3 ms·

It makes you wonder what other valuable films are decomposing elsewhere

by random3 10y ago

M_Grey 10y ago
Absolutely. If we had a functional government I'd say they should form a branch of the LoC to digitally preserve it all, post hast. It's hard to know what we'll be losing until it's lost otherwise.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  I wonder how much the Archive team could do on their own, with donations from us and cooperation of the "better to ask forgiveness" kind from the LoC librarians.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    That would be an excellent outcome, but given the climate around IP in this country I wouldn't want to be the one the government decided to make an example out of.
- cwingrav 10y ago
  It's the Library of Congress's job to do just this. They are doing it. People submit huge volumes of film to them and they sort through it, digitize it, and preserve it, just like books and media.
jwarren 10y ago
There are untold thousands of unlabelled canisters in film archives all around the world. Some of them are undoubtedly very important, but until they're catalogued we won't even know. Unfortunately, most film archives are enormously under-funded. Here in the UK, arts funding (which is where this normally comes from) has dropped dramatically since the financial crisis. When Jeremy Hunt axed the UK Film Council[1], most regional film archives totally lost their funding. When their money disappeared, so did any chance of employing cataloguers. A proper archive will at least be storing their film in environments with the proper humidity and temperature to reduce decomposition as much as possible. The other side of it is that the more decomposition that's happened, the more time you need to invest into restoration. See the 11 year restoration of the 18 minute Voyage dans la Lune for an extreme example[2]. That kind of effort is only possible for a film of enormous historical importance and at least some commercial value. Source: My partner's a film archivist and moving image historian. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/jul/26/uk-film-council-axed https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/jul/26/uk-film-coun... [2]: http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/chromatic-frankensteins-monsters-restoration-colour-and-variants-of-georges-meliess-voyage-dans-la-lune/ http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/chromatic-fr...
- ghaff 10y ago
  Exactly. There is, from the perspective of being able to digitally preserve it, an essentially infinite quantity of film, audio, and paper in all forms sitting in vaults, archives, libraries, etc. around the world in various states of deterioration. We collectively can (and should) make an effort to preserve significant properties but it's almost certainly unreasonable to think that even a small portion of existing physical artifacts can be digitized.

It makes you wonder what other valuable films are decomposing elsewhere

by random3 10y ago

It makes you wonder what other valuable films are decomposing elsewhere

Absolutely. If we had a functional government I'd say they should form a branch of the LoC to digitally preserve it all, post hast. It's hard to know what we'll be losing until it's lost otherwise.

pavel_lishin 10y ago
I wonder how much the Archive team could do on their own, with donations from us and cooperation of the "better to ask forgiveness" kind from the LoC librarians.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  That would be an excellent outcome, but given the climate around IP in this country I wouldn't want to be the one the government decided to make an example out of.
cwingrav 10y ago
It's the Library of Congress's job to do just this. They are doing it. People submit huge volumes of film to them and they sort through it, digitize it, and preserve it, just like books and media.

jwarren 10y ago

There are untold thousands of unlabelled canisters in film archives all around the world. Some of them are undoubtedly very important, but until they're catalogued we won't even know. Unfortunately, most film archives are enormously under-funded. Here in the UK, arts funding (which is where this normally comes from) has dropped dramatically since the financial crisis. When Jeremy Hunt axed the UK Film Council[1], most regional film archives totally lost their funding. When their money disappeared, so did any chance of employing cataloguers. A proper archive will at least be storing their film in environments with the proper humidity and temperature to reduce decomposition as much as possible. The other side of it is that the more decomposition that's happened, the more time you need to invest into restoration. See the 11 year restoration of the 18 minute Voyage dans la Lune for an extreme example[2]. That kind of effort is only possible for a film of enormous historical importance and at least some commercial value. Source: My partner's a film archivist and moving image historian. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/jul/26/uk-film-council-axed https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/jul/26/uk-film-coun... [2]: http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/chromatic-frankensteins-monsters-restoration-colour-and-variants-of-georges-meliess-voyage-dans-la-lune/ http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/chromatic-fr...

ghaff 10y ago
Exactly. There is, from the perspective of being able to digitally preserve it, an essentially infinite quantity of film, audio, and paper in all forms sitting in vaults, archives, libraries, etc. around the world in various states of deterioration. We collectively can (and should) make an effort to preserve significant properties but it's almost certainly unreasonable to think that even a small portion of existing physical artifacts can be digitized.