Getting in just under the wire for this year’s For the Love of Film Preservation blogathon! This past week I went to Paris, had tonsillitis and flew to Rochester, NY to start work at the Image Permanence Institute on Monday, so you will all forgive me for being a little short and sweet, right?!
This year’s blogathon is all about making Graham Cutts’ The White Shadow accessible via web streaming. Which is a fabulous cause, that will benefit cinephiles everywhere and to which you should all donate.
However, it is a crying shame that computers can’t give every viewer a carbon copy of the original artefact. Because it’s nitrate. And nitrate is the most romantic of film formats, even if it is a massive pain in the butt.
It’s dangerous…
As David Cleveland notes,
The thought of a hot light source (quite often a naked flame), the nitrate film in the machine, and a roll of possibly several hundred feet on the spool arm, together with the audience in close proximity, seems absurd today, but then the cinematograph was the latest wonder, and all thought of danger was pushed aside.
One can even compare the different safety standards for nitro-cellulose from 1914, 1950 and the present day. Only two British archives, the BFI and the Imperial War Museum, are equipped with storage safe enough to keep nitrate reels; the IWM keeps them in reinforced concrete bunkers.
It stinks…
Colour fading, vinegar syndrome, missing-believed-wiped… Every format is beset with preservation issues. It all decays. Nitrate just does it in style.
There are five stages in the deterioration of nitrate:
1. It fades. it turns brown. It smells.
2. It starts to stick together. It smells worse.
3. Gas bubbles cause blisters in the emulsion. It smells really bad.
4. It forms a solid mass and reeks.
5. It disintegrates completely.
The smell is akin to bad foot odour, and once stage 4 hits it’s pretty much impossible to copy the film. Which really sucks.
And yet…
Though archivists are trained to avoid decay wherever possible, it must be said that the beginnings of the warping and blistering has a sort of swirly beauty (see above example of stage 3).
Moreover, it’s the cautionary tale of film archiving that has repeated itself in every format since: film is movement, no matter how hard we try we’ve yet to find a format that is fully stable, replicable and safe. It’s as though film cannot be contained. Or, as James M Reilly (co-founder of the IPI) puts it:
Except for human negligence, physical wear-and-tear, and actual physical loss, the causes of deterioration in film are rooted in the very nature of the materials of which it is made: cellulose plastics, nitrate and acetate, colour dyes and silver.
Please donate to the blogathon by clicking on this button:
If, like me, you’d like to be at the Image Permanence Institute studying film and its decay, you have one week left to apply for the AMIA/IPI Internship Award. You must be a student or recent graduate of a film preservation programme.
Sources:
This Film is Dangerous, ed. Roger Smither
Kodak: Storage and Handling of Processed Nitrate Film
AMIA: Identifying and Handling Nitrate Film
Our Movie Heritage, Tom McGreevey and Joanne L Yeck
The Film Preservation Guide, National Film Preservation Foundation (online)























