This is tangential to the article but when ever I read about a lost film being found there’s always mention of how it was found in a vault. I can’t help but always try to imagine what that is. Can anyone describe what these vaults are like?
People can reference a data center but most probably have never been in one. However I’m very familiar with the slightly dusty smell, the whine of fans and HVAC, the odd people that work there, server cages, card and retina scanners, some have metal detectors. From the outside they’re huge nondescript brick buildings with massive gensets surrounded by a not f’ing around security fence.
So I’d be very curious to know what a film vault in Hollywood is like.
Well the one I know of near me in Kansas has an article about it.[0] This one is in a salt mine as the salt helps keep the moisture out of the air. I could definitely imagine a recurring multi year lease expense like this being a blip on the radar for movie studios, so these things are mostly forgotten.
If a movie studio goes out of business though, who know what happens to these films? I’d imagine that’s how movies get “lost”.
> This one is in a salt mine as the salt helps keep the moisture out of the air
As an aside, various salts are useful as humidity regulating agents due to their deliquescence characteristics. Different salts and brine solutions can be used to either pull moisture from the air, or to maintain a higher humidity.
It uses Google Maps Street View to move around inside the vault.
EDIT: having gone through it, that vault appears to contain machines - "technology". I didn't see anything which looked like a large film storage area, much less one for nitrate films.
Using '"Rochester film museum" Nitrate Vault' as my search terms I found the article "Rochester's best kept secret: A nitrate film collection" at https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/lifestyle/2016/04... with several images in the interesting story, with details like "Only three other facilities in the U.S. can legally store this volatile film stock" and "Every five years staff goes through 20,000 reels to make sure they are not decomposing", and the quote “Because of the great amount of silver content in the emulsion, nitrate films have dark, rich blacks, and more detailed gradation. The sharpness of the edges are so crisp and there’s so much depth, it’s almost like 3-D.”
I wonder what the other three places are that store nitrate film? I would guess the National Archives and some facility in Southern California. Where else though?
PRO-TEK’s nitrate film services, "PRO-TEK is one of the few places left in the world that manages nitrate film vaults for clients. The nitrate vaults are located several miles away from our Burbank campus." - https://protekvaults.com/blog/nitrate-film-preservation/
> Putting this festival on requires a great deal of inter-archival cooperation--prints were sourced from across the United States (the Big Five archives for nitrate are the Academy, UCLA, MoMa, the Library of Congress, and the Eastman itself) and from international archives, notably the Swedish Film Institute (supplied Strandhugg), KAVI in Helsinki (supplied Ihmiset suviyössä), and the Austrian Film Museum (supplied The Nevadan)
Using those as search terms:
The Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Center at Wright-Patterson AFB. "Today, under the stewardship of M/B/RS, the nitrate film holdings, dating from the 1890's through 1950, exceed 100 million feet." - https://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/mpcc.html
> There are only a few film archives in the country that store nitrate film, and they include the major film archives in the nation: the two Packard archives (Culpeper, Virginia, and Santa Clarita, California); the George Eastman House’s Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center in Chili, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art Film Archive, in Hamlin, Pennsylvania. MoMA’s collection is the largest private film collection in the world. Most of it is located in this purpose built 33,000 square foot, two-building, partially underground compound on 37 acres of woodland and meadows in the Pocono Mountains. Also known as the Cesleste Bartos Film Preservation Center.
Really similar to Iron mountain, with more fire suppression. Arguably to protect other buildings from their contents as much as protecting their contents from time. Nitrate film is extremely flammable.
In the mid-20th century film switched to modern plastics like cellulose acetate, and later PET (which are still quite flammable). But before that, it was the first kind of plastic invented -- nitrocellulose plasticized with camphor. Nitrocellulose is also known as gun cotton; it's literally explosive.
It degrades over time, with the plasticizer separating and the film becoming brittle, eventually turning into a powder that can ignite from friction or even auto-ignite. More than anything else, that's why so many early major films are lost. They turned to dust. And then exploded.
> The use of volatile nitrocellulose film for motion pictures led many cinemas to fireproof their projection rooms with wall coverings made of asbestos. Those additions intended to prevent or at least delay the migration of flames beyond the projection areas. A training film for projectionists included footage of a controlled ignition of a reel of nitrate film, which continued to burn even when fully submerged in water. [...] Owing to public safety precautions, London Underground forbade transport of movies on its system until well past the introduction of safety film.
You might mean that it does not detonate -- it does not. It is not a high explosive. But gunpowder (of both smoking and non-smoking varieties) is still generally considered an explosive. An explosive is something that can produce an explosion - a blast. And they can certainly do that.
>An explosion is a rapid expansion in volume associated with an extreme outward release of energy, usually with the generation of high temperatures and release of high-pressure gases. Supersonic explosions created by high explosives are known as detonations and travel through shock waves. Subsonic explosions are created by low explosives through a slower combustion process known as deflagration.
Doesn't have to be supersonic to be an explosion. This is a disagreement about definitions, not about the properties of nitrocellulose.
I'm not talking about a shock wave, but a pulse wave. would you feel the event from a reasonable distance? true shock waves will generally kill you because they move faster than sound.
So you are talking about a detonation, a specific type of explosion that involves a supersonic wave, almost everything you would see as a munitions expert would be one of those.
A dictionary definition of explosion is "a rapid expansion in volume associated with extreme outward release of energy", that includes things like, gunpowder deflagration, aerolized gasoline burning, or even a pressurized container (like a pressure cooker) rupturing. Film burning on a metal tin as they were stored could fit this definition pretty well.
I can't quickly find any resources that distinguishes between a 'shock wave' and a 'pulse wave' in the context of explosions. Do you have some resources?
If you're defining pulse wave as a sub-sonic pressure wave, deflagarations can definitely produce those, even with relatively poor fuels (e.g. wood dust). Why do you expect nitrocellulose couldn't? Not enough gas volume?
a shock wave is propelled outward by the explosion itself; a shock wave is part of the explosion, the actual gases produced by the explosion being pushed outward. a shock wave moves faster than sound and is usually fatal if you are struck by one.
pulse waves move at the speed of sound and are not propelled by the explosion. an air compressor tank rupturing would produce a pulse wave. pulse waves alone are not fatal to humans, though you definitely feel them and hear them.
I have two questions:
- If pulse waves 'aren't propelled by the explosion', what propels them?
- Why would seeing a pulse wave in nitrocellulose prove that it's an explosive (as you claim), if you're defining pulse waves as any sonic wave?
I'm having a hard time understanding your position, or your reasoning for why nitrocellulose isn't an explosive. I also still haven't been able to find any resources that corroborate what you're saying.
Just about any extremely flammable material in a constrained environment will generate a pulse wave. The combustion sucks in the oxygen and radically changes the pressure in surprising ways.
> She said that in 2016 she asked archivists across the country if they had any copies of the film. She heard back later that year about one museum, the Eastman, which had a decaying copy in a vault.
> The Eastman had listed the film in its extensive online archives but the museum has so many reels that it hadn’t paid attention to “The Oath of the Sword.”
An alternative title for the article, such as "A Professor Requests a Copy of a Film from Archive", just lacks a certain je ne sais quoi (sensationalism and inaccuracy).
Rochesterian here. Had to snicker when I read this, given that the Eastman is like a superfund site because of all the film that it decided to "archive" by burying it the grounds of the museum.
Not even just films. The BBC was notorious for taping over old programmes to save money on tape and thus there's early episodes of Doctor Who that are lost along with some classics such as episodes of Hancock's Half Hour.
I'd suggest that tapes should be digitised and that way they're far easier for the public to watch and categorise them so that other hidden gems can be found again.
I've been involved in getting the archives of a small-time newspaper digitized and it's not cheap in terms of either time or money.
There's a near-infinite amount of decaying and fairly rare analog media out there--and much that has been lost as companies have gone out of business, etc. It's not realistic to digitize all of it.
I'd be happy for some of my tax money to go to a historical preservation project.
Maybe it'd be feasible to get members of the public to volunteer to do some of the digitisation - that should reduce costs, but I can imagine it would be difficult to keep track of where all the originals are and quality of the digitisation.
I have no idea how you'd crowdsource something like that outside of a local group of some sort who could come into an office and volunteer.
The reality is that there's a near-infinite amount of stuff that could be digitized and someone needs to make a call about what's worthwhile. At some point you're just digitally hoarding and spending a lot of time/effort/money to do so.
I'm in the UK, so I'm not contributing towards that.
We've got the British Film Institute (https://www.bfi.org.uk/) but that's a charity and part funded by funds from the National Lottery (that I don't play as it seems to be a voluntary tax on the poor).
It's a mix. For loose issues, it's mostly people's time. We have a large format scanner and it takes maybe 10 minutes per ~16 page issue or so once you get into the flow. For bound volumes, they'll really need to get sent out to somewhere that has specialized equipment and that will cost $1 to $2 per page.
I probably have more of a preservationist urge than most people. But, at some point, you really have to accept that you're not going to preserve (and properly index, provide access, backup, etc.) every word, photo, or video that's been put on media in some form.
Doctor Who fans are probably the most aware of this. It’s hard to say which is the more stunning fact: how much of early Doctor Who was lost or how much of the lost managed to be recovered later.
I remember reading about the efforts to restore colour to material that had only been preserved in black and white.
Before magnetic tape for video really became feasible (1970s), to make a record of television broadcasts, the BBC (and many other broadcasters) would film a quality TV monitor with a film camera. Black-and-white film recordings exist of a number of Doctor Who episodes originally broadcast in colour in the late 60s and early 70s.
Black-and-white analog televisions, like used in the BBC telecine recorder, receive the same signal as a colour TV. They receive a signal with colour information, encoded at very high frequency within the otherwise black-and-white compatible TV signal. On a black and white TV, that high frequency colour information, shows up as fine variations in texture with repeating patterns. Shift the phase of the colour carrier, and the colour changes for an appropriately equipped colour decoder, and the pattern shifts on a B&W TV. It's almost imperceptible really, which was the hack that allowed compatible colour TV. But it's there on the B&W display. And it's preserved on the film recording, too. That colour data can be recovered with appropriate software:
Correct me if I am wrong, but weren't some of the lost episodes recovered from copies that were illegally made by people recording the show off their TV? I can't help but feel that the costs to preserve these things would be much lower if we just let fans do the backing up.
Not really, as home videotaping was not yet available. There are audiotape recordings from broadcast that were used for some recreations (there are some stories which were recreated with animation and the original soundtracks or still photos either from broadcast or on-set). Most of the recovered copies were film copies that were sent overseas.
What’s really wild is how in some cases, what was able to be recovered was a segment that was censored before broadcast as the film that was broadcast was lost, but the segment that was cut managed to survive.
The BBC does have a project to digitise the archives, partly because you just can’t get the players anymore for obsolete formats like D3 (…which most of the old analogue 2” quad library was transferred to when that became obsolete).
Although just having a digitised archive doesn’t mean it can all be made public ally available, there are lots of rights issues and so on (writers and actors will want to be paid etc.) that prevent mass access to the archive.
Half of all American films made before 1950 and over 90% of films made before 1929 are lost forever. The vast majority (75 to 90%) of silent films are lost forever. This is mostly due to fire caused by the nitrate used in the film. Projectionists used to have an escape tunnel from some projection rooms in case of fire.
I don't think fires during projection were responsible for most lost films. If one or two prints of a particular movie were lost that way, surely others would have survived. Rather, Hollywood just didn't care to keep most such films around; many were tossed, reused (nitrate base stripped of the emulsion and recoated), or relegated to poorly run vaults in which they slowly degraded.
There's a number of references to anti-Japanese sentiment in the article. Was that due to the ongoing imperialism of the Japan Empire at the time? For example, they had just annexed Korea in 1910.
It's public domain but no scan is available even though it's found. So it won't be available for viewing unless the owners decide to screen it (unlikely given its age) or scan it.
Sadly this remains the case for a large number of copyrighted works which have fallen into the public domain, but the original media is hoarded by the owners for various reasons (elitism, investment etc).
Sounds interesting but behind the WSJ paywall.
A story I find very interesting is the recovery of a large number of films found preserved under permafrost under a former ice rink in Dawson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawson_Film_Find
This is tangential to the article but when ever I read about a lost film being found there’s always mention of how it was found in a vault. I can’t help but always try to imagine what that is. Can anyone describe what these vaults are like? Does film have a smell?
People can reference a data center but most probably have never been in one. They all have a slightly dusty smell, there’s the whine of fans and HVAC, the odd people that work there, server cages, card and retina scanners, some have metal detectors. From the outside DC’s can be huge nondescript brick buildings with a massive gensets surrounded by a well built security fence. Regardless of the size they all have a similar vibe.
So I’d be very curious to know what a film vault in Hollywood is like. If it has a similar ‘you know you’re in a film vault’ feel and culture to it.
This is tangential to the article but when ever I read about a lost film being found there’s always mention of how it was found in a vault. I can’t help but always try to imagine what that is. Can anyone describe what these vaults are like? Does film have a smell?
People can reference a data center but most probably have never been in one. They all have a slightly dusty smell, there’s the whine of fans and HVAC, the odd people that work there, server cages, card and retina scanners, some have metal detectors. From the outside DC’s can be huge nondescript brick buildings with a massive gensets surrounded by a well built security fence. Regardless of the size they all have a similar vibe.
So I’d be very curious to know what a film vault in Hollywood is like. If it has a similar ‘you know you’re in a film vault’ feel to it.
