Film Preservation: A Dire Need

The term “film preservation” now has an official ring to it. In one sense, that’s progress—it means that people take it seriously, which was not always the case. On the other hand, the fact that it has become official means that it has also ceased to be urgent, that the problem has been solved, and that it can now be taken for granted. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Film preservation is always urgent. It always will be urgent. For every neglected film print or set of film elements that is not being stored under optimal conditions, that has not been checked or cleaned or scanned, the clock is ticking. And even if a title has been transferred to digital media, the clock is still ticking. It is always ticking, just as it is for every painting and every manuscript in every museum or archive.

(Read Britannica’s biography of this author, Martin Scorsese.)

And then, there’s that question that is still asked from time to time: why? Why preserve films at all when there are so many more important and urgent things to spend money on? The answer is very simple. The cinema gives us something precious: a record of ourselves in time, documented and interpreted. The need to incorporate time and motion into our representations of ourselves goes back to the beginning of humanity—you can see it in the paintings on the walls of the caves at Lascaux. And, on a fundamental level, that is true of every art form. The cinema gives us a way of dealing with the mystery of who and what we are.

We now know how much of the cinema has been lost to us. But we came very close to losing much more.

In the late 1970s I went to a screening of a film made in the mid-’50s called The Seven Year Itch, by Billy Wilder, shot in the Eastmancolor process. This was the studio archival print of the picture with the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe. The lights went down, the screening began, and we were shocked by what we saw. The color had faded so dramatically that it was almost impossible to actually see the film. In those pre-home video days we’d grown used to seeing film prints that were a couple of generations away from the original negative, that were scratched and spliced and worn, and—in the case of pictures that had been shot in color—that were sometimes faded. However, this was beyond mere fading. This was visible evidence of deterioration and, since it was the studio print, of neglect. But beyond the fact that the color was lost, I realized that the performances were lost as well, and the characters along with them. The eyes of the actors had been reduced to smudged orbs of brown or blue, which meant that their emotional connections to each other and to the audience had been lost. They walked across the screen like phantoms. This meant that the entire narrative was lost. In essence, the film itself was lost.

So that night, we all realized that something had to be done.

I received a quick education. I came to understand that Eastmancolor was particularly unstable and prone to fading, that films shot in the Technicolor process were far more stable, but that all film prints and elements, whether black-and-white or color, were susceptible to chemical decomposition if they weren’t stored in sufficiently dry and cool conditions. They would develop what became known as “vinegar syndrome”—as the film base (either pre-1948 nitrate or post-1948 acetate) degrades, the print starts to actually smell like vinegar and becomes brittle; it buckles and shrinks. Once a print develops vinegar syndrome, the degradation is irreversible.

Then I made a truly terrifying discovery: due to chemical decomposition, wear, fires (more prevalent during the era of nitrate, which was extremely flammable), or some combination thereof, 50 percent of pre-1950 American cinema and 80 percent of American silent cinema had been lost. Gone. Forever. This seemed inconceivable to me and to my friends who were also filmmakers and film lovers. On the one hand, there were countless celebrations of the greatness of Hollywood and the Golden Age of Movies. On the other hand, over half of it was gone, and that included several celebrated titles that had won multiple Oscars. There was no consciousness whatsoever of systematic preservation or, when needed, of restoration. And this was just here in America, where the resources are vast. What about the rest of the world?

After I led a campaign to develop a more stable color film stock, I met Bob Rosen, who was then the director of UCLA’s Film and TV Archives, and we tried to build bridges between the independent archives and the studios. This led to the Film Foundation, which I formed in 1990 with Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Sydney Pollack, Robert Redford, and Steven Spielberg. Since then, we’ve made possible the restoration of more than 800 films from around the world. During the ’90s and the early years of the 21st century, the consciousness of the fragility of cinema seemed to come into focus. There seemed to be an increasing awareness of the need for preservation.

Through the mid-’90s, film restoration work was done photochemically. Then, in 1996, a late silent film by Frank Capra called The Matinee Idol was restored with digital techniques. Damaged frames could be scanned and repaired information cloned from cleaner frames, and a picture that would previously have been presented in fragments or severely truncated form could now be seen in something close to its original version. This was a huge leap forward.

In the years since 1996, everything has changed. Almost all restoration work is now done digitally, which has its pluses and minuses: on the one hand, films can be given whole new lives that often fulfill and sometimes surpass the original intentions of the filmmakers; on the other hand, the technology sometimes drives the restoration choices when in fact it should be the reverse.

Today, there are very few film labs left in the world. Almost all pictures are shot with digital cameras, and even the ones that are actually shot on film are edited and color-timed and finished digitally. When a print of a new or even a restored picture is made and projected, it is now an event. At this point, when you are watching a film projected in a theater, you are usually seeing a Digital Cinema Package, or DCP, which is either sent to the theater in question over the Internet or in the form of a drive that is plugged into the projector, which “ingests” the file (the movie) that is activated with a code supplied by the distributor. The drives that contain the DCPs are the same exterior drives that you use to store digital information at home. And, as we all know, digital information sometimes simply disappears. This has happened to more than one major studio picture. “Systematic migration” from the current state-of-the-art digital format to the next evolving format is now the goal, but this requires more vigilance than ever on the part of the owners. At this point the majority of film-watching is not done in movie theaters but via streaming to computers or homescreen systems, which means that the standards of acceptability for restoration, preservation, and presentation have changed and, I think, loosened. In the future the memory of the actual film image will have to be preserved as carefully and lovingly as an ancient artifact at the Met. That is why the Film Foundation always insists on the creation of actual film elements—a negative and a positive—for every restoration in which we are involved.

Meanwhile, actual film—now Mylar-based and stronger than ever—is still the most reliable and durable means of preserving movies.

This essay was originally published in 2018 in Encyclopædia Britannica Anniversary Edition: 250 Years of Excellence (1768–2018).