status of a particular work
for $20-per-hour. Information on how to search the copyright status
of a work is provided in Copyright Office Circulars 22 and 23. For
help in determining the term of copyright of a particular film, see
Circulars 1, 15, 15a and 15t. To request these circulars or to speak
to a Copyright Information Specialist, call (202) 707-3000. Written
requests should be addressed to the Copyright Office, LM 455, The Library
of Congress, Washington, DC 20559.Return to text
(142) See testimony by Mary Lea
Bandy, MoMA, and Paul Spehr, LC, D.C. hearing, pp. 82-3, 87.Return
to text
(143) Robert Rosen, written
submission, pp. 366-7; Stephen Gong, written submission, pp. 323-5.
For further discussion of new demands being made on film archives,
see Paolo Cherchi Usai, "Archive of Babel," Sight and Sound 59
(Winter 1989/1990): 48-50.Return to text
(144) Alan Lewis, Charles Mayn,
and William Murphy, interview, December 12, 1992. The Library of Congress
estimates that film and television producers seeking footage now account
for over 60% of its moving image researchers (member report in 1993
FIAF conference packet, Mo i Rana, Norway).Return to
text
(145) "Frame enlargements" reproduce
the image as seen on screen and have become essential for serious film
publications. Less scholarly film books are often illustrated with
the more easily available "production stills," which are generally
taken by a studio publicist on the movie set. See the D.C. hearing
(pp. 104-5), the written submission by David Bordwell (pp. 43-4), and
Kristin Thompson, "Report of the Ad-Hoc Committee of the Society for
Cinema Studies: Fair Usage Publication of Film Stills," Cinema
Journal 32 (Winter 1993): 2-20.Return to text
(146) For instance, see the description
of its three-screen laserdisc installation in the submission from the
Japanese American Historical Museum, pp. 199-203.Return
to text
(147) See submissions from
Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum, pp. 138-40; and Margaret Parsons, National
Gallery of Art, pp. 292-3.Return to text
(148) For a discussion of 35mm
print availability for older films in Britain, see Anthony Smith, "The
Problem of the Missing Film," Sight and Sound 75 (Spring 1988):
84-6, and the written submission from Clyde Jeavons, British Film Institute,
p. 45.Return to text
(149) Mary Lea Bandy, interview,
January 13, 1993.Return to text
(150) See the March 8, 1993 submission
from Robert Kolker (p. 207), which discusses this possibility.Return
to text
(151) Currently $25 a month,
plus a variable per-hour searching charge. As of January 1993, about
38,000 motion picture title records are available. Plans are underway
to load this database into the University of California's union catalog,
which is available without charge through the Internet. See the submission
from Edward Richmond, UCLA Film and Television Archive, pp. 362-5.Return
to text
(152) As of June 1993, about
94,000 film and television records are available.Return
to text
(153) See the discussion at
the L.A. hearing, pp. 88-96.Return to text
(154) Emily J. Laskin, William
Horrigan, and Greg Beal, eds., The American Film Institute Guide
to College Courses in Film and Television, 8th ed. (New York:
ARCO/Simon & Schuster, 1990), xviii. For discussion of the role of
archives in film scholarship and teaching, see the statement by Tom
Gunning for the Society for Cinema Studies, D.C. hearing, pp. 25-8.Return
to text
(155) See the submission from
the Committee for Film Preservation and Public Access, pp. 52-78. Supplementary
letters by committee members allude to such donor agreements; see,
for example, letters by Gregory Luce (pp. 84-6) and Michael V. Rotello
(p. 99). These submissions argue that such "exclusive rights" contracts
will have the perverse long-term effect of preventing good copies of
certain public domain titles from reaching the general public.Return
to text
(156) For the appeals decision,
see 902 F.2d. 1540 (Fed. Cir. 1990). The case is discussed in Paul
M. Mahoney, Jr., "Transfer of Antique Films to the Library of Congress:
Outright Gift, Dual Transaction, or Quid Pro Quo Under Section
170? Transamerica Corp. v. United States," Tax Lawyer 44 (Spring
1993): 957-66.Return to text
(157) See testimony by Mary
Lea Bandy, MoMA, D.C. hearing, p. 80.Return to text
(158) This, of course, assumes
that sufficient vault space is available.Return to text
(159) Estimated at the monthly
rate of $175 per million feet (one thousand 1000-foot reels), an average
of the rates quoted by three commercial nitrate facilities (two East
Coast, one West Coast). Public archive holdings exclude the recent
Disney deposit at the Library of Congress and 1993 Turner transmittals
to the Museum of Modern Art.
This rate excludes charges for service, inspection, or retrieval. MoMA estimates
that at 1993 commercial rates, it would cost over $800,000 yearly to store
its film collection (nitrate and safety) at the Museum's current service and
security levels (Mary Lea Bandy, interview, June 14, 1993).Return
to text
(160) Andrea Alsberg, "Dracula
en espaol," Archive: UCLA Film and Television Archive Newsletter (January/February
1993): 5; and David Francis, interview, June 6, 1993.Return
to text
(161) See written submission,
pp. 101-2.Return to text
(162) Bruce Goldstein, interview,
May 5, 1993. To borrow a print from a film archive, Film Forum typically
pays a handling fee to the archive and a rental fee to the rights holder.
Film Forum takes steps to reduce the wear-and-tear on the archival
print. Even with the permission of copyright holders, archives will
generally not lend films, unless they are confident that the copy will
not be damaged in exhibition.Return to text
(163) See Kirk Honeycutt, "Classics
Pay Their Way in Pre-Vid Theatrical Runs," Hollywood Reporter,
June 4, 1992, p. 1+. The theatrical re-release of commercially restored
titles like Lawrence of Arabia opens the door for lucrative
home video products.Return to text
(164) The physical condition
of the nitrate controls the labor-intensive preparation time needed
before copying can begin. The $1.50-per-foot estimate would be for
a silent film copied from a print that needed little preparation, with
the creation of a safety duplicate negative and answer print. The $3.50
estimate would be for a sound film where the original picture and track
negatives survived but needed significant preparation work. (Background
for these estimates from Edward Richmond and Bob Gitt, memo to authors,
April 22, 1993.) As Ralph Sargent, President of Film Technology, testified
about 25 black-and-white preservation projects completed by his company, "there
does not appear to be any correlation between the gross footage and
`extra charges'" for the labor and processes needed to achieve archival
quality; L.A. hearing, p. 31.Return to text
(165) Duplicate nitrate on the
same title can result in less safety footage created, but usually considerably
more safety is created, because of separate soundtrack copying or the
varieties of elements created (duplicate negatives, fine grain masters,
reference prints, etc.). An example: The George Eastman House in 1977
copied 484,000 feet of nitrate and created 512,000 feet of acetate;
in 1982 it copied just 215,000 feet of nitrate but created 617,000
feet of acetate; John B. Kuiper, "Film Preservation at George Eastman
House," Image 26 (1984): 22.Return to text
(166) This estimate would break
down as follows: George Eastman House, 6,000,000 feet; Library of Congress,
40,000,000 feet; Museum of Modern Art, 25,500,000 feet; UCLA, 24,000,000
feet; other archives with smaller nitrate collections (Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences, Anthology Film Archives, Bishop Museum,
National Center for Jewish Film, Pacific Film Archive, Oregon Historical
Society, Southwest Film/Video Archives, and Wisconsin Center for Film
and Theater Research), 1,600,000 feet. Since the majority of this surviving
material is now from the sound era, an average per-nitrate-foot conversion
of $2.50 might be expected. 97,100,000 feet x $2.50 = $242,750,000.
(Interviews with archivists from each institution, January-May 1993;
for several of the smaller collections, footage was estimated from
title figures.)Return to text
(167) See, for instance, testimony
by Richard Dayton, YCM, L.A. hearing, p. 32.Return to
text
(168) William K. Everson, "Should
Everything Be Saved?" Films in Review 29 (November 1978):
543.Return to text
(169) The Preservation Commission
of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) has made an
attempt to establish objective standards in this generally subjective
area of duplication quality; see Henning Schou and Dominic Case, "An
Experimental Quality Control Program for Printing Archival Film," SMPTE
Journal 96 (December 1987): 1180-5.Return to text
(170) R.M.M. Wiener, "Vanishing
Art: Fading Color Threatens Film Archives," Boxoffice 116
(April 28, 1980): 8. Return to text
(171) See submission from Sony
Pictures Entertainment, pp. 352-5.Return to text
(172) See submission from Sony
Pictures; and "Columbia Aims To Show Its True Colors with New Group," Variety,
June 27, 1990, p. 14.Return to text
(173) See testimony from
Mary Lea Bandy, MoMA, D.C. hearing, p. 82. Return to
text
(174) Robert Rosen, "Unity,
Not Sour Grapes, Needed To Restore Classic Films," Los Angeles
Times, December 28, 1992, p. F3.Return to text
(175) The Ben-Hur restoration
was supervised by David Gill and Kevin Brownlow, for "Thames Silents" and
the 1987 London Film Festival; see Brownlow, "Reconstructing Silent
Classics a Global Effort," Variety, June 1, 1988. The Noah's
Ark restoration was supervised by Bob Gitt for UCLA; see Four
Tasks of Film Archives (Tokyo: Film Center of the National Museum
of Art, 1990), 145-6.Return to text
(176) Susan Dalton, interview,
May 19, 1993.Return to text
(177) AMIA grew from two
organizations, FAAC and TAAC (the Film Archives Advisory Committee
and the Television Archives Advisory Committee), for American institutions
concerned with the archival management and preservation of moving image
material; see submission by AMIA (Jan-Christopher Horak, current President).
As of March 1993, AMIA has 196 individual members, 35 non-profit institutional
members, and 11 for-profit institutional members.Return
to text
(178) Approximate percentages
calculated from unpublished lists of FIAF archive holdings. Of the
846 feature films (of four reels or more) produced in the U.S. in 1918,
only about 29 titles survive in complete form in U.S. public archives;
approximately 27 additional complete titles survive in foreign FIAF
archives. Thus the current U.S. survival rate for 1918 features comes
to just 3.4% of total production, with an additional 3.2% precariously
held in foreign archives. Because the lists are thought to be somewhat
less complete for foreign, than for American, archives, the proportion
of U.S. silent features held abroad is probably even greater than reported.
For an earlier history of the repatriation of missing American silent
films, see Eileen Bowser, "`Lost' Films Are Found in the Most Unexpected
Places," New York Times, June 25, 1978, pp. D17, 22.Return
to text
(179) Rone Tempest, "French
Festival Takes Aim at Film Preservation Efforts," Los Angeles Times,
October 10, 1991, p. F3.Return to text
(180) Frederick Wiseman, testimony,
D.C. hearing, p. 12.Return to text
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