A 1914 silent film considered lost was rescued from a vault
wsj.com
wsj.com
People can reference a data center but most probably have never been in one. However I’m very familiar with the slightly dusty smell, the whine of fans and HVAC, the odd people that work there, server cages, card and retina scanners, some have metal detectors. From the outside they’re huge nondescript brick buildings with massive gensets surrounded by a not f’ing around security fence.
So I’d be very curious to know what a film vault in Hollywood is like.
If a movie studio goes out of business though, who know what happens to these films? I’d imagine that’s how movies get “lost”.
[0]https://www.agweb.com/news/business/technology/hidden-underg...
As an aside, various salts are useful as humidity regulating agents due to their deliquescence characteristics. Different salts and brine solutions can be used to either pull moisture from the air, or to maintain a higher humidity.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/salt-humidity-d_1887.html
I really appreciate how generous everyone here is with their knowledge and that HN exists at all.
Many thanks to everyone that keeps the conversation going.
A vault fire from 1978 is covered in some detail here: https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2018/12/04/disas...
It uses Google Maps Street View to move around inside the vault.
EDIT: having gone through it, that vault appears to contain machines - "technology". I didn't see anything which looked like a large film storage area, much less one for nitrate films.
Ah-ha! The 2020 report at https://www.eastman.org/sites/default/files/GEM_AnnualReport... mentions they had a "A Tour of the Nitrate Vault".
Using '"Rochester film museum" Nitrate Vault' as my search terms I found the article "Rochester's best kept secret: A nitrate film collection" at https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/lifestyle/2016/04... with several images in the interesting story, with details like "Only three other facilities in the U.S. can legally store this volatile film stock" and "Every five years staff goes through 20,000 reels to make sure they are not decomposing", and the quote “Because of the great amount of silver content in the emulsion, nitrate films have dark, rich blacks, and more detailed gradation. The sharpness of the edges are so crisp and there’s so much depth, it’s almost like 3-D.”
More images via DDG image search: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=%22Rochester+film+museum%22...
UCLA Film and Television Archive in Santa Clarita, with 120 vaults - https://www.dailynews.com/2019/08/12/uclas-film-television-a...
PRO-TEK’s nitrate film services, "PRO-TEK is one of the few places left in the world that manages nitrate film vaults for clients. The nitrate vaults are located several miles away from our Burbank campus." - https://protekvaults.com/blog/nitrate-film-preservation/
The notes about one of the nitrate shows at https://www.cinematary.com/writing/2019/5/9/2019-nitrate-pic... says:
> Putting this festival on requires a great deal of inter-archival cooperation--prints were sourced from across the United States (the Big Five archives for nitrate are the Academy, UCLA, MoMa, the Library of Congress, and the Eastman itself) and from international archives, notably the Swedish Film Institute (supplied Strandhugg), KAVI in Helsinki (supplied Ihmiset suviyössä), and the Austrian Film Museum (supplied The Nevadan)
Using those as search terms:
The Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Center at Wright-Patterson AFB. "Today, under the stewardship of M/B/RS, the nitrate film holdings, dating from the 1890's through 1950, exceed 100 million feet." - https://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/mpcc.html
I verified that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has nitrate film, because https://www.oscars.org/film-archive/collections/iron-mountai... lists some of them, but I wasn't able to figure out where they are stored.
MoMA has nitrate prints. From https://clui.org/ludb/site/museum-modern-art-film-archive :
> There are only a few film archives in the country that store nitrate film, and they include the major film archives in the nation: the two Packard archives (Culpeper, Virginia, and Santa Clarita, California); the George Eastman House’s Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center in Chili, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art Film Archive, in Hamlin, Pennsylvania. MoMA’s collection is the largest private film collection in the world. Most of it is located in this purpose built 33,000 square foot, two-building, partially underground compound on 37 acres of woodland and meadows in the Pocono Mountains. Also known as the Cesleste Bartos Film Preservation Center.
So a typical reel was actually a bomb without a detonator.
It degrades over time, with the plasticizer separating and the film becoming brittle, eventually turning into a powder that can ignite from friction or even auto-ignite. More than anything else, that's why so many early major films are lost. They turned to dust. And then exploded.
> The use of volatile nitrocellulose film for motion pictures led many cinemas to fireproof their projection rooms with wall coverings made of asbestos. Those additions intended to prevent or at least delay the migration of flames beyond the projection areas. A training film for projectionists included footage of a controlled ignition of a reel of nitrate film, which continued to burn even when fully submerged in water. [...] Owing to public safety precautions, London Underground forbade transport of movies on its system until well past the introduction of safety film.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrocellulose#Nitrate_film_fi...
explosions are another class of reaction.
I was conventional munitions (non-nuclear) maintenance in the USAF. I am trained on these things.
>An explosion is a rapid expansion in volume associated with an extreme outward release of energy, usually with the generation of high temperatures and release of high-pressure gases. Supersonic explosions created by high explosives are known as detonations and travel through shock waves. Subsonic explosions are created by low explosives through a slower combustion process known as deflagration.
Doesn't have to be supersonic to be an explosion. This is a disagreement about definitions, not about the properties of nitrocellulose.
A dictionary definition of explosion is "a rapid expansion in volume associated with extreme outward release of energy", that includes things like, gunpowder deflagration, aerolized gasoline burning, or even a pressurized container (like a pressure cooker) rupturing. Film burning on a metal tin as they were stored could fit this definition pretty well.
If you're defining pulse wave as a sub-sonic pressure wave, deflagarations can definitely produce those, even with relatively poor fuels (e.g. wood dust). Why do you expect nitrocellulose couldn't? Not enough gas volume?
pulse waves move at the speed of sound and are not propelled by the explosion. an air compressor tank rupturing would produce a pulse wave. pulse waves alone are not fatal to humans, though you definitely feel them and hear them.
- Why would seeing a pulse wave in nitrocellulose prove that it's an explosive (as you claim), if you're defining pulse waves as any sonic wave?
I'm having a hard time understanding your position, or your reasoning for why nitrocellulose isn't an explosive. I also still haven't been able to find any resources that corroborate what you're saying.
> The Eastman had listed the film in its extensive online archives but the museum has so many reels that it hadn’t paid attention to “The Oath of the Sword.”
Who considered this film "Lost Forever"? It appears to just have been rare and largely forgotten. It is not listed here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/7,200_Lost_U.S._Silent_Featur...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2331438/plotsummary/ -- https://www.google.com/search?q=The-Oath-of-the-Sword -- https://www.academymuseum.org/en/programs/detail/the-oath-of...
>the museum has so many reels that it hadn’t paid attention to “The Oath of the Sword.”
I'd suggest that tapes should be digitised and that way they're far easier for the public to watch and categorise them so that other hidden gems can be found again.
I've been involved in getting the archives of a small-time newspaper digitized and it's not cheap in terms of either time or money.
There's a near-infinite amount of decaying and fairly rare analog media out there--and much that has been lost as companies have gone out of business, etc. It's not realistic to digitize all of it.
I'd be happy for some of my tax money to go to a historical preservation project.
Maybe it'd be feasible to get members of the public to volunteer to do some of the digitisation - that should reduce costs, but I can imagine it would be difficult to keep track of where all the originals are and quality of the digitisation.
The reality is that there's a near-infinite amount of stuff that could be digitized and someone needs to make a call about what's worthwhile. At some point you're just digitally hoarding and spending a lot of time/effort/money to do so.
We've got the British Film Institute (https://www.bfi.org.uk/) but that's a charity and part funded by funds from the National Lottery (that I don't play as it seems to be a voluntary tax on the poor).
What’s really wild is how in some cases, what was able to be recovered was a segment that was censored before broadcast as the film that was broadcast was lost, but the segment that was cut managed to survive.
Before magnetic tape for video really became feasible (1970s), to make a record of television broadcasts, the BBC (and many other broadcasters) would film a quality TV monitor with a film camera. Black-and-white film recordings exist of a number of Doctor Who episodes originally broadcast in colour in the late 60s and early 70s.
Black-and-white analog televisions, like used in the BBC telecine recorder, receive the same signal as a colour TV. They receive a signal with colour information, encoded at very high frequency within the otherwise black-and-white compatible TV signal. On a black and white TV, that high frequency colour information, shows up as fine variations in texture with repeating patterns. Shift the phase of the colour carrier, and the colour changes for an appropriately equipped colour decoder, and the pattern shifts on a B&W TV. It's almost imperceptible really, which was the hack that allowed compatible colour TV. But it's there on the B&W display. And it's preserved on the film recording, too. That colour data can be recovered with appropriate software:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_recovery#From_chroma_cr...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/dec/11/digital-v...
Although just having a digitised archive doesn’t mean it can all be made public ally available, there are lots of rights issues and so on (writers and actors will want to be paid etc.) that prevent mass access to the archive.
Please tell me the city was named for the "frigid vaults" - it's just too damned convenient a name not to have been.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright...
People can reference a data center but most probably have never been in one. They all have a slightly dusty smell, there’s the whine of fans and HVAC, the odd people that work there, server cages, card and retina scanners, some have metal detectors. From the outside DC’s can be huge nondescript brick buildings with a massive gensets surrounded by a well built security fence. Regardless of the size they all have a similar vibe.
So I’d be very curious to know what a film vault in Hollywood is like. If it has a similar ‘you know you’re in a film vault’ feel and culture to it.
People can reference a data center but most probably have never been in one. They all have a slightly dusty smell, there’s the whine of fans and HVAC, the odd people that work there, server cages, card and retina scanners, some have metal detectors. From the outside DC’s can be huge nondescript brick buildings with a massive gensets surrounded by a well built security fence. Regardless of the size they all have a similar vibe.
So I’d be very curious to know what a film vault in Hollywood is like. If it has a similar ‘you know you’re in a film vault’ feel to it.