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Movies Forum Index » Silent Movies Forum » AP: Chillin' with Oz, Lassie and Scarlett...
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| Bruce Calvert... |
 Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 8:44 am |
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http://www.urbanacitizen.com/main.asp?SectionID=21&SubSectionID=126&ArticleID=147854&TM=82222.86
Chillin' with Oz, Lassie and Scarlett
ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) _ While Scarlett O'Hara stayed cool at home, Dorothy
Gale took a year out to go skipping down a digital yellow brick road in a
Hollywood film lab.
The recently reunited Technicolor duo could well be spending much of the
rest of the millennium killing time with Lassie, Annie Oakley, Tarzan and a
canned colony of heroes and villains from the silent-film era.
Thousands of pre-1951 movies captured on volatile nitrate film are kept in
frigid, low-humidity vaults in a modest cinderblock building owned by the
George Eastman House museum on the piney outskirts of Rochester. Cold
storage saves them from rotting away within a lifetime or, worse yet,
burning up.
In most cases, these are original camera negatives from the first
half-century of motion pictures, classics such as "The Wizard of Oz" and
"Gone With the Wind," the silent era's top-grossing "Big Parade," Lon Chaney
in "The Phantom of the Opera" and Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 version of "The
Ten Commandments."
While even the best-kept vintage reels are starting to buckle with age, a
beloved movie's master negative is a sacred object that would cost untold
millions to replace.
Much of that value lies in its power to produce the finest-quality copies,
be it on 35mm film, Blu-ray DVD or some dazzling format that pops up in,
say, the early 26th century.
"I really hope that 500 years from now people can still look at this because
it's wonderful stuff," Deborah Stoiber, vault manager at Eastman's Louis B.
Mayer Conservation Center, said during an inspection of one of 12 dark
vaults kept refrigerated year-round at 40 degrees Fahrenheit and 30 percent
humidity.
On the shelves of this climate-controlled celluloid nursing home are prized
Technicolor films such as "Meet Me in St. Louis" and "Little Women"; silent
gems starring Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo; a Lumiere brothers' chronicle
of President McKinley's inauguration parade in 1897; and "Olympia," a Nazi
propaganda feature on the 1936 Berlin Olympics shot by Adolf Hitler's
filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl.
The magical way in which a chilly, dry setting retards shrinking, fading or
"nitric melt" inevitably raises concern about the long-term survival of
other vulnerable pieces of the world's film heritage, from safety-based
acetate stock adopted in the 1950s to television recordings to flimsy
digital-video cassettes.
"Nitrate is turning out to be a historically durable medium that, if stored
properly, rivals paper 'Äî and well-made paper 'Äî as a storage medium for
image and sound," said Patrick Loughney, motion-picture curator at Eastman,
the world's oldest museum of photography and film.
Its out-of-the-way bunker is one of just a handful of nitrate repositories
run by major film archives around the country. It isn't listed in phone
books or open to the public. Nor does the plain, single-story building draw
the eye on a road where the occasional home is backed by woods or farmland.
On the shelves are 6,600 titles, or 22,836 reels 'Äî the oldest surviving
negatives or prints dating to the dawn of moving pictures in 1893. The
Rochester Institute of Technology's Image Permanence Institute estimates
that climate control can preserve films still in pristine shape for another
800 to 900 years.
Considering how a nitrate fire blinded Alfredo, the projectionist in "Cinema
Paradiso," each vault is rigged with sprinklers and blowout doors.
"Nitrate burns at 16,000-to-17,000 feet per second, dynamite at
24,000-to-25,000 feet," Loughney said. "It has that disturbing quality of
producing its own oxygen, so you can't put it out with water. If properly
stored and handled, then it's no more dangerous that any other kind of
hazardous substance, like gasoline."
That knowledge came the hard way. Made primarily from sulfuric acid and
cotton, nitrocellulose was blamed for disastrous warehouse and theater
fires, chiefly in the two decades after Rochester-based Eastman Kodak Co.
adapted it from flexible roll film it pioneered in 1889.
Nitrate film was heavily recycled for its high silver content. But the main
reason some 90 percent of U.S. holdings has vanished is neglect. In severe
cases of exposure to heat, damp and temperature swings, scenes become
obscured by a psychedelic collage of bubbles, swirls and flashes of light.
Library of Congress vaults contain half of the estimated 300 million feet of
nitrate film in U.S. storage. The Film & Television Archive at the
University of California, Los Angeles, is next with about 80 million feet.
Among Eastman's 28 million feet are DeMille's silent-film collection, an
early Lumiere film featuring monks walking up a hill in Indochina in 1894
and Garbo in "Flesh and the Devil," made in 1926. Stoiber's personal
favorite is "When Flowerland Awakens in Japan," a stenciled short film from
1912.
"It doesn't matter if it's 'Wizard of Oz' or an obscure newsreel that's
incomplete and unidentified, they're all treated the same way 'Äî as a
historic artifact," she said.
A California native who keeps a winter coat at the office, Stoiber gets
through examining the entire collection every few years. One telltale sign a
film is starting to decompose: "It smells like wet dog."
Gently unwinding the cyan negative of "Gone With the Wind" through her
fingers 'Äî the Technicolor system required scenes to be recorded
simultaneously in yellow, cyan and magenta 'Äî she pointed out an original
splice in which Rhett 'Äî on his knees 'Äî proposes to Scarlett, whose
second husband has just died.
"See this warping, how it curls a little?" Loughney interjected. "That's an
early, early stage of deterioration" in a celebrated 69-year-old movie "not
very well stored in the first 50 years of its life."
The chilled-vault solution began gaining traction among film custodians in
the 1970s and storage centers have sprouted in the last 20 years, most
recently at UCLA and the Library of Congress.
One unavoidable trade-off that shortens a popular film's life expectancy is
when its corporate owner, encountering the latest technology, borrows it
back for reformatting. "Wizard of Oz" returned in March after undergoing a
special-edition DVD makeover, just as "Gone With the Wind" did from 2002 to
2004.
Interest in nitrate films has ballooned of late "because in the age of
video, the DVD and the Internet, a corporate liability that was expensive to
store got converted back into a corporate asset," Loughney said.
Similarly, film preservation has entered a golden age, bolstered by private
foundation funds that also flow toward repairing far less familiar or
"orphan" movies. Enter Eastman's vaunted team of specialists, fueled since
1996 by newcomers trained at its pioneering film-preservation school.
One of Daniel Wagner's yearlong projects as a preservation officer at
Eastman is using digital technology to remove dust and scratches and restore
missing chunks of "Attack of the Indians," an 8-minute film shot in 1911 by
Native American filmmaker James Youngdeer.
Only four of Youngdeer's 120 movies are known to survive, and this one 'Äî
scanned back onto 35mm film 'Äî will someday show up in screenings around
the world, starting at Eastman's Dryden Theater.
"When I started my career 30 years ago, it was taken for granted that films
like this would never be recovered," Loughney said.
Finding old movies sometimes involves global detective work, with long-lost
negatives turning up in places such as Russia and China where they didn't
get thrown away so often. Old or new, however, many titles await expert
intervention.
"We have a lot of films that won't be got to in my lifetime, but that's OK,"
Loughney said. "We keep them alive for another 50 years before somebody else
raises the money. The most effective preservation strategy is cold storage
because it buys you time."
___
On the Net:
www.eastmanhouse.org
www.cinema.ucla.edu
www.log.org
www.moma.org
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. |
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| rodney at (no spam) mont-alto.com... |
| Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 8:44 am |
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On May 7, 10:07 am, "mack" <macke... at (no spam) dslextreme.com> wrote:
Quote: "Bruce Calvert" <silentfilmxs... at (no spam) verizon.net> wrote in message
news:mniUj.51164$Bb3.49500 at (no spam) trnddc01...
http://www.urbanacitizen.com/main.asp?SectionID=21&SubSectionID=126&A....
Gently unwinding the cyan negative of "Gone With the Wind" through her
fingers 'Äî the Technicolor system required scenes to be recorded
simultaneously in yellow, cyan and magenta 'Äî she pointed out an original
splice in which Rhett 'Äî on his knees 'Äî proposes to Scarlett, whose
second husband has just died.
Huh? Now I'm really confused. I've always been given to understand that
the Technicolor camera shot three images with filters shutting out all but
yellow, cyan and magenta on Black /White film, with only the answer print
being in color.
So how can there be a "cyan negative"?
Perhaps it's the black and white negative with the cyan information. |
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| mack... |
| Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 11:07 am |
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"Bruce Calvert" <silentfilmxspam at (no spam) verizon.net> wrote in message
news:mniUj.51164$Bb3.49500 at (no spam) trnddc01...
Quote: http://www.urbanacitizen.com/main.asp?SectionID=21&SubSectionID=126&ArticleID=147854&TM=82222.86
Gently unwinding the cyan negative of "Gone With the Wind" through her
fingers 'Äî the Technicolor system required scenes to be recorded
simultaneously in yellow, cyan and magenta 'Äî she pointed out an original
splice in which Rhett 'Äî on his knees 'Äî proposes to Scarlett, whose
second husband has just died.
Huh? Now I'm really confused. I've always been given to understand that
the Technicolor camera shot three images with filters shutting out all but
yellow, cyan and magenta on Black /White film, with only the answer print
being in color.
So how can there be a "cyan negative"? |
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