Conservation technician Joy Hare repairing perforations
Copyright Peter Musgrave
The National Film & Television Archive, a division of the British Film Institute was founded in 1935 to acquire, preserve and make permanently available, a national collection of moving images which have lasting value as examples of the art and history of cinema and television, and as a documentary record of the 20th century.
The archive now holds 350,000 titles dating from 1895 to present day, comprising features, shorts, documentaries, cartoons, newsreels, television programmes, amateur films and videos.
In addition to moving image materials, the archive preserves and makes accessible a unique collection of posters, stills and designs for more then 60,000 films. Books, film scripts, production documents, personal artefacts, recorded interviews with movie makers (the BECTU Oral History Project tapes are there) are all carefully collected and preserved.
The preservation work and storage of safety film and video tape, along with the paper collection are all housed at the J Paul Getty Conservation Centre in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, named after it's generous film enthusiast sponsor.
Members will recall that AMPS is one of the many organisations and individuals who responded to the Archive's current appeal for more funds by making a donation to the restoration of a specific movie. The Council chose Gabriel Pascal's 1945 Technicolor epic Caesar And Cleopatra . When 19 co-sponsors have been found AMPS will receive a videotape of the result bearing our name, which Members may borrow.
On April 28th last, Peter Musgrave and Bob Allen, at the invitation of Katie Hawkins, the BFI Film Heritage Appeal Co-ordinator, joined a party of other contributors to be shown over the archive facilities at Berkhamsted and see the work in progress.
After introductions by curator Anne Fleming and her deputy Henning Schu, the party divided into groups, each ably led by one of the staff, for a tour of the facilities and storage areas.
The tour started with a screening of excerpts from a number of the films already completed in this present campaign. Among them was the trailer for Caesar And Cleopatra. If the colour restoration is as good in the feature as in the trailer, members will be well pleased with their contribution that helped make the restoration possible.
From the viewing theatre we passed through a central oval atrium which has a small display of old projectors, flat bed editing machines and an early RCA optical recorder. Although we kept passing through this area as our tour took us from section to section, frustratingly we never paused long enough to inspect the exhibits thoroughly.
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Conservation technician Joy Hare repairing perforations |
Several rooms are identical to normal laboratories' negative-cutting areas with rewind and synchronisation benches where positives and negatives donated to, or procured by their acquisition officers, arrive in states varying from the mildly cinched to hopelessly decayed powder. Physical repairs are carried out, and decisions made about cleaning and chemical treatment. If it's a talkie they don't always receive a track negative as well, or there may be one that doesn't sync with the picture, so detective work commences to compare the new acquisition with items on the same subject they may already hold. The aim is to have at least one good projection print of the 'normal' version, but any dupes, longer versions, censor cuts, deletions and paper work will all be preserved.
Surprisingly, state funding only covers B&W films. This means that they have to seek private or corporate funding for colour film work, and have no processing facilities for it. Thus the Archive has only three processing lines, for negatives, fine-grains and prints. The speed of the processors can be varied to change the gamma achieved if the grader considers the contrast of the original neg higher or lower than normal. We saw Ben Thompson assessing, on his monitor, a beautifully lit scene from a Rudolph Valentino 1926 adventure. He mentioned that they have more graders than most commercial labs due to the 'one-off' nature of the work. Several tricks can be used, eg if the leading edges of neg perfs are worn they will print from the end backwards to utilise the unworn trailing edges. If rerecording and processing of sound tracks is required it's contracted out.
Each subject is identified only by a code number on its can for security reasons but of course their computer database contains details of the provenance, whereabouts and condition of every item.
We also visited a warehouse where all paper-based donations, stills, posters and design, are stored and, sooner or later, indexed. Items ranging from Dirk Bogarde's doodled-upon scripts to a heavily overdue library ticket from Michael Caine (not many people know that!). Conservation-grade acid-free envelopes are widely used, and the temperature was kept chilly in the same good cause. Halon gas fire extinguishers are in frequent evidence, not least least because of the unpredictable combustibility of nitrate film which was in general use until 1952. All nitrate-based films are housed in specially constructed temperature and humidity controlled vaults at Gaydon Warwicks. The nitrate film vaults vaults that we viewed at Berkhamsted are to store a limited amount of footage for the pictures that are being worked on.
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Film decayed beyond reclamation |
Occasionally a company will ask the Archive to execute restoration on a commercial basis. I asked Anne where they stand on the use of digital equipment; for example it should be possible to write a computer program to iron out the disturbing rapid fluctuations of density on old silents caused by variations in emulsion sensitivity, but they cannot yet afford digital video equipment (such as used by Disney to restore and bring back full colour to Snow White). Anne considers the proliferation of formats and platforms a disincentive to considering such methods for some years to come.
The archive also stores a huge number of TV programmes; one might consider some of the titles hardly worth preservation by reasonable artistic or cultural standards. Rightly, Anne pointed out, that they don't set themselves up as arbiters of taste or worth, and even the most pedestrian 'soap' reflects the style, costumes, mores and scenery of its day. There's an analogy with the fascination a fifty-year old photograph of just our local street can hold.
The major subject of ownership and copyright is not easily summarised, but broadly speaking when the archive receives a film, TV tape or article, they ask the donor to sign a form which doesn't cede their copyright, but does allow the Archive to retain it, do any necessary restoration work and make the result available to Members and researchers at the BFI and its offshoots, the NFT in particular. Indeed, gentle reader, you may have some interesting piece of film or scripts, call sheets, photographs, crew lists and other film artifacts, which are worth passing on for posterity. If so why not ring Janet Moat, Special Collections Manager at 0171 255 1444 to discuss it? Or perhaps you would rather support restoration of a specific title from the current list of suggestions and have your name on the credits. If so ring Katie Hawkins, Film Heritage Appeal Co-ordinator on 0171 957 8921.