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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Author
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Topic: Digital Archiving article from IEEE
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 09-04-2018 07:57 AM
quote: Connor Wilson
The year in which we first saw The Wizard of Oz is also the first and last time we saw The Good Old Days.
I couldn't have put it better. You've hit the nail squarely on the head as to the real reason why movies (and other cultural artifacts, for that matter) disappear. It is not, fundamentally, because the technology makes it difficult to preserve them. It is because they were not considered worth saving, either ever and at all, or until it was too late.
A great example of this is Beyond the Rocks. The movie is a mainstream Hollywood genre pic from the early 1920s. It got lukewarm reviews, and did OK, but not great, at the box office. It then vanished without trace, until a print was discovered in a barn in The Netherlands in 2003, which was used to restore and re-release the film in a blaze of global "film archiving event of the century!" publicity three years later.
It was a ready made project, that checked all the boxes needed to make the work of film restorers into a big media event:
1 - The film had two big stars in it (Swanson and Valentino)
2 - There was no evidence of it having been seen in any way, shape or form, for over 80 years after its original release.
3 - The rediscovered print was complete and most of it was in good condition
4 - It was rediscovered in a very unlikely location and under bizarre circumstances
5 - Scanning and digital film restoration was in its infancy, and this was one of the first projects, if not the first, in which a Hollywood feature was restored using this technology.
6 - The archive that did the restoration was very good at press relations and PR.
There was just one, tinsy little problem. The movie is fucking abysmal. It is truly, truly bad. I have probably seen around 100 Hollywood features made between the end of WWI and the conversion to sound, and this is easily the worst. The script is a crude, cliche-ridden hack job from a basically unfiilmable (at least, without spoken dialogue) novel. The acting is totally ham - exaggerated gestures of the sort you'd expect to see in movies made a decade earlier, before Griffith invented the cut to a close-up. The problem is that Sam Wood was using cuts to close-ups, but the actors (especially the supporting cast) didn't get it. The screen was filled with them making faces like clowns. Camera movement, or anything else even remotely visually interesting? Forget it. This film is so incompetently conceived and executed that it actually provides unintentional amusement value.
However, in the media event that accompanied this restoration, no-one was really allowed to point this out. When I did so, discussing it with a few people after a screening at an AMIA conference, I was rebuked for undermining the achievement of the film archiving movement, etc. etc. Actually, I'd consider it a bigger achievement than if they'd found the lost footage from Greed, or The Mountain Eagle, because this actually gives us a more accurate idea of what a typical American going to the movies in 1922 would have been found themselves watching than anything we had available previously. Most of the films that the professors idolize and rave about now did not reach a huge audience when they were first made, and the ones that are lost are only lamented now because those professors, and the archivists they taught, are making a big deal out of them.
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