Welcome back to the Free Film School, my dearest students. You will find that CraveOnline‘s Free Film School is the best film school you’ll ever find. For one, you can eat during class. For another, you can attend classes in the nude (which is wholly encouraged). And, best of all, you can learn as actively or as passively as you want, and I’ll still give you a passing grade. I may even mail you a handwritten diploma, should you request one. As of now, you already have an “A-.” Today’s lecture will be a grim look at a sad and often-overlooked notion in film. That sad moment when a film disappears forever.
As modern audiences, hooked on the internet, and authors of the Wikipedia, we have a relatively newfound tendency to record everything. No longer mere historians or scientists who must record data for professional or intellectual reasons, we have become obsessive collectors of all kinds of information. Not a meme, not a quotation, not an internet cat video, not a “tweet,” will pass without being rigorously stored in a hard drive somewhere. I heard (perhaps fallaciously) that every Tweet on Twitter was being stored in the Library of Congress. If this is true, I have a severe wish to be part of the post-Earth space alien fleet who discovers the ruins of human civilization, and who has to make sense of what the Tweets mean. Whether or not this obsessive storing of information is wholly or only partially good is up for debate.
Because of the technology used to make them, we tend to think of films as permanent records of a sort. After all, when a piece of cinema is recorded – no matter what kind of technology is used – it can be stored indefinitely. A film strip will be safe as long as someone thinks to store it in a safe place. A digital data file can, in theory, be shunted throughout ever-changing computers, ensuring that its life will be maintained in some form or another. The proliferation of home video has even put archiving films in the hands of the people, and I am surely not the only one here who has amassed a sizable film library on VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, or even digital files. Prints may be misplaced, and digital files may be left behind on old servers, but the films are still going to wait patiently – like a treasure in an Indiana Jones film – just waiting for the day that some enterprising film historian will discover them again. Film history is full of tales of films lost and film re-discovered. Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis, for instance, was re-released in theaters in 2010 after large pieces of it, thought to be lost forever, were discovered in Buenos Aires. This may not be the ideal way to store or catalogue a film (i.e. randomly), but it illustrates that film can last forever.
Sadly, that is not always the case. Indeed, you would be shocked to learn how many films have been lost over the years.
Yes, it happens. Films can indeed just vanish. Even important ones. Early film stock was not intended to be all that permanent, and many original film strips have just cracked and rotted under the oppressing thumb of the elements. Sometimes fragile nitrate film stock has been destroyed during production (nitrate film is so flammable, it can burn underwater). Studios have had infamous fires in their archive departments over the years, and master prints have been lost. Sometimes films will disappear for business reasons; studios will change hands, massive business restructuring will take place, and the exact location of certain prints will be lost in the shuffle. Films are subject to bureaucratic death. Sometimes a film will be re-edited by a studio, and the original version will be lost; I may devote a Free Film School lecture to Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons someday – the classic go-to story for studio tinkering literally destroying a director’s original vision.
The stats are staggering. According to Frank Thompson’s wonderful and tragic 1996 book Lost Films: Important Movies that Disappeared, nearly half of all the films and shorts made before 1950 are gone forever. They disintegrated, they burned, they got lost in the shuffle. Of the films made during the the earliest days of film (around 1895) all the way up until 1930 – a prolific and substantial time in cinematic history – anywhere from 80 to 90% of movies are lost forever. The silent era had just as many high-profile movie stars as the modern age, but thanks to the crumbling and vanishing of film stock, many of them are being increasingly lost to time. Many people know Clara Bow, for instance, for her hit film It from 1927, but finding too many other Clara Bow films will prove to be difficult or impossible. Same goes for infamously European sex symbol Theda Bara, who acted in over 40 feature films. I think four remain. When safer acetate film was invented in 1949, the devastating studio fires became less and less frequent, but films still vanished with a startling regularity. Sure, a lot of the mainstream studio product was maintained, but all of the “B” features were treated roughly. Scholars of bad cinema are constantly frustrated by the loss of Ed Wood’s later films – and those were made in the 1970s. Are you a Sam Raimi fan? Did you know that he made a film in 1978 called Clockwork as an early personal project? Did you know that the film is gone forever? Who knows what happened to it?
And don’t make me have to point to Martin Scorsese’s film Hugo, which dramatizes the true story of Georges Méliès‘ movies. The film stock for literally dozens of his films was melted down during a war crisis, transformed into other products like women’s shoes. We have a few of his films remaining, pointing to what kind of a filmmaker he was, but the bulk of his films are gone. Indeed, the loss of slighted important directors goes on and on. Ken Russell, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, Orson Welles, Yasujiro Ozu, and John Schlesinger all have missing films in their lives.
The first giant Japanese monster film was Godzilla, right? Well, actually there was a King Kong rip-off called King Kong Appears in Edo that was made a full 16 years before the lizard lord strode the Earth. I can’t say if that film was good or important, but I’d sure love to see it.
Prints – even digital ones – are not typically taken care of by the exhibitors or even the studios that put them out. When a studio distributes a film, they typically make hundreds if not thousands of copies of a print (and I’ll use the word “print” to describe both 35mm film and digital files in this lecture) and those prints will be used up, and eventually erased or destroyed once the film has ended its theatrical run. This is only logical; why keep all those prints and files when the run is over and there’s no more demand? Often the studio will keep a negative or a master file on the movie, and it will be archived… maybe. Not all studios are necessarily interested in paying the money necessary to store and maintain their old library – they’ll only care if someone exhibits it without their consent.
Some studios have bent over backwards to store their prints. Fox famously once transferred all of their highly flammable nitrate film to safe acetate film, and they destroyed the originals. Many older films you may see will be copies of copies. Some studios hire archiving specialists to look after their prints. Of course, as I mentioned above, most high-profile studio product will be looked after with meticulous care. Casablanca, for instance, is not only being stored with the utmost care on several film formats, but it is constantly being looked at, restored, updated, kept alive. There are perhaps a few thousand important movies that are being watched with eagle eyes, always ripe for restoration, ready to be viewed at any theater that will have them.
The recent shift to digital projection, however, has some archivists concerned. If thousands of dollars have been poured into the restoration of a gloriously colorful 70mm print, it will all be for naught if no theater is capable of showing such a print. Digital film technologies are always being tinkered with, and some archivists have staunch faith that great films – no matter their previous format – will live on in glittering and crisp and easily-stored digital files. Other archivists are skeptical. What if the computers change? Will the format that Ben-Hur is currently being stored on be usable in the next generation of projectors? Has archiving become just a matter of constantly updating files and shifting them to other computers? How long before a great film gets lost in the shuffle? These are legitimate concerns for film archivists.
The lesson is, of course, to keep a close eye on our film heritage. We have to educate ourselves on how films are stored, and keep them alive in one form or another. If you know any film archivists, talk to them about their challenges. I’m doing my part to educate you on film technology, but there are books upon books of information on the topic. You don’t need to become an expert, but you do need to realize that keeping track of these movies is hard, and also that it is important.
More fundamentally, however, we need to realize how much old movies influence the movies of today. It can be tempting – what with the sheer overpowering glut of entertainment out there on the internet – to dismiss older, largely unavailable movies as having failed the Darwinian pop quiz. As your professor, I gently raise a finger, and slowly wag it back and forth in front of your jaded eyes. Have you not been listening these past 102 weeks? Older films are just as vital and as important and as alive as they were when they were first filmed. Their aesthetic and cultural impact can still be pondered, and their pleasures can still be just as intense – if not more so – than when they were first released.
Consider this: Think to that time when you rented an old, obscure movie that you had never heard of before (or borrowed the DVD, or streamed the flick, or even attended a repertory screening at your local movie house) and it became an amazing blast of awesomeness that you ended up holding near your heart. You had discovered something that felt like it was yours and yours alone. It fulfilled you in ways you didn’t know you could be fulfilled, because it provided you with pleasures you didn’t know you wanted. When a film is rediscovered, that pleasure is felt by an entire community of film lovers and critics and archivists and scholars and audiences all over again. Maintaining film heritage may not have the big money gambles and high-flash advertising of week-by-week blockbuster tailing, but it is still the large beating heart underneath the movies.
Homework for the Week:
Look over this list on Wikipedia: a list of lost films. Which of those films would you like to see? How permanent are most archives? Is film more permanent in today’s digital world, or is it less permanent? How important is film heritage to you? Do you watch a lot of old movies, or do you prefer newer ones?
Witney Seibold is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, co-host of The B-Movies Podcast and co-star of The Trailer Hitch. You can read his weekly articles B-Movies Extended, Free Film School and The Series Project, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind. If you want to buy him a gift (and I know you do), you can visit his Amazon Wish List.
