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Is 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 passag

Is 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 ago
  While 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.
- glofish 3y ago
  Remembering the past does not mean remember every single pointless thing. Lots of things in the past were not worth the paper they were printed on.
  - jpollock 3y ago
    Lots of things have been lost because people didn't consider them worth paper. What is important ends up being very strange. Ephemera become _very_ important. For example, how did women care for their hair during Victorian times? Did they wash their hair? What with? Lye soap is really strong, and they didn't have detergent based shampoos. So, what did they use? That example came to mind because it was the focus of one of the "live a while in the shoes of someone from time X" on TV. It was a huge thing for the women of the house to be able to care for their hair, and no one knew how it was done! What we consider useless to keep now may become extremely important to a future historian.
  - danaris 3y ago
    Talk to an archaeologist sometime. Some of the most valuable finds in terms of learning about past societies have been very ordinary things: the everyday objects that we make, use, and keep says so much about us that doesn't get put into official records. Archival isn't just for entertainment. It's for research, for history, and for remembering and understanding where we've come from.
    - ShroudedNight 3y ago
      There's a line in an old Time Team episode about how Phil Harding [I think] had found one of the most exciting things an archaeologist could find: [Totally deadpan] "A ditch." Indeed, the things that make good historical evidence are very frequently rather counter-intuitive.
    - glofish 3y ago
      how about the current era, where every human generates thousands of photos per year ... is that a history worth remembering and will it help where we've come from? I am not saying to not study history, I am saying storing everything is probably worse than storing half of it.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Yeah, but we still don't learn from mistakes with well-known history behind them. For example, I still hear from smart, educated people that we can stop illegal drug use by applying severe punishment to the drug suppliers.
  - usefulcat 3y ago
    It might be that knowledge of the past is necessary but not sufficient to avoid repeating previous mistakes. The fact that some people lack knowledge (whether by choice or by accident) is hardly a compelling argument against its utility.
- randmeerkat 3y ago
  > The primary function of culture is to pass knowledge and habits to the next generation. At first glance this makes sense, but then if that was really the case, why are we losing cultural artifacts and not protecting them..? Why is copyright law continuing to be weaponized to such an extent..? Maybe what culture “was” has changed and modern culture is just one of ownership and consumerism.
troutwine 3y ago
> 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. While I agree that preserving through something through time does take intentional effort I disagree that this acts as a 'quality' filter. What we've received from the past comes to us through a surprising amount of accidents, or close scrapes. Beowulf exists now in millions of copies but the original is a single, damaged codex. Was Beowulf worth preserving more than the other, now lost oral poems of that era? Gilgamesh was popular in the ancient world and was told and retold, yet we still don't have and may never have a complete Gilgamesh. Is it not worth preserving? It may be, through sheer blind luck, that in 10,000 years some trade paperback you have in your home right now will be the only written example of your native tongue. Is all the literature composed in your tongue not worth preserving? > The current archival processes are something so radically new, we don't yet understand how it shapes society. Are they so new? And, as to how archival practices shape society, I think you need only look at the European Renaissance to see what a rediscovery of the past will do to a people. Or, consider the rediscovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls on Biblical scholarship in the modern era.
libraryatnight 3y ago
I don't know that I'd argue - in the case of cultural artifacts - that time is a quality filter. I'm certainly glad that it seems as much good stuff survives as we have, but we also find lots of interesting things after the fact and in spite of ourselves. We make a decent attempt at archiving things of cultural significance so far as we can assess such things in our own time is about as generous as I'd get. Also it's a weird idea that we should forget things so that someone later can feel special when they do it again. Really weird.
- JasonFruit 3y ago
  In music, at least, I've reluctantly concluded that time is an almost infallible judge. I'm a violist, and we have very little repertoire, so we're always excited when we discover a viola piece among the works of a forgotten or little-known composer from the 19th century or earlier, but almost invariably, it's either mediocre or outright trash. Zelter, Sitt, Ritter, Zitterbart, Firket, Rougnon, — it sounds like I'm making these names up, but I'm not — mediocrities all. As a professor of mine was fond of pointing out to me, "There's a reason we haven't heard _x_," where _x_ is the new find of the day.
  - hedora 3y ago
    I think that was more true when less stuff was being produced, and the cost of keeping a copy was non-zero. Those things stopped being true ~ 100 years ago, so now we end up with strange filters. For example, a large number of high-value film masters were lost in a single warehouse fire. (Arguably, shorter copyright terms would have prevented that, since distributors and fans would have had geographically distributed backups that the film studio had little financial incentive to maintain).
    - JasonFruit 3y ago
      Those are all good points.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    As a musician, perhaps you can answer this for me. It seems that people who play a guitar try their hand at composing music. But the people who play violins and other orchestral instruments appear to be satisfied playing other peoples' compositions. Why is that? Have you tried to compose new viola pieces?
at_a_remove 3y ago
Stoker's widow won a lawsuit and all of the copies of Nosferatu were destroyed. Well, all but one. Every copy today has that source, that accidental source, as its ancestor. "Bothering to preserve" is a terribly blunt filter. Luck (good: a crazed archivist; bad: a nitrate fire) is too fickle to select for the best. It isn't just the films themselves: often, we have no sense of a given actor's career. We know that they had a huge impact at the time, but we have only secondhand evidence of it.
- blakesterz 3y ago
  Turns out to be a pretty interesting story, and one that I somehow never heard! https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2011/10/17/dracula-vs-nosferatu-a-true-copyright-horror-story/ https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2011/10/17/dracula-vs-nosfer...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- jutrewag 3y ago
  The mistake was letting a widow have a say in anything.
duped 3y ago
> Every phenomenal photo of a sunset takes away the future generation's credit when recreating an identically phenomenal sunset. It also takes away future generations' knowledge that such a phenomenal photo can be taken and potentially the means to do so.
pjc50 3y ago
Couple of these "who cares about old stuff" comments on here and I worry that this is the dark side of the AI revolution; once you're hooked up to the infinite content hose, or Bach faucet, you're adrift from culture as a continuous succession of works by humans engaged in conversation with one another.

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 ago
While 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.
glofish 3y ago
Remembering the past does not mean remember every single pointless thing. Lots of things in the past were not worth the paper they were printed on.
- jpollock 3y ago
  Lots of things have been lost because people didn't consider them worth paper. What is important ends up being very strange. Ephemera become _very_ important. For example, how did women care for their hair during Victorian times? Did they wash their hair? What with? Lye soap is really strong, and they didn't have detergent based shampoos. So, what did they use? That example came to mind because it was the focus of one of the "live a while in the shoes of someone from time X" on TV. It was a huge thing for the women of the house to be able to care for their hair, and no one knew how it was done! What we consider useless to keep now may become extremely important to a future historian.
- danaris 3y ago
  Talk to an archaeologist sometime. Some of the most valuable finds in terms of learning about past societies have been very ordinary things: the everyday objects that we make, use, and keep says so much about us that doesn't get put into official records. Archival isn't just for entertainment. It's for research, for history, and for remembering and understanding where we've come from.
  - ShroudedNight 3y ago
    There's a line in an old Time Team episode about how Phil Harding [I think] had found one of the most exciting things an archaeologist could find: [Totally deadpan] "A ditch." Indeed, the things that make good historical evidence are very frequently rather counter-intuitive.
  - glofish 3y ago
    how about the current era, where every human generates thousands of photos per year ... is that a history worth remembering and will it help where we've come from? I am not saying to not study history, I am saying storing everything is probably worse than storing half of it.
WalterBright 3y ago
Yeah, but we still don't learn from mistakes with well-known history behind them. For example, I still hear from smart, educated people that we can stop illegal drug use by applying severe punishment to the drug suppliers.
- usefulcat 3y ago
  It might be that knowledge of the past is necessary but not sufficient to avoid repeating previous mistakes. The fact that some people lack knowledge (whether by choice or by accident) is hardly a compelling argument against its utility.
randmeerkat 3y ago
> The primary function of culture is to pass knowledge and habits to the next generation. At first glance this makes sense, but then if that was really the case, why are we losing cultural artifacts and not protecting them..? Why is copyright law continuing to be weaponized to such an extent..? Maybe what culture “was” has changed and modern culture is just one of ownership and consumerism.

troutwine 3y ago

> 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. While I agree that preserving through something through time does take intentional effort I disagree that this acts as a 'quality' filter. What we've received from the past comes to us through a surprising amount of accidents, or close scrapes. Beowulf exists now in millions of copies but the original is a single, damaged codex. Was Beowulf worth preserving more than the other, now lost oral poems of that era? Gilgamesh was popular in the ancient world and was told and retold, yet we still don't have and may never have a complete Gilgamesh. Is it not worth preserving? It may be, through sheer blind luck, that in 10,000 years some trade paperback you have in your home right now will be the only written example of your native tongue. Is all the literature composed in your tongue not worth preserving? > The current archival processes are something so radically new, we don't yet understand how it shapes society. Are they so new? And, as to how archival practices shape society, I think you need only look at the European Renaissance to see what a rediscovery of the past will do to a people. Or, consider the rediscovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls on Biblical scholarship in the modern era.

libraryatnight 3y ago

I don't know that I'd argue - in the case of cultural artifacts - that time is a quality filter. I'm certainly glad that it seems as much good stuff survives as we have, but we also find lots of interesting things after the fact and in spite of ourselves. We make a decent attempt at archiving things of cultural significance so far as we can assess such things in our own time is about as generous as I'd get. Also it's a weird idea that we should forget things so that someone later can feel special when they do it again. Really weird.

JasonFruit 3y ago
In music, at least, I've reluctantly concluded that time is an almost infallible judge. I'm a violist, and we have very little repertoire, so we're always excited when we discover a viola piece among the works of a forgotten or little-known composer from the 19th century or earlier, but almost invariably, it's either mediocre or outright trash. Zelter, Sitt, Ritter, Zitterbart, Firket, Rougnon, — it sounds like I'm making these names up, but I'm not — mediocrities all. As a professor of mine was fond of pointing out to me, "There's a reason we haven't heard _x_," where _x_ is the new find of the day.
- hedora 3y ago
  I think that was more true when less stuff was being produced, and the cost of keeping a copy was non-zero. Those things stopped being true ~ 100 years ago, so now we end up with strange filters. For example, a large number of high-value film masters were lost in a single warehouse fire. (Arguably, shorter copyright terms would have prevented that, since distributors and fans would have had geographically distributed backups that the film studio had little financial incentive to maintain).
  - JasonFruit 3y ago
    Those are all good points.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  As a musician, perhaps you can answer this for me. It seems that people who play a guitar try their hand at composing music. But the people who play violins and other orchestral instruments appear to be satisfied playing other peoples' compositions. Why is that? Have you tried to compose new viola pieces?

at_a_remove 3y ago

Stoker's widow won a lawsuit and all of the copies of Nosferatu were destroyed. Well, all but one. Every copy today has that source, that accidental source, as its ancestor. "Bothering to preserve" is a terribly blunt filter. Luck (good: a crazed archivist; bad: a nitrate fire) is too fickle to select for the best. It isn't just the films themselves: often, we have no sense of a given actor's career. We know that they had a huge impact at the time, but we have only secondhand evidence of it.

blakesterz 3y ago
Turns out to be a pretty interesting story, and one that I somehow never heard! https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2011/10/17/dracula-vs-nosferatu-a-true-copyright-horror-story/ https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2011/10/17/dracula-vs-nosfer...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jutrewag 3y ago
The mistake was letting a widow have a say in anything.

duped 3y ago

> Every phenomenal photo of a sunset takes away the future generation's credit when recreating an identically phenomenal sunset. It also takes away future generations' knowledge that such a phenomenal photo can be taken and potentially the means to do so.

pjc50 3y ago

Couple of these "who cares about old stuff" comments on here and I worry that this is the dark side of the AI revolution; once you're hooked up to the infinite content hose, or Bach faucet, you're adrift from culture as a continuous succession of works by humans engaged in conversation with one another.