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Almost three quarters of the golden age of Hollywood has been lost
- therealmarv 3y agoWithout archive.org we could say the very same about the Internet. Although there is not much of an archive of before 1996/1995 (it's lost)
- macrolime 3y agoThere's not much from the 90s at all really. While some stuff is there, most of the stuff I remember from the 90s isn't on archive.org and probably nowhere else, except maybe in someones old hard drives or floppy disks at the bottom of a drawer.
- therealmarv 3y agoif somebody has some 90s webpages in their drawer: Please reach out to archive.org ;)
- yamtaddle 3y agoThe main geocities-alike web host I used around IIRC 1998-2001 is just gone, as far as I can tell. I think it was called spree.com. The spaces were intended to be used by some kind of sales affiliates, I think, but were de facto just little ad-free (unlike other hosts) web spaces with a decent amount of storage (a few MB, I think?). I wasn't the only one just using it as free web hosting. I've tried a couple times, and can find no record of the service ever having existed, let alone any of the content that was on it (mine, or any other).
- mardifoufs 3y agoDo you think this might be related? If it is, you seem to have gotten the name right! http://www.4degreez.com/popupsmustdie/solutions/spree.htm http://www.4degreez.com/popupsmustdie/solutions/spree.htm
- yamtaddle 3y agoYep, that page has to be about the same site.
- squarefoot 3y agoSomething from that era that was also published in the form of CD has been archived, fortunately. http://cd.textfiles.com/directory.html http://cd.textfiles.com/directory.html
- kingcharles 3y agoThanks, that's a great resource.
- xref 3y agoBefore that it was 20 years of BBS content that is sadly mostly lost.
- ghaff 3y agoAnd Usenet is pretty fragmentary as well and, even among what was preserved, I don't know how accessible what archives there are as they went via Dejanews and then Google Groups. Of course, there's also a huge amount of information about companies, products, news, etc. that was largely never in electronic form and--where it didn't just get tossed in the trash in the wake of some corporate buyout--is in the stacks of some library someplace.
- iggldiggl 3y ago> I don't know how accessible what archives there are as they went via Dejanews and then Google Groups. And unfortunately Google has starting blocking some groups because of too much spam (that to some extent probably was enabled by Google itself in the first place), and unfortunately that means that the archives of those groups (pre-dating the current spam deluge) are inaccessible, too.
- jasonwatkinspdx 3y agoThere's definitely a lot lost from the era of personal home pages.
- LocalH 3y agoIt's amazing how literally every major copyright proponent doesn't really care about the things that actually make copyright possible - the actual works themselves. Time and time again, they've shown disrespect for authors and creators when they treat works as a means to an end. They're not in it for the art of it, they're in it for the money of it. This has been happening for almost a century at this point, just in the realm of moving pictures. Never forget the entire Dumont library being dumped in the upper New York Bay just because they didn't want to store them.
- jmclnx 3y agoWell I thought the Golden Age was the 30s and 40s, not the Silent Era. But sad to hear many of those old pictures are gone.
- glofish 3y agoIs it really a big deal that some really old movies are lost ... sorry but I just don't see why ... I wish lots of content disappeared - in the past the passage of time was a way to filter for quality, because we only bothered to preserve something worth preserving. Forgetting is also a gift - it is is foolish to think that you have to preserve everything. I think it is a much bigger problem that too much of today's photos and videos are preserved. Every phenomenal photo of a sunset takes away the future generation's credit when recreating an identically phenomenal sunset. The current archival processes are something so radically new, we don't yet understand how it shapes society.
- sonofhans 3y ago“Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” I find that more compelling than, “Erase the past so we can build again.” The primary function of culture is to pass knowledge and habits to the next generation. If we remember the past we can build on it — standing on the shoulders of giants, as they say — rather than re-finding old mistakes. Old movies teach us about (of course) old movies, and that’s interesting for anyone learning the art. Even in very dated art there is often something worth copying, stealing, learning from. Old movies teach us about ourselves, and in a more visceral way than any other art form. Some of those old movies show cultural context in a way that’s difficult to document — clothes, street signs, mannerisms, slang. There are already plenty of forces intent upon the destruction of old cultural artifacts, from Egyptian pharaohs breaking monuments of prior rulers, to the burning of the library at Alexandria, to the looting of the Baghdad museums in the Gulf War. That doesn’t even account for the primary killers of old culture: mildew, insects, rot, loss, indifference, repurposing. It’s a miracle when any old culture survives. It’s a good thing.
- monsieurgaufre 3y agoWhile i somewhat agree with you, i do not share your optimism. We already have lots of information to prevent from repeating errors from the past. Yet, more than i'd like seem to creep out of the shadows right now. And I'm not even talking about the intrinsic value (or lack thereof) of a cultural item.
- irrational 3y agoWhat makes it the golden age? I’d much rather have Raiders of the Lost Ark than Metropolis.
- iamerroragent 3y agoIt's just a conveniention as far as I am aware. Similar one is applied to comics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age
- jdfellow 3y agoThere's a long-standing convention of "golden age" meaning the first age, when an art came into its own. A "silver age" follows if there's a revolution in the art, often with some sort of decline between.
- stametseater 3y agoWho needs Rome? Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas is much better... Seriously, of all the modern movies to pick, you choose one who's entire shtick is referencing and celebrating (or commercially exploiting) memory of the old movies you mean to denigrate with this comparison?
- zirgs 3y agoMaybe it was different in the 80s, but most of those who watch Indiana Jones movies now haven't even seen the old movies that they referenced.
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- genewitch 3y agoby the 40s, most radio drama was not any of those things, at least not to an offensive degree. I've only seen a few very old movies and caricatures are annoying, but it's a product of the time. There's no reason to wipe it off the planet.
- anthk 3y agoI'm hearing the "Old Radio" archives, and Dimension X it's highly recommended for what it was for its era. Remember: the sci-fi folks mostly were the progressive ones, just look at Star Trek from the 60's. Or The Twilight Zone from the 50's.
- stametseater 3y agoWhen discussing the era of scientific racism, it's a mistake to assume that interest in science correlated with socially progressive beliefs, in the modern sense of progress.
- anthk 3y agoIt depends on the artwork. Most pulp and scifi comics were progressive and "scientific racism" had no sense from a huge intergalactic biology review. Wars? yes, OFC. Stereotypes? Back and forth. Cultures were far more isolated back in the day and the typical " 'murican Southern/Chicagoan journalist/NYC cop" on a Franco-Belgian comic-book was given as a fact.
- genewitch 3y agoMy favorites are: Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar Phillip Marlowe Richard Diamond these are all noir (hardboiled) detectives, although Johnny and Richard are much more lighthearted... uh, at heart.
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- MarkusWandel 3y agoA release rate of three per day (overall)! This isn't that much different from the rate at which stuff comes up in my modest set of Youtube subscriptions. And what of that stuff is worth a rewatch or considered culturally significant? And yet! 100 years from now they'll lament that so much of today's pop culture has simply been lost to random deletion or bit rot.
- chx 3y agoAlready the link rot on youtube is significant. Very often I will find links like "listen to this music it's good", you go to youtube and not even the metadata is left, it's just an error page so you have no idea what it even was.
- xmprt 3y agoMusic on YouTube is probably a bad example because it's subject to a lot of weird licensing restrictions and copyright claims.
- chx 3y agoYes but is that reason to delete the metadata as well?
- judge2020 3y agoI know YouTube will throw a video to an extremely slow archival hard disk where getting 720p requires waiting a few minutes for YT to (presumably) move it to some regular storage tier with reasonable write speeds. But I've never heard of there being rot on the actual data YT stores, and I imagine it's on the same policy as Drive files where they're globally redundant, or at least in two different DCs.
- xyzzy_plugh 3y agoI believe the parent is referring to deleted content, not literal unintended data loss.
- mortenjorck 3y agoI was already familiar with the perils of nitrate, but I never knew distribution patterns were such a big factor in the loss of vintage films. I have some memories of the concept of "second-run" theaters growing up, but I had no idea there was once such a long-tail network of nth-run cinemas that the total number of prints in distribution would need only be a fraction of modern releases.
- rjbwork 3y agoThis is what today's IP oligopolists would have happen to the bulk of culture. I find it exceedingly unlikely that all IP will be maintained by the owner for the life of the author plus 70 years. We know there are gobs of cultural artifacts from as recently as the 80s (videos, games, etc.) that are permanently lost. Without short copyright terms and the encouragement of independent archivalists, we ensure most cultural artifacts will be lost to time.
- whitemary 3y agoThis is what capitalism would have happen to the bulk of culture.
- GalenErso 3y agoI download YouTube videos I like. A number of them aren't available anymore. As far as I am aware, I have the last backups. I've also downloaded obscure .swf files and weird soundtracks and sound effects from obscure and now deprecated flash games I used to play in my youth.
- hakonhaki 3y agoNot a huge collector but so checkout moonwalk.swf Not too hard to find, but a beautiful animation of a human struggling yo walk home on the moon… you’ll love it
- Ruthalas 3y agoIf you feel like chatting with others who also archive YouTube (and other) content, consider stopping by my discord server: https://discord.gg/rgBHGm9mTC https://discord.gg/rgBHGm9mTC We maintain a central list [1] of content that various members have archived, so that when content is removed from YouTube, people can direct inquiries to contributors who have archived that content. It's a small way to keep track of what things have been successfully archived, and sometimes direct efforts to preserve specific content. [1] https://tinyurl.com/v4rpe9w https://tinyurl.com/v4rpe9w
- amatecha 3y agoYeah I've started doing the same. When I [rarely] log into my YT account to find an old favorite from a couple years ago or whatever, I notice that something like 2/3 of my Favorites are unavailable now (I've been using YT since it launched so that kinda skews the chances in that direction of course, but the point remains).
- 49erfangoniners 3y agoShould have been less restrictive about ip, I guess.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoIf IP were less restricted, I could envision hundreds of derivative works for each film; nobody would know whether Han shot first; Ted Turner would colorize the first 20 minutes of "The Wizard of Oz", and my mom would star in "Ghostbusters (1984)".
- 49erfangoniners 3y agoI enjoy your mom's movies, so I favor this outcome
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoGoing by the nature of what art has been preserved from the past, I am convinced that what is preserved is likely either to be religious or porn. Thus, 500 years from now the works they are most likely to know about from this era will be The Passion the Christ and Kim Kardashian’s tape.
- PaulHoule 3y agoAccording to this tome http://www.wilhelm-research.com/book_toc.html http://www.wilhelm-research.com/book_toc.html it was not "films seen as art" that started the preservation wave in the 1980s but the introduction of home video which meant that a movie like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_of_Oz_(1939_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wizard_of_Oz_(1939_film) was suddenly worth millions again.
- bobthepanda 3y agoThe article claims the preservation wave started in the 1960s. That being said, home video certainly made preservation a lot easier, if only because rather than a select few copies being made for movie theaters you now were making possibly millions for home consumers. That, and extremely flammable/degradable media was not suitable for home use.
- PaulHoule 3y agoThere were two waves. Early on films were make on explosive celluloid base that was by no means durable, those were replaced by ‘safety film’ on acetate bases. Around the 1980s there was a perceived crisis about the fading of color film, Martin Scorsese was one of the leaders in that movement. People had all kinds of ideas about how to preserve color film but it was eventually realized you could keep in the freezer for hundreds of years without fading.
- tedunangst 3y agoA 25% retention rate is pretty good compared to the 4000 years of culture that preceded it. Who was the best King Lear in 1842? What made their performance special?
- jowdones 3y agoYeah and additionally, most silent movies were garbage. Even the good ones are total crap by modern standards. Who would have watched them again? A few weirdos and only a tiny random subset chosen by random criteria. Might as well watch the 25% that was preserved and is waay too high anyway. Some things must just go away.
- Aloha 3y agoSome did reach the same production values as modern films - but Silent Film was functionally a completely different art form than Talkies.
- local_crmdgeon 3y agoHot take: Those TikTok meme slideshows or compilations of images with music over them? Where the music isn't synced to anything? Silent movies.
- Aloha 3y agoSilent Movies did often have semi-synchronized music.
- superhuzza 3y ago>Who was the best King Lear in 1842? What made their performance special? There's actually a surprising amount of information about famous stage actors, even going back to the 17th century. There are quite a few written accounts describing specific details of the staging, casts etc. To answer your question, Samuel Phelps seems to have been the most popular King Lear of that time period. Prior to him, possibly Edmund Kean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Phelps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Phelps
- jb1991 3y agoIt's not just century-old movies, many much more recent movies which were available on DVD are almost impossible to find now that everything is to the whim of streamers and online services. Here are some examples: https://johnaugust.com/2018/missing-movies https://johnaugust.com/2018/missing-movies
- dylan604 3y ago>everything is to the whim of streamers Is it though? To me, it seems much more to the whim of the content owners. If they choose to not make it available to the streamers, then it's not the streamer's fault for not having it.
- freejazz 3y agoExcept that the streamers don't take everything that is available... streaming has a cost to bear.
- usefulcat 3y ago> A more immediate way of getting some action would be to talk to some of the directors with films on the list and encourage them to get their movies released digitally. Ron Howard and James Cameron are obvious candidates. Interesting side note: a couple of years back, I wanted to buy The Abyss on blu-ray. When I went to look, all I could find were DVD versions and a crappy fake blu-ray version where someone had just ripped a DVD and transferred it to blu-ray (seriously). After a bit of digging, I came to find out that there is no blu-ray version of The Abyss because (basically) Cameron has been holding it up. I don't recall the exact details, but it has something to do with him wanting to oversee it personally, yet simultaneously never bothering to actually bother to get it done. Looked again just now and supposedly the work has finally been done (?) and it was to be available last month, yet as of right now it's not available on amazon, so who knows..
- johnwalkr 3y agoI've been hoping for the 4K remaster to be finished and end up in theatres, hopefully as a nice director's cut and maybe even in an old school non-widescreen IMAX theatre. I remember 20 years ago being so excited to buy and watch a 4:3 DVD of The Abyss. It was right around the time that widescreen was equated to "good", but The Abyss was shot in 4:3 and it was a rare case where the widescreen version was the "pan and scan" version. Highly recommend the documentary about shooting the film if you're a fan[1]. It's a film that could never be made in the same way today. The rat breathing an oxygen rich liquid scene was real (not saying this is a good thing) and the stuntwork of actors was even more dangerous. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YctOKgWVn9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YctOKgWVn9E
- Aloha 3y agoWhich Golden Age? Yes, the preservation for pre-1927 films is very very poor, 3/4's was lost, with most of that loss being things make before 1925. Much more of the post-1927 content was preserved (more of it was preserved with sound once we switched to sound on film) - I'd note however that Silent Movies are virtually unrecognizable by modern viewers as being even the same art form as sound pictures - and sound movies didnt reach the same... production values? as the silents until 1936-37. The period between 1927-and 1937 was a period of reinvention and learning of a new medium, which is why - my general take is the golden age of Hollywood was 1939 to 1959. Consider what films came out in 1939 - * Gone with the Wind * Wizard of Oz * Mr. Smith goes to Washington These are films that still find audiences today, now - 80 years or so on. Most Americans might have seen one movie produced between 1927 and 1938 - but most people who are above 30 have seen at least two those three movies at least once. And that trend continues from there on - where 1940 to 1959, most americans have seen one movie released in each of those years. So while I dont disagree that we are losing heritage in these things - I take issue with their definition of Golden Age and the idea that there is value in saving everything ever written or filmed. Much of it wasnt meant to be relevant for decades, it was meant to be ephemeral topical entertainment, and functionally intended to be disposable. Most of the production of Poverty Row, and B pictures by the majors are like this, they were intended for Block Booking, and largely just as a way to fill the content needs of the theaters and as a way to provide steady revenue in the event an A picture flopped.
- ehvatum 3y ago> Much of it wasnt meant to be relevant for decades, it was meant to be ephemeral topical entertainment, and functionally intended to be disposable. As with Pompeii graffiti and warehouse cuneiform tally tablets, from the anthropological perspective, the ephemeral is interesting. Old entertainment that seems alien has a lot to offer for understanding culture that was.
- Aloha 3y agoDo you need all of it, or like 30-40% of it? The costs to try to save all of it are vast - the costs to try to save some of it are pretty reasonable. What's interesting is what has survived from the 20's was mostly by accident.
- tristor 3y agoNearly everything I remember as a cultural artifact from the 80s and 90s is gone, except for movies and video games, both of which have been preserved only due to illegal copyright infringement. Nearly every aspect of my online presence and the people who influenced my formative years, things like the local dial-in BBS, some of the Usenet groups, and the many MUDs are all gone, poof, vanished. I imagine more of human culture has been lost than preserved at nearly every point in history, but as with other commenters, I expect online culture in particular will be lost to memory due to the folly of US copyright law, the US global hegemony (primarily focused on enforcing said laws), and the US being a lynchpin to the early Internet.
- rjbwork 3y agoHello fellow baconeer. Fancy meeting you in a thread like this ;)
- stiglitz 3y agoThat’s odd- the first film mentioned by this article (Ben-Hur from 1925), which it describes as completely lost, is not lost, at least according to its wikipedia article. Apparently it was (at least) partly considered lost until being found again in the 80’s. Not sure whether to trust TFA on any other claims now.
- pavon 3y agoThe article doesn't say that Ben-Hur was lost. It says that another movie, The Devil Dancer, by the same director was lost.
- MisterBastahrd 3y agoThere's a lot of dismissive posts in this thread, and I think some people are missing an issue here. When documenting the history of anything, it's rarely a bad thing to have a lot of data. Here, the preservation of these films is a documentation of history. When we talk about the art form of film, we see the giants and then work backwards. How much has Spielberg, for example, benefitted from being able to watch Kurosawa? Who influenced Kurosawa? Who influenced the people who influenced Kurosawa? Yeah, it's a bit like counting turtles, but since when has adding granularity to our knowledge-base ever been a bad thing? If it turns out that Kurosawa didn't create a technique because someone else did it first, that doesn't matter, because he still did something that synthesized it into something special. Even the giants stood on shoulders.
- charles_f 3y agoAnd yet "reaction" videos with someone stealing content and looking bored in the bottom left of your screen will still be available for everyone for the ages to come.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoIt's still happening. Remember the Universal Music fire? The scope of the damage from that is still a subject of debate: https://variety.com/2020/music/news/universal-music-fire-archive-damage-update-2008-1203525454/ https://variety.com/2020/music/news/universal-music-fire-arc... Even worse is that we have music labels intentionally and methodically destroying generations' worth of music with dynamic compression, making despicable "remasters" the only thing available to modern listeners. What happens to the originals? Is anyone tracking their provenance?
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoSomeone downvoted that? WTF?
- rightbyte 3y agoMy prime example of a toxic remaster is Star Wars.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoMmmm, quite different because that's a movie, but yes that sucked too obviously.
- somat 3y agoIt's fine, Sturgeon's law applies to this just as it applies everything else. you don't need to keep everything, there does not need to be a frantic effort to obsessively horde every single thing ever created, things get lost, room is made for new things to be made. You do however want to make an effort to save the 10 percent of things that are actually any good.
- justinator 3y agoMySpace Music can be used as another example, https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/b2381s/myspace_lost_all_music_uploaded_from_2003_to_2015/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/b2381s/myspace_...
- caseysoftware 3y agoThe first job of my professional career was at the Library of Congress in the Motion Picture, Broadcast, and Recorded Sound Division working to digitize things like this. First, it was a fascinating job because of how media has been stored over time. Most people think of records or even phonographs but there are wax cylinders, wire spool recordings, and a ton more. Unfortunately, many of them are so degraded that you couldn't play them. It wasn't later that they came up with the turning images to sound approach but we captured many of those original pictures. Second, the sheer volume of stuff was nuts. The Library had warehouses of uncatalogued things sitting around without a real plan to log them, let alone digitize them. While we had Thomas Edison's first motion pictures, the more fascinating thing about those is that copyright law at the time didn't have a way to address "moving pictures" so they did the only thing they could: copyrights on each individual frame. Yes, seriously. Luckily, at that point, it was only 15fps and movies were short. Edison's work got all the attention but there were tons more like the ones in this article that were simply lost to time.
- danzk 3y agoMany TV stations would reuse tapes leading to many shows getting lost as well. The BBC routinely deleted content until it changed its archiving policy in 1978. Until then thousands of hours of programming in all genres was deleted. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes
- johnwalkr 3y agoThis one is interesting in that most or all audio was recovered, and some episodes are recreated by animators.
- snvzz 3y agoCopyright (and thus Disney) to thank for it.
- meristohm 3y agoWhat percentage of generational histories and educational or simply entertaining stories from the, let's just narrow it down to the indigenous cultures in the Pacific Northwest, have been lost due to disease and colonialism? How far back did some of those stories go, how many thousands of years? The lost Hollywood stories are just variations of archetypical tales presented in a different medium, sometimes superbly. Moving pictures were certainly novel, at the time, but in the context of tens of thousands of years of human existence I find that I don't really care. Up-triangle'd anyway, for those who do care, and because it's a story about stories.
- 8bitsrule 3y agoMoMA's film library (created in 1935, moved to a special facility in the 90s) now reports that it has 30,000 films in its vaults - including "the Museum’s holdings of 5,000 fragile nitrate films, dating from 1894 to 1951..." https://www.moma.org/research-and-learning/film-preservation/ https://www.moma.org/research-and-learning/film-preservation...
- sublinear 3y agoWhy not pray to the AI to bring it back? /s
- yieldcrv 3y agowhen did silent films start be called “silent” films since they were the only kind of film for a very long time
- black_13 3y ago[dead]
- ttoinou 3y agoI recommend watching Decasia by Bill Morrison https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decasia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decasia The film is a meditation on old, decaying silent films, featuring segments of earlier movies re-edited and integrated into a new narrative. Critic Glen Kenny described Decasia as an "abstract narrative about mortality in all of its manifestations."