Turning a fragile chemical format into more-fragile digital formats
"What happens to an art when its foundational medium disappears? We don’t yet know, because it’s happening right now. If you care about movies, you should be wondering."
(…)
"In 2011, the historian David Pierce gave a talk on silent films at an annual event in Los Angeles called the Reel Thing. At one point, he showed a 1925 photo of a few dozen Universal Pictures stars next to a stack of crates holding that season’s negatives. He asked if anyone recognized these stars and was met with mostly bafflement. We soon found out why. Twenty years after this photo was taken, Universal sent a letter to its East Coast lab ordering the destruction of all but 17 of its silent-film negatives. The studio had already lost numerous older titles in fires, and now it was junking the rest of its silent features — hundreds — having decided that most were not worth keeping. It’s no wonder that those stars were unfamiliar: Their own studio destroyed their legacy.
"Some legacies may be lost forever; others re-emerge or gain new luster when films that went missing resurface in a barn or an archive. In 2015, “Seven Sinners,” Milestone’s long-lost feature directorial debut, turned up in Australia and was passed on to the archive, which is restoring the film. Such rescue stories come wreathed in romance as a film is plucked from the brink, like a silent-screen heroine pulled from train tracks at the last minute…."
(((Nice metaphor there but in point of fact there are scarcely any silent screen heroines pulled from train tracks. Comic gags in a couple of Keystone comedies played for chuckles, that's about it. Silent film has become such an obscure medium that a legend like this passes unchallenged; it's just a given that silent film abounds with menaced women hauled from train tracks, but, well, in fact it doesn't. Makes you wonder what people will think of desktop computer games when desktops are pretty much gone – probably that gamers were way into first-person shooting girls on train tracks.)))
