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Every second as I'’m talking now,

cinema is falling to dust.

Most people don'’t realize or think somebody else should

think about it.

Not just celluloid, but also videotape, and now

digital, have all the same problems.

All of us have had our experiences of loss,

and that becomes the foundation of archiving.

Film does have a limited life, but that'’s the value

of preservation, isn'’t it? It'’s to make certain that

that life is a long life.

How much less we would know about the world that

we might never travel to without being able to watch

films, from different eras and different countries,

that only exist because archivists saved them.

People working in this field consider themselves

to be backstage people.

So not many people know what we are doing.

When I personally become interested in an artist

or a thinker in any way, one part that'’s very interesting

to me is the path that they took to get to that point.

And archiving; it shows that path.

A film archive, as a space, is interesting, there are work

areas and there are vaults where things are stored.

But anytime I give a tour to somebody of the archive,

they'’re still kind of blown away by the scale of it,

because we just have a ton of stuff: on pallets

and in boxes, on shelves and in cans, and barcodes

and numbers written on boxes...

As these things get stored, and labelled and numbered,

and put into an archive, these become, quite literally,

our memories.

So we think that about 80% of all the silent films

in the world are completely gone.

They didn'’t really think they were of any value,

and they melted them down for the silver.

Not only were you saving yourself in storage costs,

you were also making money by reclaiming the silver

that was included in the film stock.

They were like, maybe the way people treated comic books

when I was a kid: they were cheap, they fell apart.

Who cared? You used them, then you got rid of them.

They were deliberately destroyed.

Film was not treated as art, and film was not treated

as a historical source.

So dump them. That'’s the way the attitude was.

And they believed that, once safety film came along,

there was no need any longer to keep nitrate film.

Nitrate, or nitrocellulose film, is the film stock

that was used from the very beginning up to about 1950.

All of those Hollywood features that you see

on TCM or in festivals were created on nitrate film.

It says: Eastman Kodak Nitrate Film.

It'’s a really good film stock. It'’s very, very strong,

but it'’s very, very flammable.

It can withstand time, if treated with respect.

If it gets too close to an open flame or a match,

it'’ll go up like that.

It literally explodes.

There'’s this dark joke or comment that the largest

archive is the bottom of the Pacific Ocean,

because so many of those nitrate prints were dumped.

And there were a handful of catastrophic nitrate fires.

The Fox Film Corporation had a devastating fire in 1937

at their vaults in New Jersey that they lost most

of their silent films.

"Autumn,which was previously booked for Saturday, was

destroyed in a fire." Back in the day, nitrate fires were

very common, and they had to change the program because

they lost their print.

They would make movies constantly, but they weren'’t

very good about saving the movies made five years

before or ten years before, because their attitude was:

"If you like a Fred Astaire movie, just wait, there'’ll

be another one in six months."

This was even the approach of the filmmakers. Very few

of them, some did, of course, but very few of them

in the early days wanted to keep any films.

After the initial run of the film, they couldn'’t

imagine that there'’d be another use for it.

There wasn'’t a lot of awareness of film as an art

maybe at the Studios, but it was happening in museums

and archives around the world.

They had legal restrictions. They were surrounded in large

by the indifference of the cultural environment

of the time.

Four major national archives that would become FIAF:

the International Federation of Film Archives,came together.

They had to explain what they were doing. They had

to explain to the Studios that they were not a threat.

They had to explain to their government funders

and to the public that cinema was an art.

They had to explain to the Fire Department

that they had to be able to build nitrate vaults.

There was the first generation of archivists: Henri Langlois,

Iris Barry, Jacques Ledoux, Ernest Lindgren. Most of them,

not Ernest Lindgren, were film collectors, and it was their

enthusiasm that put together collections of films,

and they were run on a semi-official basis.

For him to avoid the Germans, who would take the films

and burn them, because they were forbidden films, he was

switching films. So that'’s why even today we find a film

that was not corresponding to its cans.

Gosfilmofondis the Russian State Film Archive, which was

founded in 1948. The film depository was there

from 1937. There was a legal deposit of everything.

So there is a very low probability of a Soviet film,

from 1948 to 1991, to be lost. On the other hand,

Gosfilmofondholds one of the most important

collections of foreign films. And this is where a huge

amount of lost or partially lost films were found,

especially German films, because when the war was won,

the Soviet troops took the material to Moscow

and the Germans, before that, captured lots of films

from the territories they occupied.

So Gosfilmofondis still an invaluable source for many

international collaborations.

Our vaults were at a little village outside London called

Aston Clinton. Once a week, a van came to pick up any waste

film we had. We were the furthest out of London.

So when it arrived, the van was full of film.

I and a colleague used to unload all the film off

the van, replace it with other nitrate films, and put them

into the collection. Now, this was strictly wrong.

But 10 or 15 years later, they'’d come back to us and say:

"Have you got a print of this?" And we'’d say: "Yes."

But we never told them this was a print

we'’d actually taken off the back of the van on its way

to the silver recovery plant.

David Shepard, starting as a film buff, he worked

at the American Film Institute in charge of collecting films

from the Studios, because, at the time, the Studios wanted

to destroy their own films.

For example, the Universal silent films have been

destroyed by Universal. So it took people like

David Shepard or Sam Kula to tell RKOin 1966:

"Don'’t destroy the negatives of Citizen Kane, Fred Astaire,

King Kong,and so on. Why don'’t you bring them

to the Library of Congress?"

On this side, we have Universalpictures.

So we have, like, the original negatives of Frankenstein

and Dracula.

That'’s been the challenge as to step in and decide

who'’s responsible for saving these important films

for future generations. Is that the responsibility

of the companies that produced them? Many

of those companies are out of business or they belong

to big international corporations.

Or is it the responsibility of the government? So that'’s

always been the tension in the United States?

In a way, I look at this as an archaeology center.

We'’re trying to rescue films that are lost or unknown

before they ultimately disappear forever.

I fought for things which one day perhaps will be lost.

Heaven knows if in hundreds of years people will still see

films of Murnau and Lang and Renoir.

It'’s too hot. Thank you.

I hope I wasn'’t too pessimistic.

But film is really a fragile art.

That'’s the first thing you do: you collect and you conserve.

And then there'’s the technical challenge, because when

the films were collected, finally, it took quite some time

to realize that you need to preserve them: nitrate film

stock and the safety film stock. There was decomposition,

and there'’s the vinegar syndrome and the color fades.

Film decomposes, if not stored properly.

The great majority of audiovisual film heritage is

still very much at risk of being lost forever.

Without the right temperatures and humidity controls,

this would happen to film archives all over the world.

But you can see the image is almost completely gone.

Just like the rest of us, it'’s organic material

and it'’s going to decay.

Film is susceptible to the vagaries of time,

of weather and temperature, and whether it had this type

of chemical composition or that. Each one will age

or rot in a different way, and that will eventually

affect the images. So it wasn'’t a large leap to look at all

this rotting film and think of it as our own rotting

memories. And I was always looking for images where

people were trying to be heroic in some way.

It was either tragic or comic, or something.

That they were valiantly punching the boxing bag,

you know, with the boxing bag with now just some chaotic blob,

you know and you don'’t know if it'’s going to win or lose,

but they'’re still in there fighting. And that is

the experience of being alive. We'’re fighting every day

for another one.

Anything that we have in our archive now is a survivor.

The archives had no money at that time at all.

We did virtually no film duplication.

In fact, the chief technical officer at the archive,

Harold Brown, made his own printer. We couldn'’t afford

to buy a printer, he built his own printer, using parts

of an old showman'’s projection outfit, bits of elastic,

and things like this.

Only careful copying of the restored

original enables us to see the great

Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson as Hamlet. And look at

that ghostly cinema trick that they contrived!

This unique film was saved for posterity when it had

almost perished. Sir Johnston'’s daughter found it rotting

in an attic, when it had already started to shrink.

The film base can just dry out and the film is very,

very brittle. I mean, it'’s a negative. Luckily, this film

exists elsewhere. It'’s an original George Méliès negative

called: From Paris to Monte Carlo.

As the film starts to decay, it will eat through everything

around it. It'’ll spread. It'’s almost like a cancer.

It'’ll go everywhere.

We have open boxes where all that was left was dust,

brown dust.

When you get to this point, you really don'’t have

anything left. This is a soundtrack from 1929.

But we'’ve also opened boxes where the film is just

a solid block of plastic.

It begins with accumulating the material and inspecting it,

and documenting it, and understanding

what shape it'’s in. And from that, you can construct

priorities for preservation.

It'’s heartbreaking when you have to make decisions,

what can be preserved, when 100 films are falling

to pieces and you can preserve only ten.

The practice of personal record keeping is very,

very old. You could argue it goes back to the cave

paintings, or to clay tablets, or to quilting, you know,

writing letters. And that somewhere in the middle

of this spectrum of personal record keeping is home

movies and home video. And then video with our telephones,

and who knows what comes next.

People forget that up until the video era of the early 80s,

everybody captured everything on film, especially

these home movie formats.

Home movies really goes back to this guy right here.

It'’s basically a smaller version of the Lumière Cinematograph,

if you would. It'’s a hand crank camera.

In 1925 they came out with this guy right here.

And by the way, these all still work.

There are a lot of clichés, birthday parties, holidays

and so on. But there'’s also just things you would never expect

were documented on film, sometimes quite creatively.

It'’s quite a creative culture in amateur film.

I think about the film that we found of one

of the American concentration camps for Japanese Americans

during World War II.

Footage that my spouse found in a house that was abandoned,

when she brought it home, it was film shot during the Depression

in the United States. And it'’s the real people that were

in the book and the film of The Grapes of Wrath,

migrant agricultural workers who were living under terrible

conditions, working in the fields in a very

complicated moment in 1938. And here'’s color footage showing

the real lives of these people.

We found footage of Vienna showing Jewish stores that have

been vandalized and destroyed by Nazi gangs, material that is

now used in almost every documentary and every book

about the Holocaust in Austria. Home movies really begin

to change the way we look about history, because ordinary

people who shot home movies have been witnesses

to historical events.

Different people can look at them in different ways:

for anthropological reasons, cultural, historical,

sociological reasons.

Every year we organize Home Movie Day,and we invite

people who donate their film. It'’s always in tears,

when you listen to their story, it'’s like so much memory

of the people who shot it. I think that'’s kind of like...

what makes me feel good about what we are doing here.

But there it is. And it'’s on that little teeny weenie

frames, on this tiny little film.

Last year, one of the NYU students, Becca Bender, was

doing an internship at Lincoln Center, and one collection

turned out to be a large home movie collection

by Leopold Godowsky, Jr. He and his father were known

in the classical music world. But, by happenstance,

he also was the co-inventor of Kodachrome film process.

Kodachrome, the most beautiful color format ever invented,

perhaps. In the midst of this home movie collection,

there was one anomaly, a reel of 35mm nitrate film.

And it'’s the most charming thing you'’ve ever seen,

Mr. and Mrs. Einstein pretending to drive. Meanwhile,

Warner Bros. is rear projecting footage of Niagara Falls,

a jazz club and whatever.

It'’s also funny because Albert Einstein famously

never learned to drive a car. And when it was posted online,

it literally has now been seen by millions of people.

That'’s me, 4 or 5, looking very sceptically:

"What is this world all about?" That'’s my father, that's

my mother, and that'’s Adolfas.

Cinema is like a big tree with many different branches,

the same with literature, the same with dance, the same

with music. Diaristic cinema, in which I'’m involved,

there are many, many little stories, because

what is a story? Every day, we go through many different

mini-stories. There are big stories, and there are tiny

little stories. So there is a very wide range of what

a story is.

We received a letter from a lady in California.

Well, she happened to have a film, and she said:

"Would you take it? It'’s been in our family for years."

It was made in Italy by Roberto Leone Roberti.

He sent it to his brother in New York, and he wanted

to save it from censorship.

Our curator looked at it and realized that it was

a lost film. And Roberto Leone Roberti was

the father of Sergio Leone. No one had seen it,

but it was the family saying: "We have to save this piece

of our family history. We believe this is important."

And it was, it was important!

Sometimes what we consider a lost film is something

that has not been identified yet.

The Lon Chaney film from 1927, The Unknown,was missing.

But because the film was marked "Unknown," it ended up in a room

with thousands of other cans of films that were unknown.

It was like: "What'’s in these cans?" And they realized:

"This isn'’t an unknown film. It'’s The Unknown,

with Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford!"

And that had been missing for years and years.

It takes a very long time to list and catalog films.

We do it very, very slowly.

It'’s hard not to talk about Pan Si Dongbecause it was

such a surprise.

It is an adaptation of one of the legends in the Chinese

classic The Journey to the West which is a legend that every

Chinese person knows. They know it by heart.

And it'’s a legend that has been used in books

and as illustrations, and in very many ways.

This was the very first film adaptation, and it has

all the superstars. It had a large budget,

and it was also very modern in its technique.

It disappeared and it was considered lost.

So when we discovered this seven reels of Pan Si Dong

in our archive, the Chinese film archivists, they had a hard time

believing that it was really, but they confirmed that this was

really an original print of that adaptation.

So we brought it back to China, and it'’s been screened

from Singapore to Seattle, all over. But of course,

to Chinese speaking people, it has a special place.

We'’re not going to keep finding silent films.

And then, like, several times a year, it seems somewhere

in the world, not just single movies appear that were presumed

lost, but sometimes whole collections.

Of course, there was some smuggling. There were

people like going to a screening room, taking a film, making

what we call a '’dupe negative'’ in a printer,

during the night, and then returning the print.

Basically, illegally, one print would bring babies.

Many times, this original print is gone. No one kept it.

But the dupe negative is still there.

There was this big discovery of a complete but very low

photographic quality print in Buenos Aires, and missing

sequences were included from that print in the beautiful

previous restoration. But I finally liked the film,

which I never enjoyed before. When we have all of those

extra plot lines in Metropolis, that'’s when this whole thing

starts to click and work. So I think the film is

different now. This was an eye-opener for me.

One of the more fun things that we do around here is

we host a workshop called Mostly Lost.

We have an audience to help us identify films that we don'’t

really know what the titles are.

And we ask people to watch them and yell at everything

they recognize. Misfortune!

And people come in from literally all over the world.

Some are archivists, film specialists...

Locations specialists, license plate specialists,

fashion specialists...

It'’s a lot of fun. It's a lot of people shouting at the screen

when they recognize an actor, or a place, or something.

That bridge is in Philadelphia!

That car is a such and such, and they only built those

for two years...

This is what would have been called a heavyweight car.

And it'’s been amazing to watch these people figure out

what these movies are.

The actual celluloid itself can tell you a lot of different

things. Is the film negative or positive?

Is it a talking film, is it a silent film?

The manufacturer: Kodak, Fuji...

You can often find on Kodak stock an edge code that will

help you locate the earliest year that that film could have

been made.

A triangle and a square, which is 1924.

And then you can start looking for clues inside the image.

Is it an actor'’s face? Is it the type face of the intertitle

that'’s indicative of the Studio that may have produced it?

Where it gets very tricky, if it'’s a Western, those are

the worst to try to identify. All horses kind of look alike.

All rugged terrain looks alike. There'’s so little clues

to go on with a Western, and there were so many made!

It'’s very close to detective work because it triggers

your curiosity.

Many of these films we dragged from the dumpsters

in the streets of New York, when the labs went bankrupt.

Everybody switched to video and the labs had to close.

I would get called up by lab owners and they'’d say:

"Just go over and take it. Take what you want."

I'’m trying to locate anyone that was related to the film,

then seeing if they have any elements left, in their closets,

in their basement, and then trying to get them to bring

them into our vaults.

So, basically, what you can see all around here are new

deposits. And it'’s coming and coming.

Whenever I meet someone, I say: "Do you have films?"

To my banker: "Do you have films?" I'’m dating a girl:

"Do you have films?" I'’m asking the question to everyone.

And I always end up in places with dead mice.

I don'’t know why but I always end up in a place that has mice.

And I'’m like Indiana Jones' father: "I don'’t like mice!"

And I always get to that.

When they closed a lot of these big labs,

they discarded the stuff off to the scrap man.

Millions of dollars worth of perfect equipment,

they had signs on them: "Scrap."

A lot of people thought I was absolutely crazy,

I got trailer loads of stuff.

I edited on this all my films.

We used to cut on film. The Steenbeck, the actual

machine you cut on, is still fine.

The joiner is still fine, but the technological

infrastructure collapsed to prevent us from cutting

on film, even though we still shoot on film.

Someone at Pixar posted an article from Screen Daily

that said that Ken Loach, the British filmmaker, was

looking for coating tape that you use for film editing.

We couldn'’t get a particular numbering tape.

It has a colored emulsion on it, and a machine stamps

consecutive numbers. If you line up the numbers,

then the sound is lined up with the picture. And nobody makes

that anymore. My office was right around the corner

from what we call the Pixar Film Museum,

which is sort of a repository of all the unused film equipment.

And we had a bunch of it.

We asked all around the film world, and it came from Pixar

in the States.

The ultimate digital film studio comes to the rescue

of a man who is insisting on working in film.

We were very grateful for that, and we'’ve exchanged

some happy messages with them.

As technology is changing all the time, artefacts

from the past get forgotten. So part of an archive,

as far as I'’m concerned, also includes a cinema museum.

This camera was actually used on the movie Star Wars.

A lot of Waldenwas shot through this camera.

There'’s not so many inventions that stayed efficient

for so long. And the projector the Lumière we'’re using is

pretty much the same as the projector that is behind me.

And for one century it was like the best tool we could use

to show moving images.

We found recently a group of films by the Lumière

brothers. The physical condition of these prints is amazing.

In theory, and maybe even in practice, these films can

still be projected.

So, those DCP projectors we have now, they'’re going to be

transformed very soon, and it'’s going to be different,

and it'’s never going to be the same tool.

One day, Henri Langlois brings to New York, and

at the Metropolitan Museum, he projects a nitrate film

by Raoul Walsh. I became aware of what we lost in the richness

of the nitrate film. I could not believe it.

Hey there, everybody. Welcome to TCM, I'’m Ben Mankiewicz.

In May, the George Eastman Museum will be opening its doors

for its third annual Nitrate Picture Show Film Festival,

focusing solely on the conservation and preservation

of films made from nitrate.

The first film we actually showed

in the inaugural Nitrate Picture Show

was a print from the Museum of Modern Art

of Casablanca.

That'’s the oldest existing material for that film.

Everybody has seen Casablanca dozens of times, probably.

This print made everybody rethink that they never saw

Casablancabefore.

So, personally, I feel that'’s my Starry Night.

I do believe that film is comparable, as an art form,

to the paintings and sculptures that are in this building.

It'’s having those archives, now that they'’ve taken care

of the film for so long,

looking at those films as projectable material.

When we'’re running nitrate and this is open, we'’ve got

our hand on the douser the entire time.

We'’re looking at the screen, and we'’re watching the film run,

and we'’re listening to it run.

If the film ever stops, then we just immediately

close the douser, and we cut off the heat, which is what would

cause the fire.

My father had his collection, which he was building of all

this nitrate film, because he foresaw that television was

coming in and they were going to be making documentary

productions, that they were going to need actuality footage.

When they started to sell their films to TV in the 50s,

they realized: "Well, we better start having preservation

programs of our own."

Because as long as you can keep selling the movies,

then there'’s a desire on the studio part to preserve them.

Ted Turner paid a huge amount of money for the same

collection that we have here, which is the MGM pre-1948

collection. And he bought that to start TCM, to run on TNT,

TBS at the time. And he pays a huge amount of money for it.

And suddenly the studio executives were like: "Whoa,

we can get money for this." Now, the only one that really

thought that before, in my opinion too, is Walt Disney.

Disney was always saving his films, always was very

conscious about how his heritage would be saved and remembered.

And then, way down at the end, all by itself, is

the Walt Disney Collection. So, we have the original negatives

to Snow Whiteand Fantasia. They never threw anything away,

we have all sorts of stuff from Disney.

The Snow Whitethat Disney saw as a child, later made him do

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

And we were able to find this film, which had not been

seen, and we restored it.

You look at something like Snow White,that'’s still

around, and it'’s been transferred from film to VHS

to DVD to Blu-ray to 4K. But the original element is

still on film.

So, there are Hollywood Studios that have nitrate

film stored. Every time that they'’re doing a new scan,

they go back to that original material.

From the top to the bottom, is Gone with the Wind.

They have to go back to the original because

that'’s where all the information is.

This was in the film camera, on the film set,

with Clark Gable, with Vivien Leigh, with the director.

We have films in our collection that are very controversial.

We have films in our collection that are very popular,

but they'’re all kept in the same vault right next to each other.

Technological transformation has been inherently part of film

history from the first day.

All the major developments in cinema occurred before 1906.

That was the great period of experiment.

You found 68mm film, 70mm film, 17.5mm. So there were

no standards.

And it'’s always so bizarre, when you discover films

in an old recorded gauge or format that is totally

forgotten.

Buster Keaton made a film called Hard Luck,and when it was

restored by Kevin Brownlow, the beginning and end of each

two reels was missing.

We found the film complete in 24mm on Ozaphan base.

But think of it, that'’s the only surviving print with the missing

scenes of Buster Keaton! So, we had to set up a machine

and, eventually, we could read the images and Hard Luckis

back complete.

And then, of course, there was a little bit of stabilization

with 35mm as a standard.

Film historians were not interested in what happened

before the cinema. They said cinema was invented in 1895

and nothing relevant had happened before.

And that was a general view in the late 50s, when I first

became an archivist. I said: "No, this is not true."

There had been projection forms before. The most famous

of which, of course, is the Magic Lantern.

A lot of the stories that were used in the early cinema were

also Magic Lantern slide stories. And, of course,

a lot of the techniques used in the Magic Lantern:

the dissolve from one image to the other,

the animated slides, slides with moving parts so you could

create movement. There was a lot of the techniques that were used

in early cinema that were there already.

Today, when we film with the cell phone, we instantly have

color and sound. Because it'’s so easy, it is not so valuable.

But in the early days of cinema, to get color on a screen,

what you had to do is to take a black and white film,

take a brush, take dyes or paint, and paint every single

frame of the film to get the impression of a color film.

It was hand colored or stencil colored films.

Alongside with hand coloring and stencil, there are very

popular techniques such as tinting and toning.

You would dip the films in dyes, or you would bleach

out the silver halides and added new color to it.

This is toning. It'’s no longer black and white.

It'’s actually blue and white.

And then we have tinting. And the different colors would

represent different scenes. The blue shows the ocean

or the lake, the amber is more what'’s happening on earth,

on the ground. Every time the tint changes, you have

what'’s called a splice here.

Black and pink, blue and pink, and a splice in-between where

they'’ve been connected and joined.

These films are kept in the vaults and are usually

only inspected by a few film archivists, and maybe some

lucky film historians. And we felt with this book

we could give a sense of what it is to inspect

an original colored film frame and you can see all the details.

As part of working with Martin Scorsese, I have

had the pleasure and the honor of being able to help make

documentaries, produce documentaries. And one

of the things that Marty does is cultural preservation.

I remember on No Direction Home,Marty'’s first film

about Bob Dylan, we were looking for the screen test that Warhol

shot of Dylan. We went to MoMA, we went to the Warhol

Foundation, and it existed. It'’s a wonderful moment in the film

because Dylan is revealing his restlessness, but he'’s

also quite aware of himself. And then later, I just was reading

about this extraordinary filmmaker, Barbara Rubin, who

worked with Jonas Mekas. And she was this really kind

of legendary figure who'’s not that well known. And

she introduced Dylan to Warhol, she introduced Lou Reed

to Andy Warhol. She was very close with Allen Ginsberg.

And she actually shot that Dylan screen test,

she was running the camera. Preservation has that added

benefit of learning more about the history of film.

In 1982, I was one of the founders of a very small

film festival in the city of Pordenone. We showed silent

films we could find. Eight people came

to the first festival. Those eight people talked

to other people. So, the number grew over the years.

And so the festival became what it is today.

In the meantime, I was learning where the films are, what can be

done or should be done in order to preserve them. And I started

visiting film archives and museums. It was a little

bit like being in the Far West, but it was a great ride.

Last year, I nearly didn'’t go to Pordenone, because I looked

at the list of films, and I didn'’t recognize very many

of them. And I'’ve been in this business 60 years,

and I thought if I didn'’t recognize them, they can'’t be

any good. Well, fortunately, I went. And the Pordenone team

had done the usual miraculous thing they do, producing films

you'’ve never heard of, which turn out to be very often

masterpieces.

As a historian, I feel rather ashamed not to have discovered

them for myself and made them better known. But this is

one way of doing it.

Film is this amazingly collaborative art form,

every step of the way, whether you'’re just dealing

with the production, the creation of the script,

trying to get it funded, and then you get it

funded and you'’ve got to come to the laboratory, you'’ve got

to rely on the alchemy of processing, the mechanics

of the machines, the scanning...

Just like filmmaking is collaborative, the archival

process is deeply collaborative.

No single entity can solve this question

of preservation alone.

The restored version of Abel Gance'’s Napoleonmade

a sensation.

And in the 80s, they restored A Star is Born,the 1954

version with Judy Garland. And that set off what

they called '’The Decade of Preservation.'’

You have three things: you'’ve got access, you'’ve got

preservation, you'’ve got restoration. A lot

of people are throwing a huge amount of money at restoration,

while we have all this stuff that should be preserved.

Especially in countries like Asia, Africa, where we don'’t

have that kind of money to be able to restore films in that

manner. For us, we need to first save it. Restoration is

a First World concept.

So where do we begin? We begin with first finding the lost

films, looking at what has survived.

Cineteca di Bologna is doing: reprint, restore, refine.

And, after, it'’s supposed to be preserved.

So it becomes: immagine ritrovataand restaurata

and preservata.Not only restored, but also preserved,

that'’s the most important thing.

We produce new elements, new conservation Elements, and store

them in a way that that film is safe and its life is extended

for another 100 years.

Everybody who'’s interested in film preservation is

interested in answering the question: "How do I transmit

to the next generation the work done by the prior generation?"

Film preservation is an expensive proposition and not

many people are helping. Thanks to Scorsese and to a few

others that understand the need for it.

Scorsese created The Film Foundation

for that very purpose.

He saw these wonderful films that were not really being

properly preserved. He said: "Well, I'’ll do it."

Most people knew him. They knew he was a filmmaker.

But he explained film preservation

to the general public.

Originally, he was joined by passionate advocates like

Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg.

This started as him being personally upset that the films

he loved all his life were turning magenta,

the colors were going...

One of the reasons that Marty made Raging Bullfamously

in black and white was because he just didn'’t want

to have to worry about the film fading within ten years

and becoming magenta.

It was a problem, a big problem. And Scorsese was

the person that put a lot of pressure on Kodak to make

it better. Yeah.

So, Marty wrote this impassioned letter,

and this campaign gathered letters from filmmakers around

the world who immediately signed on and became part of this

movement to help encourage Kodak, who, by the way,

were in the process of trying to develop this low fade stock,

but the urgency was kind of amplified.

When Martin Scorsese and The Film Foundationstarted

to advocate on behalf of film directors for film

preservation, that was a huge step forward.

I was very intrigued that a filmmaker of his stature was

preserving films.

Marty and Bob Rosen would go to the Studios and deliver

these lists, typewritten... It was the 80s, so it was

typewritten, these typewritten lists, and talk to them about:

"These are the films you own. And here is a guide to preserve

them." It was just something that he did while he was making

movies, in his spare time.

But this is not his job. It'’s not his job. You have

a country called US. You have a government that has a budget,

that could portion part of this budget to devote

it to film preservation. And let Scorsese make his films.

When The Film Foundationwas first started, 30 years ago,

that brought a keen awareness to everyone in the industry

in terms of the importance of film preservation.

As this foundation progressed, they now have restored close

to 900 films, from all around the world, through funders

that they find. After saving a good amount of American films,

they wanted to reach out to a lot of other countries

and a lot of other cultures.

Martin Scorsese was able to be here. And for that, I think

it'’s really the meeting of the two great kind

of inspirations in film preservation internationally,

Marty and the Cineteca di Bolognaand this festival.

It'’s very exciting for me to join all of you in a really

spectacular celebration of films, past, present

and the future and to introduce this restoration of Enamorada

by the great director Emilio Fernández.

Around the world, there'’s not an even distribution of archival

infrastructure. You know, you have enormous resources

in France, for example.

The experience in Brazil, you fight against bureaucracy

and you fight against ridiculous politics, and against

ministers who come in and don'’t know what they'’re doing,

and they start to destroy what you built up.

And so you say: "Okay, we'’ll try to build it up again."

That'’s what we do all the time.

There'’s a lot of rich heritage. And one of the things

that you notice in film is the liberation struggle,

because African countries were under colonial rule.

Looking even at the Nelson Mandela archives,

their own collections will show you the struggle against

the apartheid era. And Nelson Mandela is an icon,

but it also shows his struggle and the struggle of the South

African people. Many countries came to help South Africa,

so the footage that you see at these archives is very

important. It shows struggle, but it shows unity. It shows

the oneness of the people of Africa.

I tried to show some of the films in the archive

to senior personnel in the nation, so that they see

the importance of the archives by projecting to them important

films, like announcing the independence of the Sudan.

As a Zimbabwean, I love watching films, working

for the National Archives, the songs, the speeches made

by great men and women of the struggle, the construction

of Lake Kariba, which is one of the biggest constructions

that was done not only in Zimbabwe

but in Southern Africa, and the way they would preserve

the animals during the building of that dam.

All this footage is very important for us.

There'’s also Africa in its relationship to its former

colonial powers. You also have the Cold War, some of these

countries had to develop their prints in the former

Soviet bloc. Some were processed in China, Romania,

Czech Republic, Poland. So, you have to go to Yugoslavia,

to Russia, to look for some of these films.

So, we find ourselves with what you may call a kind

of dismembered memory, because it'’s all over the place.

The vaults are the perfect example of store it in a cool,

dry place. But this is what happens when you store it

in a warm, damp place.

I distinctly remember till this day, that very afternoon

that I opened the door to the archives and I saw piles

and piles of rotting films. And that'’s when I really

discovered the amazing men and women who throughout

the decades have been fighting this uphill battle of trying

to preserve my country'’s cinematic heritage and trying

to build the film archives from scratch.

I was then further exposed to almost a similar narrative

across the region: from Thailand to Indonesia, to Malaysia,

to Singapore, of this ragtag group of archivists that are

just trying to make do, with very limited resources,

but with an unimaginable level of passion.

The weather in Taiwan is warm and humid, so the humidity

and the temperature control is very important for us.

And we spend a lot of money to make the environment

in a good condition.

The Myanmar film industry was started in 1920. We lost

the first feature film of Myanmar and also the 90%

of the black and white films.

My grandfather is a filmmaker and also my grandfather'’s first

feature film was lost. So, this is a sad story

of Myanmar cinema.

I think I have the responsibility to keep not only

my family films, but also the Myanmar cinema.

If I had a chance to visit the Canadian archive,

Library and Archives Canada. They'’ve been complaining about

cuts. And it'’s true, there were cuts under the conservative

government, that has really slashed the staff. But when

you go inside the vaults, you have to really say: "Respect."

The way they can move from a set of temperature levels...

You'’re like: "Wow." In our context, energy is

a big problem. No African country has reliable electricity

100%, not a single one.

Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai were the three places where

the film industry started and they were all port cities,

the wrong places in terms of film preservation,

because you were close to the sea. The humidity levels

were too high. And by the time we came to the starting

of the National Film Archive, in 1964, we had already lost

70% to 80% of our heritage.

You had a very imposing figure, P. K. Nair. He was sort

of something like Henri Langlois to all of us. And P. K. Nair was

not only the director of the archive, but he was

the founder of the National Film Archive.

And I found him just outside the Archive. He had retired,

he was old. I never knew I was making a film called

Celluloid Man.I was just recording P. K. Nair.

And I walked in with him to the National Film Archive,

and we saw the state of the Archive. It was the most

emotional moment for me, because here were films lying completely

as if they are lost souls. You know, for me films are

like souls. It'’s like reincarnation. They can be born

anytime. You just have to show the film and it starts

living again.

It was in 2014 that I started the Film Heritage Foundation.

I didn'’t know at that point the mammoth size of the film

industry we'’ve got to deal with. It'’s too huge, nine or ten

film industries. We are making films in about 36 languages.

When you start a foundation of that kind, it'’s more

of an emotional plea to do something.

Action!

Nollywoodcinema is seen everywhere today, on line,

in the stores, both in Africa and beyond, there'’s a very huge

presence in the Diaspora. I'’m just coming back

from Burkina Faso, and there were two channels

devoted exclusively, 24 hours a day, to Nollywoodcinema.

So by that standard, of course, you cannot say that it'’s

difficult to see African cinema, if you think of African cinema

as Nollywoodcinema.

But if you think of African cinema as, also, what you can

call a kind of auteurist cinema, then you have complications.

If you think about Ousmane Sembène, Djibril Diop,

some of the major figures of African cinema, when

they were making films, it was not profitable

for the exhibitors to show African films because they could

get Hollywood films for cheaper.

What we were realizing is that there really needs to be

a very focused program to address the issue

of restoring and preserving films made on the African

continent.

So, the African Film Heritage Projectwas created

in partnership with FEPACI, the leading organization

of African filmmakers, scholars, historians, and then also

reached out to UNESCO.

What we'’re trying to do is really bring these films

back to the awareness of new generations, new audiences,

simply, across the world.

As a film student, you only know American films and French

films, and some German films and Japanese films, and that'’s it.

We run the risk of sort of falsely educating future

generations that there was only this.

We not only follow the canon of the established film history,

we try to rediscover those hidden histories.

They are buried in the film material.

I would say that I was surprised that Fragment

of an Empire,its restoration, is so successful. I think

it is one of the absolute masterpieces of silent

cinema in general. But there is a canon which is extremely

difficult to change. In Soviet cinema, I'’m used to everyone

talking about Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Vertov,

and nobody else. Ermler was somebody who really had

this wonderful ability to combine Soviet montage

with very sophisticated acting. We contacted many film archives

and we ended up finding nine different versions of the film.

I wanted to find a print with the original Russian

intertitles, and I did find it, in Switzerland. The font

of the letters changes all the time and it becomes

an important element of editing.

Why isn'’t this film better known? I don'’t know why.

I cannot go and tour the world with it. Maybe I should.

That'’s kind of why I got into this field, to try and find

unique films from the past that, for whatever reason,

have been forgotten about, and reintroducing them to sort

of broaden our film knowledge.

Sometimes a miracle happens, and this miracle usually has

somebody behind that miracle, somebody who is

active enough to advocate for a specific film or filmmaker.

This canon could be expanded.

Man, the cowboys always win.

The cowboys don'’t always win.

Yeah, they do. The cowboys always win.

Look at Tom Mix. What about John Wayne?

Man, he was about the toughest cowboy of them all, ain'’t it?

You know, in all those movies, you never saw John Wayne'’s

teeth. Not once. I think

there'’s something wrong when you don'’t see a guy's teeth.

We have a mandate to really look for films that have been

overlooked by the canon.

The L.A. Rebellion, independent African American

cinema in Los Angeles. Those were mostly students from UCLA.

And many of those filmmakers, like Charles Burnett,

and Julie Dash, and Billy Woodbury, Haile Gerima,

Larry Clark, became quite well known and had careers

as independent filmmakers.

One of the little masterpieces that we discovered was a film

called As Above, so Below, made by Larry Clark.

And this film visualizes a revolution of African

Americans against the white power structure.

When we asked Larry about the film, he said: "Oh,

last time I heard it was in a lab, but that was about 1975."

Well, we searched through every lab we could find,

and we actually found the original negative and were

able to preserve that film. For the first time, since

the early 70s, that film was actually shown.

In 2007, we finally released Charles Burnett'’s Killer

of Sheep,it had taken us six years to clear the music rights.

The response was so overwhelming. When it was shown

in the communities, African Americans recognized themselves.

They saw themselves on a screen, not as drug dealers,

not as murdering thieves. They were real people

with integrity and striving to just get a job

and feed their family.

We want the canon to include all kinds of artists,

not just white men.

People seeing themselves or seeing other people,

and understanding them.

Lunar Orbiter was an impressive advance in lunar

photography. One Orbiter got an exceptional shot.

What we think of as film history is largely determined

by what we have access to. And until the 2000s, we didn'’t have

access to most industrial and educational film.

The Congress recognized that not all films are made by Studios

in Hollywood and created the National Film Preservation

Foundationso that orphan films can be preserved,

they are so-called '’orphan films,'’ they're not owned

by commercial rights-holders.

I work specifically on short films, with student films,

documentary films. I feel like a lot of times shorts are

kind of underrepresented.

We have quite a large collection of student films,

including in that are films made by Ray Manzarek

and Jim Morrison, who were the founders of The Doors.

One of the first times The Doors ever played publicly was

at a student film festival.

We are working on a project with UCLA on the Hearst

Newsreels, and that was a collection that originally was

over 100 million feet of film, and only 27 million feet

survives. I'’d like to find these missing newsreels.

I'’d like to see something that was shot 80 or 100 years

ago of some historical person, place, or thing, and have

that come back so that they'’re not just a dry name on a piece

of paper. It brings that person closer

to the reality of the present.

When we think about film production in the United States,

we usually think about Hollywood, New York,

possibly Chicago. But in reality, on one

of the most active centers of film production was Detroit.

The myth is that more film was shot in Detroit than in New York

and Hollywood combined. And in Detroit there were a number

of very large production companies who specialized

in making corporate and industrial film.

Huge Studios, companies like the Jam Handy Organization,

an incredibly active studio, with two orchestras.

Many people who were exiled from Europe during World War II

ended up coming to Detroit, to make films, to do animation,

to be composers, to be cinematographers.

This was a dull day, a flat day. The weather was a bit

of misty, and so I finished by around 4:00, started to put

things back into the trucks, and the sun came out.

And I raced back saying: "Put it all back down, get it all out,

I'’m going to reshoot it." It was perfect, because the hill was

like that, and the sun was kind of setting back, it was

like marvellous...

Last stop on round would be Old Ma Peggoty'’s place.

It was like taking bread to the top of the world.

It was a grand ride back, though.

I knew baker would have a kettle on and doorsteps

of Hovis ready.

Often the medium itself might play some role in the work

itself. Gloves can actually be an impediment to feeling

in a more sensitive and nuanced way what'’s going on

with the film. If there'’s a broken perforation or a tear,

and it snags on the glove, it could make the damage worse.

So, when we talk about preserving a Brakhage painted

film, it'’s almost always preserving the film

from the negative, because the negative is really

the finished master. The painted film is production material.

It'’s amazing, one of a kind production material, but it'’s

not something we could remake the film from.

And you can see this was actually painted over a faded

70mm print of Irma la Douce, the Billy Wilder movie.

You can see a little bit of the faded color print underneath.

I don'’t really see how the world could be if nobody

could see Stan Brakhage films, Germaine Dulac'’s films.

Those are masterpieces. They exist and they have

to circulate, and they have to be seen. Without them,

the world would be very different.

Especially things that are underrepresented, because

if it'’s not preserved, then it will disappear

from people'’s memories.

And these are films that I think are the most

at risk, because in many instances, the filmmakers had

one copy of the film.

Even Maya Deren'’s original coffee cans, Medaglia D'’Oro,

in which she kept her unfinished films and outtakes, are here.

And so are Bruce Baillie'’s and Kenneth Anger'’s and Brakhage

and many, many countless others.

If we had treated cinema seriously from the very

beginning, we would have a very different history of cinema.

And there are really remarkable films which are not

really properly known.

We don'’t necessarily know about them because they'’ve

never been written about or shown since the time

they were made.

And there are some films that we'’re always looking for.

Hitchcock'’s, The Mountain Eagle, we wait to see if that will

one day resurface. We hope not, in a way, because it sounds

like it wasn'’t his best film, but it'’s Hitchcock.

So we look for it.

We tend to think of African cinema as beginning with people

like Sembène until the present. But of course, if you study

the colonial period, you see that there were actually

filmmakers in the colonial period from Africa as well.

One of the good examples was somebody called

Albert Samama Chikli. He was of equal stature to somebody

like the Lumière, Thomas Edison... He adopted

cinema in its very first days, started projecting some

of the Lumière films in early 1897. I think by 1903,

he was already trying to film from within a submarine.

So, took his camera inside a wooden submarine, in Tunisia,

and tried to film water, underwater. These are

the early, early years of cinema, or he was filming

from a hot-air balloon, for example. He was interested

in astronomy, he was a photographer as well.

He was part of the French army film unit with people

like Abel Gance. And if you look at his footage of World War I,

it'’s absolutely fantastic. Now here'’s somebody who played

an important role in the history of cinema in general,

but whose name does not exist in the history books. Or when

it does, it'’s really as a mention, there'’s not

a genuine recognition of him as one of the major pioneers.

Film preservation is a main, I would say, tool for filling

in these gaps.

It'’s just one of the things that every film archivist wants

to do, to be able to write, rewrite history and celebrate

people who have long been forgotten.

The Visual History Archiveis the online system for accessing

the USC Shoah Foundation'’s collection of 55,000 testimonies

from nine different genocides.

My background is in computer engineering, and as an engineer,

you are told and taught you should build things

that matter. So, being able to build technical equipment

that preserves these stories and teaches others to be better

is one of the best things that I could be doing as an engineer

in this world.

It seems to be something ingrained in us.

If we dehumanize another human being, we make them seem

like an object. All of a sudden, their life is not as important.

Our job is to humanize one set of people to others so that

they will have empathy and not hurt someone who'’s different

than them.

This area is where the International Criminal

Tribunal for Rwanda was, that'’s where we are now going.

This is where they were located.

The archives of all this information has been kept

and saved, so that people can learn more of the issues

of genocide.

And the lessons that we'’re learning from all of these

various genocides now will hopefully be around for people

to learn about in the future, so that the reminder will be here

of what the effect is of intolerance of others.

One of my favorite artists is Bob Marley, and he has

this song, which I think you'’ll know, No Woman, No Cry.

He says: in this world, if you do not know your history,

you don'’t know where you are coming from.

So, you have to know your history. And I feel

film captures history. It captures the true

emotions of people.

One of my favorite sayings or mottos has always been

a quote by George Santayana: "Those who do not remember

history are doomed to repeat it." So, for my part, I'’m

making sure that that history is there, so people can see it

and people can understand what is going on.

And that also can be seen with film preservation.

When people feel that nothing ever changes, and nothing is

ever getting better for everybody. If you just watch

some of these old movies, you can say, okay, things have

improved, things have gotten better.

That was the thing about celluloid. It'’s about light,

and the enlightenment, and the use of light,

both literally, the use of light, and metaphorically,

shedding light on a situation, on characters, on relationships.

Actually, Cinema Enlightensis from Dome, the director,

because he said: "Cinema is not only entertainment."

Enlighten is the aim of Buddhism, to be enlightened.

That'’s why he put it that way.

If you watch a film, you should learn or you should see

something else, not only entertain.

There'’s a metaphor at the heart of cinema,

which is about light: light that comes through the window

and the light in our minds.

When I was a teenager, I read a series of articles

by Milan Kundera and in one of those, he talks about

his father, how when he was passing away, at the end

of his life, he would only say two words: "It'’s strange."

And the way he talks about it, he says: "That was the essence

of his life. His life came to those two words: It'’s strange."

So, we talked about these two words, what the essence of each

person'’s life would be. I think 24 Frameis the essence

of what Abbas did. He loved simple things. He always said

it'’s much more difficult to be simple because there'’s

nothing to hide behind it.

Up until 1912, there was no statute in the American

Copyright Law to cover motion pictures, but there was

for photographs.

So, producers would hit upon this brilliant strategy

of making a long, continuous photographic print that then

they could file as a photograph. And they just kept getting

shoved back further and further into the collections,

until they ended up in a closet where they were rediscovered

in the 40s. And this is like at the time that many

of these films no longer existed in any form, except these

paper rolls.

It'’s one reason why we know so much about the work

of D. W. Griffith, it'’s because so many of his films were

registered for Copyright.

It looks just like a 35mm film print. But, see,

it is a roll of paper with sprocket holes in it.

And this last frame says: "Copyright 1903 by American

Mutoscope and Biograph Company."

We are scanning them now and stabilizing those digital

images and outputting them back to film, which is

using our very latest technology on our very oldest material.

I think it'’s amazing they have lasted as long as they have.

When they made a film, they never realized that there could

be an afterlife of film in terms of video or television. And so

a lot of the rights of the films are very messed up and it gets

very difficult to trace.

And sometimes we cannot show a film because of that,

because the rights are not cleared and we don'’t have

the authorization to show some films, which is very sad.

All those tracks I put in innocently at the time

in 1971, thinking I'’d clear the music rights later.

I used a lot of my favorite music, from Elvis

to Roy Orbison, to Van Morrison. What do you do? Either you say:

"Okay, the film can'’t be shown anymore because I don'’t have

the music rights." Or you have to replace it.

I'’ll never let you fall

Now we are...

So now we can remix The Goalie'’s Anxiety,own all

the music rights. And, actually, after 30 years of being dead

in the ground, the movie can be shown again.

The Film Foundationwas really fortunate to be able to work

with George Romero to finally restore Night of the Living

Dead,which was a film that had fallen into the public domain,

immediately upon its release, because the title card was

changed at the last minute and the Copyright was overlooked.

So, what it resulted in were all of these bastardized versions,

the wrong aspect ratio, terrible copies of the film.

So, working with George Romero and his team at Image Ten

in Pittsburgh and, of course, with MoMA and Cineric labs

in New York, the film was meticulously restored,

and George even went to L.A. to supervise the sound restoration.

So, he wanted to address some of the sync that had been off.

Some of those gunshots were happening before the smoke

appeared on the rifle.

When we finally were able to do that, he was like:

"That'’s why I wanted to restore this movie!" That has bugged

him for years that, every time he had seen it, there were

a couple of scenes where you didn'’t hear a gunshot, but

you saw a gun being shot. So...

He also wanted to address the crickets.

Some of the internal shots had cricket sounds and some didn'’t.

So he wanted to make that more consistent.

But, in general, I think it sounds really good.

You wouldn'’t just say that because George Romero is

in the room? No!

But, George, you use the crickets as a device as well,

not only for... I always loved old movies

where the crickets were important!

It looks beautiful. And now it sounds great.

So, I mean, we'’re cooking with gas!

It'’s a great feeling to know that you'’ve preserved something

that is going to last for a long time. This was his first film,

and sadly, he passed away less than a year after we completed

it. So one of my pivotal times here was working with him

and restoring that movie.

And what a fun experience that was, you know.

Every restoration project has a different path, although

usually it begins with the research.

You look for the best element in existence.

Original camera negative, that'’s often the point

of departure. If that doesn'’t exist anymore,

then you go on to the next generation of elements.

Duplicates, duplicates, and duplicates.

You'’ve got to compare each of these elements frame by frame

by frame by frame.

And you take the best you can find.

Here we have a 1913 version of Macbethfrom a 1916 28mm print.

This is the only known copy of the film.

Now we'’re cleaning it up digitally. These scans will go

back to the Haghefilm laboratory in Amsterdam, where they will

then put it back out to 35mm black and white negative.

And from that they will make color prints that will

replicate the tinting that'’s in the original 28mm copy.

Well, how come this still looks so bad? It'’s like...

you don'’t know what it looked like before.

And you'’re looking at a brand new copy of a film that

you couldn'’t have seen before they did all this work.

This is the Edison Frankenstein,the thing has

been around for a long time, but it'’s never looked this good.

You can actually see people'’s faces now.

And now there is a very big risk of over restoring the film.

Because we don'’t want to restore to perfection.

We want to restore as close as possible the look that

the film had when it came out.

The great thing about my job at the moment is using

these two different sets of techniques, so you can use

the photochemical technique and the digital scanning.

When we were restoring The Great White Silence,which was

the feature film made out of the footage of a famous

Antarctic exploration with Captain Scott and his team,

we had to use some film techniques and some digital

techniques in order to restore the color to the black

and white footage. And it is a silent film.

So we were able to do new live music. And this is

another thing that brings people in.

And, of course, silent is really silent. There'’s nothing

there. There'’s nothing to help you. There'’s no reference

to sound at all. And it became obvious pretty quickly, once

I'’d seen the film, that it was a fairly terrifying task to take

on, to tell you the truth.

We'’d never seen penguins in the beginning of the 20th century.

We didn'’t know really what a penguin looked like.

So Herbert Ponting spent a lot of time filming penguins.

Hence, there'’s quite a lot of penguins in the film.

How do you score a penguin?

For instance, the bell from the ship. Somebody said one day:

"Oh, we'’ve got the bell." I mean: "The bell, the bell?"

But she said: "The bell from the ship that took Captain Scott

to the Antarctic."

We went to get the authentic bell, and we sat there

with a little recording device and recorded it.

And it just introduces this rather melancholic note

into the film. But if you know that it'’s the real bell,

it somehow adds something extra. I think restoring films is

a complicated job. It requires a team of people, actually.

I'’ve never restored a film in my life by myself.

On Lawrence of Arabia,because of the nature of that film,

large format film, every frame was split into quadrants.

There were individuals who worked on one quarter

of the frame of every frame of that film, and there are

well over 200,000 frames in that film. And then all

of that had to be stitched back together.

At the Academy, our connection to Satyajit Ray started

in the early 1990s. Ray was going to get an honorary Oscar.

People started to say: "Why are we giving him recognition

for his work and not preserving the work?"

The prints they found were beat up, scratched, mangled.

So, a coalition of the Academy and non-profit foundations

started an effort to preserve Ray'’s films.

Now, at the same time, there was a tragic fire in a lab

in London. And just before the preservation work was started,

those negatives were destroyed at the Henderson Lab.

Luckily, the director of the Academy Film Archive

asked for all of the film to be shipped from London

to Los Angeles.

But when Criterion approached us a few years ago, we thought:

"Should we go back to the material from the fire?"

We were able to scan at L'’Immagine Ritrovata,

in Bologna, much of the film and use the original negative

when possible.

I would say 40% of the surviving original

negative from Pather Panchali, and about 60% of the surviving

original negative for Aparajitowere usable.

There were color grading issues, stabilization issues.

There were dirt and scratches, stealing information

from different parts of adjacent frames.

By far, the biggest job we'’ve ever done.

No one perceived that there could be this digital technology

that would save film that was badly warped and shrunken

and damaged from the fire. So, that'’s a perfect lesson about

keeping things.

Cuba was a particularly significant experience.

How do you transfer 120 kilos of elements from Cuba

to Italy?

It took 23 signatures to get the negative of Memorias

del Subdesarrolloout of Cuba.

It became a sort of international

relationship operation.

We discovered that, when we got the negatives, that those

negatives probably had six or seven months of life,

they were deteriorating so much that had we started

the restoration six or seven months later, there wouldn'’t be

any negative anymore.

So the films in Havana have suffered mold damage, they'’ve

suffered humidity damage, and the acetate deterioration has

accelerated.

After we restored the films, we went to Cuba, and there were

huge lines of people, unbelievable! There were

like 200 people out of the cinema, and the cinema was

packed, and people were so emotional to watch it again.

It was incredible.

Their work is back and living again. That'’s the most exciting

part, is when you see that I can take this and it can finally

be available again.

We'’ve encountered just about everything you can imagine

being wrong with motion picture film, but we'’re always

surprised. You never know what you'’re going to encounter until

you crack open the cans and have a look at what you have.

There are so many physical repairs that need to be

made to a film, and it'’s really frame by frame.

And now with digital we scan a film, and each frame

of that film is now a digital file that we can pull up

on a screen, and then we can make repairs to it.

For a short film, you end up working a couple of years.

And this is before you even start restoring the film.

If the director or the cinematographer is still alive,

we try to get their comments.

They have a unique viewpoint in terms of, not only what was

achieved, but what they intended to achieve.

When we were restoring Sunset Blvd.,Billy Wilder wasn'’t

alive, and nobody was alive from the making of that film.

But the Library of Congress had a vintage original print,

and that was incredibly helpful because we could see how dark

the cinematographer had really wanted to go.

Little Alice in the Citieswas shot in 16mm. And with that film

I became a filmmaker. We were inexperienced, so we made

from that negative more than 100 prints. And then it was

basically shredded to pieces. Lots of really ruptures

in the negative, scratches, funguses, and God knows what.

I mean, everything bad in the book had happened

to that negative. I was really heartbroken when we made a new

print of it to see what shows up on it. And it looked

like disastrous.

Arrireally started to clean those 50,000 little frames.

When I saw the restored Master, I don'’t even know how

to describe it, I sat there in awe. Yeah, that'’s the film

we wanted to make.

One quite large project I'’ve been really honored

and excited about working on are the films of Barbara Hammer,

the pioneering lesbian feminist experimental filmmaker.

Everything about her was so vital and so full of like

life-affirming energy and positivity. And to put

her films in an archive kind of seemed funny to her because

she was like: I still have so much I gotta do." I emailed

her and said: "Hey, you don'’t have to put your films

at the Archive, but let'’s start actually restoring them."

And she said: "I'’d like to do it now," because her cancer had

come back... Just in these last two years of her life, we were

able to do a ton of work. And it was just really

a fantastically, exciting experience, and it still

continues to be. I'’m still working on her films,

even though she'’s gone now.

When I'’m restoring a film by Ermler, or by Lubitsch,

or by Chaplin. And when I'’m trying to do what they intended

to do, I'’m part of their team. This is quite a remarkable

feeling.

But it'’s really to represent the men and women, the artists

who made these pieces. It'’s their legacy that we'’re

representing.

The satisfaction you have is you'’ve done something you know

is worthwhile, to enable the memory to survive.

After we released I Am Cuba, it had a real impact,

which was amazing to us.

People in Hollywood would buy it because every DP had to watch

it, because of the crazy camera work.

There'’s an I am Cubashot in Martin Scorsese'’s Casino,

and Paul Thomas Anderson has a very clear homage to I Am Cuba

in a swimming pool scene in Boogie Nights.

The fact that artists are being inspired by the work that we'’re

doing just gives us the sense that these films are getting

out there and changing the way people see the world,

which is what films can do and what films have done for us

over the years.

It does not help to just preserve films without then

making them accessible in one way or another.

There'’s a sort of myth, I think, about archivists that

we like to hide everything away, like hoarders or something.

And there probably are people like that. But it really

couldn'’t be more far from the truth.

No wonder there were several waves of wonderful filmmakers

who came from film archives.

There would be no French New Wavewithout film preservation.

It was through going to see the films at the Cinémathèque

Françaisethat they were able to see: "Oh, cinema is

different." Henri Langlois did the work of preservation

for them.

And then there are the things that always surprise us.

Like one of the projects I got to work on were these films

called Edison Kinetophones. They were shot with sync sound

in 1913, and they'’re absolutely astonishing.

Hollywood would have you think The Jazz Singerwas the first

talking picture, but no, 14 years earlier, they were

doing these little talking films. It wasn'’t successful.

But now, again, with the digital processes we have, we were

able to perfectly synchronize them so people can see how

they intended them to look.

You bet it won'’t happen again

No, you bet it won'’t happen again

No, you bet it won'’t happen again

It'’s just like our eyes. Our eyes are very keen

at detecting motion. Our ears are very keen at detecting

change. I worked with the International Olympic

Committeeto restore all of their official sound films,

and that was like a seven year project.

I knew nothing about the films of the Olympic Games except

the films of Leni Riefenstahl, the film of Kon Ichikawa

of the Tokyo Olympics. I didn'’t know the Olympic Charter

since 1930 had obligated the host cities of the Games

to make a film record. This film collection didn'’t exist.

You have a four year snapshot...

From early sound all the way up to modern sound, a wide

variety of source elements, all on the same subject.

Seeing these Olympic sports change over the years,

get more graceful, seeing culture change, seeing

filmmaking change, that was really a rewarding project.

And all kinds of challenges.

We built a collection that was preserved, conserved,

and completely accessible. The Olympic film history had

been recovered from 1912 all the way through to the 1990s.

And we determined the best course, as time continued

to progress, was digital capture, digital restoration,

but analog preservation.

And I think that is the key, is the going back to film

at the end of it.

Right now, a 35mm film copy

is still the best way to preserve it.

That material will last much longer than the digital files.

If you made something, say, 10 or 12 years ago,

and your highest form of delivery was an HDCAM tape,

what are you going to do with that now?

And that'’s why Studios still require some form of film

element for their bigger films that they can store. Because

you'’ve got a permanent record of that image on that film.

I think it is interesting that in this digital age, where

everything is generated digitally, and edited digitally,

and rendered digitally, and now even projected digitally,

that the archival format is film.

Something crucial has changed. We have all become filmmakers

and film archivists. We make films with our Smartphones

and we store them in our Smartphone.

The entire worldwide industry is making a major mistake,

thinking that digital means permanent. Completely wrong.

Digitization is not preservation. You actually have

to do preservation on digital materials for it to stay.

We have lost a lot already. People started going digital

in filmmaking, they didn'’t care for the files...

When people say that something is on YouTube or maybe:

"Oh, there'’s a DVD of it. It's safe. Don'’t worry about it."

I mean, that'’s terrifying.

YouTube is an amazing phenomenon. It'’s not

an archive. It doesn'’t do preservation. It doesn'’t

guarantee longevity. And, yet, YouTube is kind of an example

of the archives that we should have built.

Not a week goes by that something doesn'’t appear

on YouTube or the Internet Archive that I presumed was

a lost film.

And we'’ve seen so many examples of interesting clips

that you might want to preserve for future generations because

it meant something to society. And it was only posted

on the Internet.

Everything rots. The conservative numbers are

that you have about 50 years before you start to see

age-based damage in film, 20 years before you see

age-based damage in videotape, five years on hard drive,

three years on data tape, as low as two years on optical,

like DVD. The newer the technology, the faster

it'’s rotting.

The analog film cans, films that we see here, you can

store and you can ignore it. It can just go on a shelf.

You put it in good cold storage, and it will be fine in 500

years. The problems with digital preservation is: you have

the format itself, if it becomes obsolete. And then the file

itself, that'’s sitting on something, and then

that something, that carrier, must be migrated.

We call that preservation through migration, and we'’ll

do that until someone invents something that they can

prove we can store content on and it won'’t degrade over time.

So we have to build systems that gather new content,

gather old content, get it into a digital form, but then make

sure that digital form doesn'’t disappear over time.

And so you just have to be able to schedule that very

carefully, so that you can migrate that data from one

server to another. Or if it'’s on LTO tape, LTO is a type

of data tape that files can be stored on.

Magnetic tapes, which is really quite ironic.

But then, every two generations of that LTO,

which is roughly every five years, you need to migrate

those files off that older generation and put it on

the newer generation. So you always have to migrate

the data.

Here'’s just one plain server doing all the work.

And the robot.

Part of digital preservation now is making sure that

there are backups and that we are constantly monitoring.

We do a digital fingerprint of every file. So if anything

changes in the file at all, we know. And they'’ll look

at those fingerprints, when the content is on tapes

in these robots. Let'’s say they find an error, they will load

a new tape in, go to one of the other robots somewhere

else in the world, and grab the exact same content out

of there, copy it to a new tape, and then take the data tape

that has the failing material on it and throw it

in the garbage. And also, we don'’t trust any media

more than three years.

And now it'’s a matter of moving the data around

to make sure that these data flow into platforms where

people can access it. So I always say we'’re not

in archiving, we'’re in IT. We are in technology.

I'’m a fan of IT, but it is making things more complicated

in a way, because now we have to use big systems, it costs

a lot of money. But still, this is a good solution.

It'’s very reliable compared to other media, like hard

drives or clouds, for instance.

Do you need to store it all up in the cloud?

Do you need to store it all in spinning disk? No, it'’s

horrible for the environment because of all the energy

that'’s being used and all of the horror stories about

what we'’re doing, the toxicity to the environment and using up

all those rare-earth metals and heavy metals that go into

servers and into hard drives.

In the future there'’s going to be something better, which

is why I'’m looking at DNA, because that just has

the potential to be able to store so much.

Some people think that storing data in DNA is science fiction.

But, no, it'’s just science. And there'’s a lot of benefits.

It'’s permanent. It's a very small size. It uses a lot less

energy, we lower the damage to the planet.

And then, finally, the format never changes.

There needs to be new ways to store data.

Losing the information is not acceptable. You want to have

it on something that you can know you can trust, and put

it on a shelf and know that it will still be there

when you'’re done.

So this building is reminiscent of a monastery.

But, in a way, the people who do this profession, and maybe it'’s

overreaching a bit to say that it'’s kind of a monastic like

profession, because people are dedicated and doing work

in many ways for generations of people not born yet.

Before the printing was invented, the monks used

to transcribe and make copies. That'’s why we still have books,

manuscripts from centuries before Gutenberg. But film,

if we just have digital...

They'’re sort of mirrors of what'’s going on at the moment.

And we can hold that mirror up to nature and say: "Look,

think about the world you live in, and why it is the way it is,

and what you can do to change it."

How one could view the world differently, how one could

imagine the world differently.

We desperately need to find a new explanation. Why

do we save this material? How can it help us change

the world for the better?

To be able to do this, I think is worth seven lifetimes,

ten lifetimes...

I can think of no country in the world where there isn'’t

a perpetual queue of material waiting to be preserved.

So I don'’t think that the battle is completely won.

It is an ongoing battle.

It'’s as simple as that. If you love something,

you have to do everything to preserve it.