In Mark McLaughlin’s documentary “Keepers of the Frame,” available Tuesday on VHS, actor Alan Alda remarks that he once believed a performance captured on film would last forever. He received a rude awakening when he happened upon reruns of his TV series “M*A*S*H” and saw that, though less than 30 years old, the filmed images had taken on a green cast. His concerned phone calls to the studio came just in time to halt further deterioration.
“Keepers of the Frame,” which played the film festival circuit last year, presents an impassioned case for film preservation, as if any were necessary. An oft-quoted statistic is that half of all sound films have been lost forever, and that nearly 90 percent of all silent films no longer exist.
But films as recent as “Vertigo,” “Rear Window” and “Jaws” have also required life-saving restoration.
Movies are more than just the world’s most popular art form. Actor Roddy McDowall says film “is a wildly important part of our heritage … a record of mores, styles and fashion.”
This record, though, has been severely compromised. During their infancy, movies were treated less as an art form than as a disposable novelty, as well as a recyclable commodity. The nitrate stock on which films before the 1950s were shot, was plundered for its silver content.
Nitrate, too, proved to be an unstable element, highly flammable and capable of reducing precious footage to a vinegary, gooey mess. “Film is more fragile than any other medium,” laments film historian Leonard Maltin. “Look at the canvases of great paintings hundreds and hundreds of years old that we can still go and see, and motion picture film, which is so much newer, has this sorry fate of being made up of an element that causes it, in some cases, to just vanish.”
Thiry years ago, one archivist notes, there was no film preservation movement in this country. Now, it’s a race against time to save what is left. There is, we are told, a joke in the film preservation field that “nitrate won’t wait.” But as “Keepers of the Frame” graphically illustrates, this is no laughing matter.
For film buffs, there are harrowing images more unnerving than anything in “The Blair Witch Project,” including photos of a poorly maintained archive strewn with rotting films. One preservationist recalls visiting one archive and being told that one of the garbage prints was “Citizen Kane.”
It is hard to comprehend that our most beloved films might be in danger as long as copies are available on video. But as Maltin explains, video itself has a finite shelf life, and when a new format is invented, studios return to the source material to make a new print. “What if there is no source material?” he asks.
“Keepers of the Frame” celebrates real movie heroes. So much of film history, Maltin notes, “owes its very life” to enthusiasts such as John Harvey, who maintains his own private archive of films made in the wide-screen Cinerama process that was invented to lure TV-struck audiences away from their new sets.
Harvey gives a guided tour of his living/screening room, which he remodeled to accommodate the three projectors required to screen Cinerama films.
Preservationists and film archivists are dedicated to keeping “the American memory intact.”
“Because archival footage has no commercial value,” says one archivist, “chances are if we don’t do the copying and preservation, no one will, and they will be lost.”
Echoes another, “It is amazing how much survives. But it kills me to think how much we’re losing, and how much we have lost. This is our record of our century.”
“Keepers of the Frame,” a WinStar TV & Video release, retails for $20. To order, call 800-414-1690.
