Lost film of life in Brazil’s Amazon 100 years ago resurfaces | Hacker News Reader

Lost film of life in Brazil’s Amazon 100 years ago resurfaces

theguardian.com

152 pointstelesilla22 comments

Hopefully it gets digitized and shared with the world!

The article says they’re doing “showings” of the film, which makes me think that they don’t want it digitized, probably because the copyright is expired.

If they control all the copies, then they can charge people to watch it, even if the copyright is expired. If a copy leaks, though, then that revenue stream will dry up overnight.

Still, film disintegrates, so I would hope they digitize it for archival, at least.

The film has been digitized by us (Národní filmový archiv) to make screening DCP for the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, where the film will be unveiled.

The raw scans were also provided to our counterparts in Cinemateca Brasiliera who are now in charge to decide about the film's fate. I surely hope they will make it accessible under a non-permissible license.

Ah, that's good to know, thank you!

What's a "non-permissible license"?

An example of a nonpermissive license is the General Public License (GPL) that ensures users have the freedom and responsibility to share their changes with the community.

Thanks. Haven't heard of it described as "nonpermissive" before. People generally refer to things like that as "copyleft". :)

It's awesome to have people involved with this work here.

I home Cinemateca Brasileira will decide to screen it. Unfortunately, Brazilian culture doesn't get a lot of attention in Brazil.

It seems like the rest of the world cares more about our history than we do.

What resolutions do you use for the digital copy?

The scan of duplicate negative was done in 2K (2048x1556).

We had considered doing the scan in 6K, but the tests proved it unnecessary as it didn't yield any more detail except more grain from the film emulsion.

I wanna spend a minute to say that this is an amazing article. It has all the information and details one needs, it tells a compelling story, and it’s well balanced in describing political and social implications. This is the average quality of most stuff you read on good mainstream media, but someone very famous wants you to think otherwise. End of the quiet rant

Similarly I found what was perhaps first film ever shot in China in the library of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) back in around 2010. Can't recall the precise format but it was a situation akin to they didn't have a player for the film format and the film itself had not been retrieved from storage for many decades. The story about how it came to be shot was quite interesting, one of the French colonial administrators assigned to the Yunnan trading post was personal friends with the Lumiere brothers and had been given a camera and film to "go shoot some stuff". Upon further research the French family thereof had, in the late 20th century, tried to monetize the thing and had it buried. The SOAS copy, being free of their latter-day copyright bullshit, was the sole free copy outside of their grasp. I was able to come back some months later, after the SOAS alumni volunteered funded to have it digitized, to a champagne soirée viewing - we had, after all, beaten the frogs.

Where can I see this film? Or read more about this?

Well you might ask. I've got a copy, somewhere. SOAS paid to digitize it so they'd have it available. I'd suggest searching their library catalog for 'Yunnan' in the film category, it should pop up.

It reminded me the movie Embrace of the Serpent.

> the film follows two journeys made thirty years apart by the indigenous shaman Karamakate in the Colombian Amazonian jungle, one with Theo, a German ethnographer, and the other with Evan, an American botanist, both of whom are searching for the rare plant yakruna. It was inspired by the travel diaries of Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes, and dedicated to lost Amazonian cultures.

Highly recommend

Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace_of_the_Serpent

Trailer: https://youtu.be/4ff7TcnqHUc

Note that the parent's description refers to the film of 2015 and not the film of 1918 in TFA.

I was confused for a moment until I remembered that Schultes' trip took place in the 1940s.

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