‘Films are vulnerable’: The battle to preserve Eastern Europe’s analogue movies (2022)
calvertjournal.com
calvertjournal.com
The problem with the film is that as it ages it becomes even more flammable than it originally was and it has a huge surface area to react with (unlike say a billiard ball or a pen made of the same material).
Quite a bit of historical material was lost to time in several huge fires. To make things worse: it doesn't necessarily require a source of ignition.
https://www.nontoxichub.com/celluloidfilmhazards
Not quite at 'stuff I won't work with' level but definitely worthy of respect.
Nor does it require oxygen to burn; from your link:
Cellulose nitrate contains chemically combined oxygen in sufficient amounts to allow burning and decomposition without the presence of air.
https://easterneuropeanmovies.com/
Searchable by decade and by country
Sadly no Yuri Norstein. I know he's an animator, but I figured he's famous enough to be on there. A couple of years ago there was a new 2K transfer of all of his (released) films too.
Perhaps won’t reveal more detail, but there is no real issue in general with scanning them at higher resolution.
Seriously, it depends on the method of scanning. There's so many people that do 8mm projection to a camera rather than scanning. It is the most affordable in transfer prices, but affords the least flexibility. Maybe projecting to a camera recording in a RAW format might up that flexibility, but who's going to do that?
Film chains like a Spirit would have a limit on how much it could blow up the image before becoming a digital scale. Some of the larger archival scanners that offer features like triple flash scans have a scanner that also has a certain resolution where the small size of the 8mm frame would again need digital scaling to fill frame. 16mm gates allow for compensation of that frame size, but I've never even heard of an 8mm gate for the higher end scanning equipment.
This has always been the limitations as I've understood them. Plus, the grain does get much more pronounced with the higher res scanning, so I was only partially joking at the start. Granted, it has been about 10 years since I was personally heavy into handling film, so maybe something has been released? What are you familiar with that allows "no real issue" with higher res scanning?
I'm not sure if this is a fair comparison, but years ago a DVD review site took the Blu-Ray release of Lord of the Rings, ripped and processed it to DVD size, and compared the output to the original DVDs (which used to be considered one of the best quality DVD releases when they came out). The quality difference was huge.
Honestly, looks like a cool designed website selling pirated content.
I guess no one is going to fill DCMAs for old eastern/russian movies?
Also with English subtitles.
You can find some Russian ones on YouTube, like the original “Solaris” — which I highly recommend. It is from the early 70s. No George Clooney or Steven Soderbergh.
Also, I'm not the biggest fan of copyright either.
What left me a bit sour about that website is not even that they are asking money but really just how they are pretending to be a legitimate business.
Instead, I'm more inclined to donate to people who make an effort to share rare and interesting content, for its own sake, like https://rarefilmm.com
"Decades old" is far from being sufficient to become unburdened by copyright. Works with joint authorship (as movies almost universally are) generally become public domain upon 70 years of death of its last remaining author - e.g. for movies you have to wait until the principal director, the author of the screenplay, the author of the dialogue and the composer of music all die, and then 70 years after that, so it's wouldn't be even surprising to have even the very oldest surviving movie of some country be still under copyright if one of them survived WW2.
Who would even own the copyright? The government? The director? Are they public domain? What's the continuity of the copyright?
They probably don't have enough commercial value to fight over.
Now if Ye used a sample of a soundtrack without authorization in a hit song, there's suddenly real money involved. Lawyers and artists would come out of the woodwork and start filing claims.
Poland:
Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie (1965) !!!!
Sanatorium pod klepsydrą (1973) !!!!
Ziemia obiecana (1975) !!!!
Osobisty pamiętnik grzesznika przez niego samego spisany (1986)
Pociąg (1959)
Pokolenie (1955)
Kanal (1957) !!!!
Popiół i diament (1958)
Czechoslovakia:
Holubice (1960) !!!!
Ostře sledované vlaky (1966)
Marketa Lazarova (1967) !!!!
Obrazy starého sveta (1972)
Spalovač mrtvol (1969) !!!!
Slnko v sieti (1962)
Zlaté kapradí (1963)
Údolí včel (1968)
Hungary:
Csillagosok, katonák (1967)
A Pál utcai fiúk (1968)
A tanú (1969) !!!!
Kárhozat (1988)
Két félidő a pokolban (1961)
Az ötödik pecsét (1976)
Szegénylegények (1966)
Szindbád (1971)
Szürkület (1990) !!!!
NOTE: the films with !!!! next to them are my absolute favourites and if you don't have time to watch all of these films, I implore you to at least watch these.
Sometimes I hate copyright law. I bought a set of all the Rocky+Bullwinkle cartoons. Surprise, surprise, the original music was removed and replaced with some generic noise. The cartoons are just unwatchable.
Married with Children also replaced their Sinatra theme song with some generic awful music. I just have to grind my teeth and fast forward over that.
For example, Hollywood is finding out the hard way that all the LTO tape libraries they bought to archive movies onto are incurring large migration costs, since nobody makes the same format tape drives for multiple decades. Every other digital storage medium also requires periodic data migration. The assumptions and budgets of pre-digital preservation projects was that "archival conditions" and original (non-exploding) media was enough.
The ideas that you're probably having in your head - i.e. of using BitTorrent and the hard drives of strangers with a data hoarding addiction as cultural preservation - would have been absolutely ludicrous any time before the Internet. Nowadays it's vaguely feasible that at least the Internet Archive or Wikimedia could handle the data storage requirements for full-take cultural preservation.
My personal opinion is that these sorts of modifications to a creative work to dodge a relicensing obligation should be prohibited by some kind of moral rights regime. The original creators are being done a disservice by having the music stripped to cut costs. But the US in particular is extremely hostile to that sort of thing (despite having agreed to implement it in treaties).
There should be a UN like international effort to set up resources for storing digital media (books, music, film, tv, games, journals, comics etc) for the long term.
A few hundred years for sure.
All digital media made in the entire world and all that can be digitized stored from the beginning until the end. A constant accumulating treasure.
Doesn't have to be streaming, but there should be a way for a person to request a copy. (if permissible by the copyright holder)
One thing that hurts me to think about are the hundreds of thousands of books that you cant read.
The book has a small run, never republished, and for the most part never to be seen again. I wish each one was submitted to the above archive,
The copyright holder is making 0 by holding is hostage from people reading it. Allowing people to read it thus would not lead to less of revenue.
Perhaps a system of micropayments for still copyrighted but will never be seen again media.
I say books because I love books, but movies, etc as well. All of it.
I have started making a tiny effort myself by scanning and typesetting book published by members of my family a ways back.
I know that Library of Congress has a lot of good stuff, but it only collects fromt he US (I think) In Norway Nasjoanlbiblioteket has a lot of stuff that is Norwegian.
20 years later, they went into some of the archives to discover that most of the CD-Rs were unreadable. The material had degraded severely enough that the material had observable pits (holes) in them.
Plan accordingly. Digital copies require it, too.
This book talks about the sordid story of fugitive color media:
http://www.wilhelm-research.com/book_toc.html
how wedding photographers got blindsided when, 20 years later, people discovered that Kodak prints and negatives of their special day were severely faded. Or how Hollywood woke up in 1980s and realized there was big money in old movies and went looking for a solution: early on there was the bad idea of splitting out the three colors into three separate wheels, but later people realized that color film lasts much longer if you keep it in the freezer.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/con...
I've lost personal archives on CD-R/DVD-R myself and now I keep my archives stored hot on ZFS (has redundancy + bitrot protection), with additional hot and cold backups that are checked regularly. When disks fail they are quickly replaced, thus ensuring that the data is on relatively "new" as opposed to aging media.
The article also mentions the problem with old/proprietary file formats for digital media which can't be opened in the future. Someone I knew actually had a story about how he had pictures stored in some obscure digital format (this was in the 90s when digital cameras were in their infancy) and he had to set up a equally old computer and software just to get the images reexported into something more modern. For something like this again regular checking of the archives (and keeping them hot) helps. Also I'm pretty sure the most basic standardized formats like BMP and JPG aren't going away for a long time.
I've never used cdrs to store really important data, I have all this on hdds, but about 30 20 year + old CDRs I recently found in my storage (stored in a dark cold - sometimes wet basement) are all fine. Same with hard drives that haven't been touched for the same amount of time.
For hard drives I have had ones that were mysteriously corrupted after being unused for six years or so, but others that were readable after fifteen. It partially is the luck of the draw.
First off, historic Western films are no less vulnerable, because businesses do not want to deal with copyright issues, and citizens are taught from the childhood that sharing is stealing.
OTOH, copyright is still a fairly new idea in Eastern Europe, so fans tend to digitize and share more often.
Compare rutracker to the pirate bay. Even in its heyday TPB did not have the level of commitment of the community that rutracker consistently exhibits for 18 years already.
P.S. Here is the Lighthouse (2006) refered in the first paragraphs in FHD quality [1]. Enjoy.
This is completely inaccurate. There is big money in storing original film prints. There are a ton of commercial warehouses (mostly in/near Los Angeles) that specializes in such things. The copyright remains with the studio, but the actual print is stored in a warehouse.
The bigger issue is the opposite -- because of real estate prices, the warehouses keep moving, and sometimes they sell off part of their collection to another warehouse. The owners of the films have no idea where their originals are. When I worked at Netflix we would often have the problem where a studio sold us the rights to stream something, so we would ask for the original print to digitize it, and it would take months to track down which warehouse actually had the original print. But once found it was easy to digitize because it was usually in really good shape.
Eastern Europe doesn't have the film economy to support such warehouses.
The number of films revived by Netflix is small compared to those largely forgotten.
Until the studio decides to, you know, just destroy them or they are destroyed by fires
--- start quote ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_film
A report created by Library of Congress film historian and archivist David Pierce claims:
- 75% of original silent-era films have perished.
- Only 14% of the 10,919 silent films released by major studios exist in their original 35 mm or other formats.
- 11% survive only in full-length foreign versions or film formats of lesser image quality.[1][3]
Of the American sound films made from 1927 to 1950, an estimated half have been lost
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-04-fi-unive...
In addition to the ruined “King Kong” attraction and the burned New York street scapes, the Universal Studios Hollywood fire has claimed another casualty: perhaps hundreds of classic 35-millimeter film prints, the studio said Tuesday.
The fire also claimed about 5% of Universal Music Group’s recordings...
In an e-mail sent to several dozen film exhibitors Monday, Universal said the “fire destroyed nearly 100% of the archive prints kept here on the lot.
--- end quote ---
etc.