Tag: preservation

Look inside the Library of Congress’s explosive film vault

Drive down to Culpepper, VA and you’ll find the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, home to the Library of Congress’s film archive. This is where preservationists keep a massive storehouse of tens of thousands of films – classics, flops, and even reportedly Jerry Lewis’s unreleased disaster The Day the Clown Cried. YouTube channel Great Big Story … Continue reading “Look inside the Library of Congress’s explosive film vault”

Drive down to Culpepper, VA and you’ll find the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, home to the Library of Congress’s film archive. This is where preservationists keep a massive storehouse of tens of thousands of films – classics, flops, and even reportedly Jerry Lewis’s unreleased disaster The Day the Clown Cried.

YouTube channel Great Big Story managed to a rare peek behind the scenes, and the level of security needed for the collection is astounding. Archivist George Willeman explains that many early films in their collection are printed on nitrate, an explosive chemical that could probably take down building (remember the ending of Inglourious Basterds?). So, much of the archive is kept in a former nuclear bunker.

Thankfully, we don’t work with nitrate, so the AU Library isn’t going to blow up. Let’s thank the archivists doing the heavy lifting.

Help a beloved LA film library preserve their old VHSes

If you read this blog, you know we have an affinity for digital preservation and weird, niche films that aren’t available anymore. We do our best to serve the university community in those areas, but there are other groups with their own missions. Take Vidiots, a video rental store that’s served Los Angeles film nerds … Continue reading “Help a beloved LA film library preserve their old VHSes”

If you read this blog, you know we have an affinity for digital preservation and weird, niche films that aren’t available anymore. We do our best to serve the university community in those areas, but there are other groups with their own missions. Take Vidiots, a video rental store that’s served Los Angeles film nerds (including directors like David O. Russell) for decades with its massive library of hard-to-find titles.

Now, Vidiots has launched a crowdfunding campaign to take wants to take their collection into the modern era by digitally preserving as much of their collection as possible. Vidiots has thousands of rare VHSes that are presumably deteriorating and may be the last copies remaining of certain films, and Vidiots wants to digitize those tapes, license them, and check them out to whoever wants a copy. Additional funds will go to creating programming to showcase these films. This is a huge benefit to the LA film community – which more or less overlaps exactly with Hollywood.

If you want to support a good cause that makes the world of film a better place, consider kicking a few dollars their way. Their campaign has about a month left to raise $45,000, any amount helps.

The New York Times looks at the confusing work of film preservation

Still from Decasia Welcome back! The fall 2016 semester is underway now, and we’re happy to see students back. You can come to us to watch any films you need to watch for class… but as we’re often reminded, there are some things we just can’t get our hands on. Last week, The New York … Continue reading “The New York Times looks at the confusing work of film preservation”

Still from Decasia

Welcome back! The fall 2016 semester is underway now, and we’re happy to see students back. You can come to us to watch any films you need to watch for class… but as we’re often reminded, there are some things we just can’t get our hands on.

Last week, The New York Times ran a story about the challenges of preserving films from the silent era. There’s a lot of eye-popping statistics – especially that 70 percent of the films from that time are lost forever – but we were most amazed by the stories of alternative versions of movies. Evidently, studios used to produce pre-censored or re-written versions of movies to show overseas or in areas that could not yet play movies with sound, and their content and production vary significantly from the originals. Keeping these versions intact has been a nightmare for preservationists. If you ever need to watch something out-of-print for class, remember all these archivists toiling way to keep culture alive.

This is to say nothing of films that have never been available on a modern format, left behind on VHS. We’re taking care of these cases as we find them in our collection, so rest assured, we’re doing our part to prevent other films from being lost to time too.

The end of the VHS, and what it means for the library

Well, we’ve been dreading this moment for years now: the VHS is officially obsolete. Funai, the last company that still manufactures VHS players, will end their production at the end of the month. This comes less than a year after Betamax tapes were also discontinued. As of August 1st, the VHS will be a format … Continue reading “The end of the VHS, and what it means for the library”

Well, we’ve been dreading this moment for years now: the VHS is officially obsolete.

Funai, the last company that still manufactures VHS players, will end their production at the end of the month. This comes less than a year after Betamax tapes were also discontinued. As of August 1st, the VHS will be a format permanently in the past; outside of small artisanal efforts (the article we linked to mentions a collector community that might not go down so easily), there will never be any more VHS players than currently exist in the world. That’s all we’ve got.

This won’t have too much of a practical effect for most people who have already replaced their VHS collections, but we worry about what will come of all the VHSes that have never been re-released or preserved. Countless documentaries and ephemera will become unavailable, assuming the tapes last longer than the supply of players.

For a few years now, Media Services has been in the process of preserving our VHS collection to ensure that this problem won’t impact the AU community. We’ve been conducting an extensive audit of our VHSes to see what isn’t available on any other format and whether we’re within the legal grounds to digitize and create our own DVD copy of it. As part of this, we’re also collaborating with other groups on campus like ATV and Athletics to preserve other valuable VHS videos, including old commencement addresses.

We still have a supply of VHS players and staff who know how to fix them, so we’ll be fine in the long run. Let’s take a second to commemorate this inevitable but sad moment for physical media.

The future of film preservation is… DNA?

Not that you need any kind of mental stress during finals, but our media librarian passed along this mind-blowing update from the world of film preservation. The best-preserved filmstrips and digital backups will still deteriorate overtime, but the folks at Technicolor (yes, the Wizard of Oz Technicolor) think they’ve developed a foolproof technique for keeping … Continue reading “The future of film preservation is… DNA?”

Not that you need any kind of mental stress during finals, but our media librarian passed along this mind-blowing update from the world of film preservation. The best-preserved filmstrips and digital backups will still deteriorate overtime, but the folks at Technicolor (yes, the Wizard of Oz Technicolor) think they’ve developed a foolproof technique for keeping films stable and format-neutral for thousands of years.

Basically, Technicolor converts a film into code, then – with science indistinguishable from magic – encodes that into DNA. DNA is absurdly dense storage: your phone might hold 32 gigs, but DNA can store about tens of billions times more data in a single gram. Technicolor can bottle millions of copies of this DNA in a small water vial, where it will remain safe probably through the apocalypse.

We have to be a little skeptical just because this is the bleeding edge of film preservation technology, but Technicolor says they’ll have it down-pat in a year. Imagine being able to store the entire history of film in a rain barrel. It’ll be pricey, but we’re astounded.

National Film Registry’s 2015 picks include Top Gun and sneezing

Every year, the National Film Registry in the Library of Congress picks 25 notable films for permanent preservation, ensuring that everyone will have long-term access to these works. Every year includes a mixture of historical items and more current movies, like last year’s selection of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the first film with an … Continue reading “National Film Registry’s 2015 picks include Top Gun and sneezing”

Every year, the National Film Registry in the Library of Congress picks 25 notable films for permanent preservation, ensuring that everyone will have long-term access to these works. Every year includes a mixture of historical items and more current movies, like last year’s selection of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the first film with an all-black cast.

For 2015, the National Film Registry once again cast a wide net. Ghostbusters, L.A. Confidential, The Shawshank Redemption, and Top Gun are surely the most well-known, but as usual, the odder choices are probably the most exciting. Of great interest is the Spanish language version of Dracula, produced alongside the 1931 Bela Lugosi classic using the same scripts, sets, and costumes. Other highlights include the New Deal working-class ode Our Daily Bread and an early educational film about menstruation that still had to sanitize its contents.

And finally, at long last, the National Film Registry is preserving Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze (above), the first copyrighted film and the subject of many running jokes about the subject matter of early video recordings. It may be the most famous sneeze in history – though it’s not clear how you’d measure that.

The AU Library has copies of most every film in the Library of Congress’s 2015 list, though several are included on compilation discs with other early cinema. Record of a Sneeze is a rare case where you might be better served with a GIF.

The definitive Star Wars remaster came from fans, is super illegal

George Lucas’s remastering the original Star Wars trilogy has gone down as perhaps the most controversial decision in film history. Even without discussing the merits of the changes made (many of which stand out like a sore thumb or detract from the original meaning), Lucas’s permanent alterations to the films’ negatives effectively erased the original … Continue reading “The definitive Star Wars remaster came from fans, is super illegal”

George Lucas’s remastering the original Star Wars trilogy has gone down as perhaps the most controversial decision in film history. Even without discussing the merits of the changes made (many of which stand out like a sore thumb or detract from the original meaning), Lucas’s permanent alterations to the films’ negatives effectively erased the original versions of some of the most successful films in history. It’ll be difficult to get that back… legally.

Film restoration hobbyist Petr Harmy has assembled a “Despecialized” version of the film, using elements taken from Blu-rays, DVDs, television broadcasts, production stills, original film copies, and other fan remasters to create a high-definition version of the film as it was projected in 1977. Often these changes make the film look objectively worse – Lucas at one point smeared Vaseline on the lens to disguise part of a shot – but it accurately represents the original release of Star Wars.

Of course, that edition brazenly violates copyright law and is illegal to obtain. This puts cultural history and the law at a crossroads. Matthew Yglesias at Vox does a good job explaining the ramifications of this, even if his explanation veers into political bluster a bit. As the video above also explains, the Library of Congress never received an archival copy of the original film, so it’s up to renegade fans/heroes/criminals like Harmy to get as close as possible.

Help fund an archive of weird, dangerous, rare films

In 1990, a film enthusiast named Mike Vraney founded Something Weird Video, a distributor of hard-to-find, sensationalist movies. This included everything from violent exploitation movies to budget Westerns and found footage. Something Weird became a touchstone for the rougher, risky side of film history, and filmmakers including Paul Thomas Anderson and Drive‘s Nicolas Winding Refn … Continue reading “Help fund an archive of weird, dangerous, rare films”

In 1990, a film enthusiast named Mike Vraney founded Something Weird Video, a distributor of hard-to-find, sensationalist movies. This included everything from violent exploitation movies to budget Westerns and found footage. Something Weird became a touchstone for the rougher, risky side of film history, and filmmakers including Paul Thomas Anderson and Drive‘s Nicolas Winding Refn have been involved with the company. Vraney died in 2014, leaving behind a massive trove of some of the only copies of over 6000 strange films – and your help is needed to preserve them.

The American Genre Film Archive has started a project to preserve and re-release as much of Something Weird’s archive as possible, and they’re looking for $30,000 from a Kickstarter. Something Weird apparently sends out hundreds of prints to film and educational groups every year, and those copies will eventually degrade if not cared for. A proper preservation program like that one AGFA proposes would ensure access to this very odd collection for generations to come.

Consider throwing a few dollars their way. AGFA has chosen the comically ahistorical The Zodiac Killer as its restoration centerpiece, and if you pitch in at least $10, you’ll get a free copy when it’s available!

We might see The Day the Clown Cried in 2025

A year and a half ago, now-removed footage from Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried surfaced online for the first time. For those unacquainted with the legend, The Day the Clown Cried was a Holocaust melodrama about a clown sent to a concentration camp. The film was never released and has acquired an apocalyptically … Continue reading “We might see The Day the Clown Cried in 2025”

A year and a half ago, now-removed footage from Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried surfaced online for the first time. For those unacquainted with the legend, The Day the Clown Cried was a Holocaust melodrama about a clown sent to a concentration camp. The film was never released and has acquired an apocalyptically poor reputation, described as “beyond normal computation” and “so drastically wrong” by those who have seen it. Lewis refuses to discuss the film at-length and vowed to block its release.

But thanks to the Library of Congress, we might finally get to witness this disastrous movie. According to the Los Angeles Times‘s report on the Library of Congress’s annual Mostly Lost film festival, the institution’s film wing recently acquired a copy of The Day the Clown Cried on the ground that it not be shown for ten years. Jerry Lewis will likely be dead by then, and we can only assume he wanted to spare himself the public attention (and probably ridicule) that would result.

We want nothing more than to see this film finally released, both for its historical and possible kitsch value. Based on the interviews linked above, it sounds like an aesthetic marvel too, with major production design errors and filmmaking faux pas. We’ll check back in 2025 to see if that print ever sees the light of day.

A glimpse behind the Library of Congress’s film preservation vaults

You may be familiar with the National Film Registry, the Library of Congress group that annually selects significant American films to maintain in perpetuity. That’s only a fraction of the over one million video recordings held by the Library of Congress, but all undergo a rigorous preservation process. For the first time that we’ve seen, … Continue reading “A glimpse behind the Library of Congress’s film preservation vaults”

You may be familiar with the National Film Registry, the Library of Congress group that annually selects significant American films to maintain in perpetuity. That’s only a fraction of the over one million video recordings held by the Library of Congress, but all undergo a rigorous preservation process. For the first time that we’ve seen, WIRED was granted an inside look at the Library of Congress’s preservation center in Virginia to show what the nation’s film archive looks like. Turns out it’s crowded – way more than desirable.

This profile of the Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation is packed with interesting peeks behind the scenes, featuring everything from political process of curating their collection to the prison-like storage facilities. But the most fascinating detail comes from curator Rob Stone, who admits that the Packard Campus receives more items than they can handle and sadly reject a significant portion of them. WIRED writer Bryan Gardiner describes the complex in terms usually reserved for hoarders, but such is the nature of any archive flooded with rarities.

We only infrequently deal with film preservation in Media Services, so it’s exciting to see the process involved in this whole other world of media in libraries. The Library of Congress is doing excellent, important work, but we’ll take the AU Library over a “nuclear bunker” any day.