There is a middle ground and I mean to walk it, telling you just exactly what you need to know -- and no more -- about film loss and preservation. You can trust me for your basic personal edification because, well, I'm smart, good at research, and make a living explaining things. So read this and learn, but if what you need is actual scholarship - worthy of citing and whatnot, you should look elsewhere:
Film Basics
Lets start with the film stock itself. Film is made up of a base, some sort of durable clear material, that is coated with an emulsion -- a layer of light-sensitive particles. In the old days of cinema (from pretty much it's inception up to 1950 or so) the film base was made of something called cellulose nitrate (or nitrocellulose). This substance was known to be fairly unstable (even explosive), but was used for a very long time anyway. If you've heard the term "safety film" or seen that phrase printed along the edges of your camera film, just realize that it is in response to what was clearly the "danger film" in widespread use before 1950!
Why then, if nitrocellulose was so horrible, did they use it in the first place? That's a bit harder to answer. The cellulose part makes sense. Cellulose is a naturally occurring component of cell walls in plant fibers, and was a precursor to plastic -- a thin, flexible, tough and clear material ideal for forming a base for the emulsion to sit on. However, to be used as film base, the cellulose was first bathed in (or in some way subjected to) nitrates in a chemical process. The question is why -- why was the cellulose alone not enough to form a film base? What exact purpose did the nitratification serve. And that, my friends, is the piece I cannot seem to get an answer to. From inferences I've made, it seems that the nitratifying either made the cellulose more gummy (in order for the emulsion to stick) or made it more durable (for running through a projector), or somehow more appropriate for working with the silver emulsion, but these are just guesses. Everyone who writes about the process seems to take for granted that there was a reason for the nitrating. People who write about this also usually gush about the amazing image quality it produced -- but I don't know if that can be properly attributed to the film base. It would make more sense for the emulsion to be the cause of the great quality.
In any case, the base is not the working part of the film. The photo-reactive layer (the emulsion) is what forms the image. Lucky for me, for purposes of this post, there is no need to really get into the process by which film records images. It's one of those things, like electricity and phones, that we modern people get to accept on faith. Just know that "silver halide" is a light sensitive material from which black and white emulsion is made. When exposed to light, the silver halide will change and become darker in the places where more light hit and stays lighter in places where less light reached the emulsion. And this is why negatives are the opposite of reality -- what is light in reality will look dark on film (and vice versa). (By the way, silver halide can only record how much light got in, not what color anything was. The process by which color is captured is an entirely different matter; and, thus, a different post.)
Originals and Prints
During the early years of cinema, 35mm film was the predominate recording medium. The 35mm merely describes how wide the film is. The higher the number, the wider the film, the bigger the images, the better the images. Simple. Although the word gets bandied about in a variety of ways, to be truly an "original," a piece of film would have to have been the original, usually 35 mm, film strip that sat inside the camera and got exposed from reality. And that original would be a negative.
"Print" is a word you see a lot when people talk about old film and preservation. To those familiar with still-photography (pre-digital I mean), you're used to prints. It's when you shine light through a negative onto a sheet of photosensitive paper and then develop that paper and get a positive! The print converts, so to speak, the negative into a positive so it is properly viewable.
This idea is similar with motion pictures. The originals are negatives. If you ran a negative film through a film projector you would see a negative image on the screen. Not good viewing. (Think about it; it makes sense. If you hold a negative up to a window to look at it you still see a negative image. To get your negative to look the right way round you have to do something else to it. In the case of printing to photographic paper, the paper is sensitive to light in the same way that the film itself was, so that the paper now "sees" the darker patches of film as places where less light gets through and represents them as light areas (once again -- just as they were in reality.)
Although the word "print" is a little odd for talking about a strip of film, the idea is well applied: light gets shown through a negative and unto another photosensitive thing (in this case more film) the negative is reversed and the new film carries a positive image. Perfect for shining light from a projector through and showing to the adoring masses.
When a print was struck from the true original it is often called an original print (or something along those lines). One can easily see that if you make a print from an original source, its bound to be better quality than one made from what is already a copy. Also, note that you can strike a 35mm print or a 16mm print or even a smaller size print (say, 8mm) from a negative. Quality of any copies will be affected by a number of factors. Keep in mind that all of these prints got made out of the same nitrocellulose based film stock that the originals had been.
Now we get to another stumbling block in the film loss dissertation. The question is "just how many prints/copies were made of these old films?" Even back in the silent days, there were theaters all across America (the world?) waiting to show these films. Did all the copies that got distributed to theaters come from a single master negative? or just a few? What happened to all those copies once the local theatre was done with them? I can't find anyone who'll tell me, but my guess is that a lot got made, a lot got worn out from showing too many times, and a lot got lost and destroyed.
Which brings us to the main point (finally): film loss
Film Nitrate Degradation
It is such a sad thing to history junkies and archivists like myself to think of all the film that is lost and gone forever due to deterioration and fire. According to a variety of sources and depending on who you believe, as much as 75% to 90% of all silent films ever created are now lost.
There are many reasons for the loss, not the least of which is intentional destruction by the studios. Pressed for space and looking to the future after the advent of sound, studios trashed large stores of films thought to have little commercial value. The world had so thoroughly switched over to talkies that, except where some very big stars or very careful producers were concerned, these films were considered cheap and meaningless, and worst of all, dangerous. Add to this the fact that the film emulsion was silver, studios had incentive to destroy the old film in order recover and recycle the still-valuable silver within.
What remained -- in basements, garages, vaults and boxes -- safe from the destruction of external forces began to be destroyed from within. The extremely flammable nature of the nitrate base caused many films to succumb to fire over the years. As if this weren't enough, the slow process of image loss took its own toll.
The way image loss works is, as nitrocellulose begins to break down, gases are released that combine with humidity to form nitric acid. The acid eats slowly away at the film, destroying the images, causing it to lose its proper form and stick to itself, as well as to decay its container. Eventually it can look something like this:
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| http://www.filmpreservation.org/preservation-basics/nitrate-degradation |
And viewing a film that is starting to decay might look something like this.
Beginning with the enactment in 1988 of the National Film Preservation Act, and the establishment of the National Film Preservation Board, systematic steps have been taken to save, copy, preserve and properly store the precious prints and originals of movies that are found to possess cultural, historical or aesthetic significance. Twenty-five more films are added to the archive every year.
The organization takes several important steps with the films - most importantly to halt further degradation of the originals (or best prints still in existence) by interring the films in cold storage at proper humidity which is the key requirement. They also make a fresh copy (print) of the film onto modern, more stable, film stock and preserve that too.
Best copies and digital restorations
So where does all this get us? Take heart! There is still a huge amount of silent era work available for viewing. And much of the best and most vulnerable work is getting saved now. However, what is available for viewing varies greatly in quality.
I've heard a couple of stories that are fascinating. Harold Lloyd, the wonderful silent comedian, was apparently a fastidious man who took great pains to wrap and store his original films and kept them safely filed away. When you view one of his films today, it looks pristine, like it just came out of the vault. Unfortunately, a large chunk of Lloyd's carefully preserved film was lost to fire.
Or, take the situation of Buster Keaton. After the peak of his fame ended, in the early 1930s, Keaton's silent era works lay largely forgotten. Not until many years later, when actor James Mason moved into Keaton's former mansion, were masses of Keaton films discovered in a shed, in various states of decay. Thanks to the work of collector, historian and film preservationist Raymond Rohauer, and to Mason's incredible discovery, most of Keaton's work was saved. The public now gets to enjoy a nearly complete catalog of Keaton's work, though much of it is scratched and faded and even missing scenes. And speaking on behalf of the public, let me just say: we are extremely grateful!
What often happens in the case of old films that still have market potential, is that someone with the rights and the interest will start assembling whatever bits they can find. Maybe the original 35mm negative still exists so we know how the film is edited and put together, but maybe it has begun to disintegrate. Perhaps large sections of the film are available on a good quality extant 35mm print, but other scenes are missing. Perhaps someone's 16mm copy has been found intact -- complete, but of much worse image quality. . . Film restorers might put together all the pieces and try to create the most complete and best quality film possible from various sources.
Because copyright law is fairly complex (turning on issues such as whether the material was originally copyrighted and copyrighted properly, as well as how much time has passed since the last copyright renewal), the situation is different from film to film as to whether someone owns the rights and what they are doing with those films. Depending on the aesthetic vision of the companies with the rights, there's a lot of variation on what is distributed.
What I will call "digital restoration" involves myriad techniques and a crazy language all its own. I know that pretty much anyone can rip a digital copy of a film and "restore" it on a personal computer. The difference between doing that and the painstaking, hand-done restoration work that can truly enhance a viewing experience is extraordinary. (Such detailed work was done on the Wizard of Oz at the cost of 1000s of hours of manual labor. According to dvd special features, actual humans identified and digitally fixed scratches and dust and other noise frame by frame, if not pixel by pixel. And the result is beautiful.) Most of the time that does not happen. Instead, computer programs can be used to "remove" noise by taking information from surrounding pixels and applying it to the whole, in effect making the whole thing look clean and clear but softer - because individual pixel resolution is lost.
This photo (which I found as a dead-end page, so I can't properly site) illustrates the difference very well:
I personally prefer the sharpness of the original (here, the left side) to the cleaner softness of the digitally restored images most of the time.
Seeing scratches and pops and flashes of light actually serve to enhance the emotional experience of the film! They underscore the fact that you are watching something very old and that the public is indeed lucky to be able to see at all.
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