At the Telluride Film Festival this year, only a handful of
movies were projected from 35mm film—the lion’s share, of course, were digital
projections.
I was a bit puzzled when I talked to an arthouse theater
programmer at the festival, who mentioned that he was having trouble getting
35mm prints from distributors. I also noticed this problem in Portland earlier
this year, when my local theater, Cinema 21, cancelled a proposed mini film
festival because they couldn’t secure the 35mm prints.
“What’s the problem?” I asked him. “Now that most theaters
are projecting digitally, why are distributors holding onto their 35mm prints?
Shouldn’t they be handing them out freely, now that demand for celluloid is so
low?”
The programmer shook his head and explained that although
distributors refuse to say why, he believes 35mm prints are being dumped to
save on storage fees.
If true, this would be the third Great Film Purge.
The first Great Film Purge happened more or less continuously
from the beginning of film in the late 19th century to the beginning
of the Television Era in the early 1950s. Studios routinely dumped their films
in these decades because they were thought to have no commercial value at the
end of their theatrical runs.
The second Great Film Purge took place at the beginning of
the 1930s, when silent films became unpopular (and hence, unprofitable) with
the introduction of Talkies.
The Film Foundation, an organization founded by Martin
Scorsese to support film preservation and restoration, notes on its website
that “[h]alf of all American films made before 1950 and over 90%
of films made before 1929 are lost forever.” The loss of cinema history wasn’t
just bad luck—it happened on purpose.
“Most of the early films did not
survive because of wholesale junking by the studios” says film preservationist
Robert A. Harris. “There was no thought of ever saving these films. They simply
needed vault space and the materials were expensive to house.”1
Not all films were simply thrown out. In the case of older
black and white films on silver nitrate film stock, the prints were often
dissolved to recover the silver content.
This is another example that underscores how the film
industry’s rush to digital projection is only about saving the industry money.
If original prints and film elements are lost, nothing will be left to digitally transfer. Or, existing digital transfers will simply be
processed over and over again to produce “restorations”. When 8K, 16K digital projectors
become standard, will there be an option to go back to the original prints and
film elements and get the cleanest, highest-quality source possible?
Robert A. Harris again:
One final point on this subject. Once materials are
preserved properly, that does not then mean that the original nitrate should be
junked. I have to assume that today's technology will be constantly supplanted
in the future with new means of creating even higher quality preservation materials.
You never want your finest surviving asset to be a dupe when you can have the
luxury of going back to an original element.1
And yet, the industry may be purging their film
archives. Again.
1. Robert A. Harris, public hearing statement to
the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress, Washington,
D.C., February 1993.
