What I don't understand at all is why allot of the films that are restored are never seen, but for the occasional live sreening or so? Then stashed away again, sometimes for years at a time. Also why solid information is so hard to come by? And numerous sources even seem to contradict one another on the survival status of various films.
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In archives and museums, it depends upon what the deed of gift says. Each time a donor gives something to a museum or archive, they have to fill out a deed of gift.
They can place restrictions on their gifts. And they often do, collectors especially because they don't want the feds knocking at their door.
The most important thing that we have to remember is that film preservation only became an issue
in our lifetime, meaning the last thirty years or so. Remember that film is over 100 years old.
For more years than we can count studios thought their film libraries were liabilities and took up much need storage space.
Over the years, studios were slipshod (MGM seems to have been the top of the pyramid in a good way) in record keeping of what was kept and what was destroyed.
Film studios, archives, museums and international archives were never big on sharing information. We have to remember that Europe endured two world wars which re-wrote much of the map of Europe and Asia over the years. Add the Cold War and the final remnants of that and foreign archives, in some cases, have been through two or three governments and not all of them friendly.
Today the problem is how many archives have collections that are searchable on the web? Not many because that is a huge undertakng that costs money. Should they spend the money to make the collection searchable or spend the money to save a film or two. That's often the choice.
The Hollywood of today is run by multi-national corporations which is very different from in the past when they were run by men and women who cared about the movie business. Today it is about the bottom line.
We are a niche market that accounts for a fraction of the overall DVD sales. While people like Scorsese, Spielberg, Hugh Hefner and others put their money where their belief in film preservaiton is, you have many more who love to pay lip service to it and move on.
Studios are not going to fund the preservation of their film libraries until we as a society make it important for them to do so. They will continue to point to the National Registry as an example of preservation. Meanwhile, the AFI discontinues its film preservation efforts because of lack of funds.
The moving image archive and the men and women who pioneered that field developed lists, inventory and guidelines as they went along because they were dealing with it in real time as opposed to today where industry standards are more in place.
Think of the number of times in our life times that we have seen standards established for something and then been forced due to growth, new media, new evidence, etc that those guidelines had to be adjusted.
Each medium that film has been transferred to whether its three-quarter videotape (once the blue chip standard), then Beta SP (once the blue chip standard), and now DVD all come with long range guarantees.
In reality, videotape had a much longer shelf life than DVD will ever have because the digital technology we are in is constantly changing.
Films that were preserved on video had long legs in terms of years (almost forty in some regards) but they decay over time.
Add to that the problem as we go forward, how will subsequent generations be able to play the media. Will they have film projectors or ways to read hard drives that are the current vogue today but even ten years from now may be obsolete and unreadable?
These are some of the problems facing archivists as we go forward in film preservation.
The problem lies with us as a society and a country in not demanding that more be done to save and preserve our film heritage.