Құжатты фильмдерді сақтау және қалпына келтіру тарихы

Historic preservation of motion pictures

Film preservation, or film restoration, describes a series of ongoing efforts among film historians, archivists, museums, cinematheques, and non profit organizations to rescue decaying film stock and preserve the images they contain. In the widest sense, preservation assures that a movie will continue to exist in as close to its original form as possible. For many years the term "preservation" was synonymous with "duplication" of film. The goal of a preservationist was to create a durable copy without any significant loss of quality. In more modern terms, film preservation includes the concepts of handling, duplication, storage, and access. The archivist seeks to protect the film and share its content with the public. Film preservation is not to be confused with film revisionism, in which long completed films are modified with the insertion of outtakes or new musical scores, the addition of sound effects, black and white film being colorized, older soundtracks converted to Dolby stereo, or minor edits and other cosmetic changes being made. By the 1980s, it was becoming apparent that the collections of motion picture heritage were at risk of becoming lost. Not only was the preservation of nitrate film an ongoing problem, but it was then discovered that safety film, used as a replacement for the more volatile nitrate stock, was beginning to be affected by a unique form of decay known as "vinegar syndrome", and color film manufactured, in particular, by Eastman Kodak, was found to be at risk of fading. At that time, the best known solution was to duplicate the original film onto a more secure medium. Although institutional practices of film preservation date back to the 1930s, the field received an official status only in 1980, when UNESCO recognized "moving images" as an integral part of the world's cultural heritage.

The great majority of films made in the silent era are now considered to be lost forever. Many of them were recycled for their silver content, or destroyed in studio or vault fires. The largest cause, however, was intentional destruction. As film preservationist Robert A. Harris explains, "Most of the early films did not survive because of wholesale junking by the studios. There was no thought of ever saving these films. They simply needed vault space and the materials were expensive to house." Silent films had little or no commercial value after the advent of sound films in the 1930s, and as such, they were not kept. As a result, preserving the now rare silent films has been proposed as a high priority amongst film historians. Because of the fragility of film stock, proper preservation of film usually involves storing the original negatives (if they have survived) and prints in climate controlled facilities. The vast majority of films were not stored in this manner, which resulted in the widespread decay of film stocks.

In 1991, filmmaker and former deputy director of the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, Peter Delpeut, made the film Lyrical Nitrate, with decaying films from the Desmet Collection. In 2002, filmmaker Bill Morrison produced Decasia, a film solely based on fragments of old unrestored nitrate based films in various states of decay and disrepair, providing a somewhat eerie aesthetic to the film. The film was created to accompany a symphony of the same name, composed by Michael Gordon and performed by his orchestra. The footage used was from old newsreel and archive film and was obtained by Morrison from several sources, such as the George Eastman House, the archives of the Museum of Modern Art, and the Fox Movietone News film archives at the University of South Carolina.

The preservation of film usually refers to physical storage of the film in a climate controlled vault, and sometimes to the actual repair and copying of the film element. Preservation is different from restoration, as restoration is the act of returning the film to a version most faithful to its initial release to the public and often involves combining various fragments of film elements. In traditional photochemical restorations, image polarity considerations must be observed when recombining surviving materials and the final, lowest generation restoration master may be either a duplicate negative or a fine grain master positive. Preservation elements, such as fine grain master positives and duplicate printing negatives, are generated from this restoration master element to make both duplication masters and access projection prints available for future generations. While some in the archival community feel that conversion from film to a digital image results in a loss of quality that can make it more difficult to create a high quality print based upon the digital image, digital imaging technology has become increasingly advanced to the point where 8K scanners can capture the full resolution of images filmed at as high as 65 mm. 70 mm IMAX film has a theoretical resolution of 18K, the highest possible resolution given the sensor. Of course, having an intermediate digital stage, followed by forming a new film master by lasering the digital results onto new film stock does represent an extra generation. So would an intermediate film master that was restored frame by frame by hand. The choice of film vs. digital restoration will be driven by the amount, if any, of restoration required, the taste and skill set of the restorer, and the economics of film restoration vs. digital restoration. The aesthetic and ethical implications of the use of digital technology for film preservation are major subjects of debate. For instance, the senior curator of George Eastman House Paolo Cherchi Usai has decried the shift from analogue to digital preservation of film as ethically unacceptable, arguing, on philosophical terms, that the medium of film is an essential ontological precondition for the existence of cinema. In 2009, the senior curator of EYE Film Institute Netherlands Giovanna Fossati has discussed the use of digital technologies for the restoration and preservation of film in a more optimistic way as a form of remediation of the cinematic medium, and has positively reflected on digital technologies' ability to broaden restoration possibilities, improve quality, and reduce costs. According to the cinema scholar Leo Enticknap, the views held by Usai and Fossati could be seen as representative of the two poles of the digital debate in film preservation. It should be kept in mind, however, that both Usai and Fossati's arguments are highly complex and nuanced, and likewise, the debate about the utility of digital technologies in film preservation is complex and continually evolving. The following year, Henri Langlois founded the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, which would become the world's largest international film collection. For thousands of early silent films stored in the Library of Congress, mostly between 1894 and 1912, the only existing copies were printed on rolls of paper submitted as copyright registrations. For these, an optical printer was used to copy these images onto safety film stock, a project that began in 1947 and continues today. The Library hosts the National Film Preservation Board, whose National Film Registry annually selects 25 U. S. films "showcasing the range and diversity of American film heritage". The George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film was chartered in 1947 to collect, preserve and present the history of photography and film, and in 1996 opened the Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center, one of only four film conservation centers in the United States. The American Film Institute was founded in 1967 to train the next generation of filmmakers and preserve the American film heritage. Its collection now includes over 27,500 titles. In 1978, Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada, a construction excavation inadvertently found a forgotten collection of more than 500 discarded films from the early 20th century that were buried in and preserved in the permafrost. This fortunate discovery was shared and moved to the United States' Library of Congress and Library and Archives Canada for transfer to safety stock and archiving. However, to move such highly flammable material such a distance ultimately required assistance from the Canadian Armed Forces to make the delivery to Ottawa. The story of this discovery as well as excerpts of these films can be seen in the 2016 documentary film, Dawson City: Frozen Time. Another high profile restoration by staff at the British Film Institute's National Film and Television Archive is the Mitchell and Kenyon collection, which consists almost entirely of actuality films commissioned by traveling fairground operators for showing at local fairgrounds or other venues across the UK in the early part of the twentieth century. The collection was stored for many decades in two large barrels following the winding up of the firm, and was discovered in Blackburn in the early 1990s. The restored films now offer a unique social record of early 20th century British life. Individual preservationists who have contributed to the cause include Robert A. Harris and James Katz (Lawrence of Arabia, My Fair Lady, and several Alfred Hitchcock films), Michael Thau (Superman), and Kevin Brownlow (Intolerance and Napoleon). Other organizations, such as the UCLA Film and Television Archive, have also preserved and restored films; a major part of UCLA's work includes such projects as Becky Sharp and select Paramount/Famous Studios and Warner Bros. cartoons whose credits were once altered due to rights taken over by different entities.

In 1926 Will Hays asked for film studios to preserve their films by storing them at 40 degrees at low humidity in an Eastman Kodak process, so that "schoolboys in the year 3,000 and 4,000 A. D. may learn about us". Beginning in the 1970s, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, aware that the original negatives to many of its Golden Age films had been destroyed in a fire, began a preservation program to restore and preserve all of its films by using whatever negatives survived, or, in many cases, the next best available elements (whether it be a fine grain master positive or mint archival print). From the onset, it was determined that if some films had to be preserved, then it would have to be all of them. In 1986, when Ted Turner acquired MGM's library (which by then had included Warner Bros.' pre 1950, MGM's pre May 1986, and a majority of the RKO Radio Pictures catalogs), he vowed to continue the preservation work MGM had started. Warner Bros. Discovery, the current owner of Turner Entertainment, continues this work today. The cause for film preservation came to the forefront in the 1980s and early 1990s when such famous and influential film directors as Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese contributed to the cause. Spielberg became interested in film preservation when he went to view the master of his film Jaws, only to find that it had badly decomposed and deteriorated—a mere fifteen years after it had been filmed. Scorsese drew attention to the film industry's use of color fading film stock through his use of black and white film stock in his 1980 film Raging Bull. His film, Hugo included a key scene in which many of film pioneer Georges Méliès' silent films are melted down and the raw material recycled as shoes; this was seen by many movie critics as "a passionate brief for film preservation wrapped in a fanciful tale of childhood intrigue and adventure". Scorsese's concern about the need to save motion pictures of the past led him to create The Film Foundation, a non profit organization dedicated to film preservation, in 1990. He was joined in this effort by fellow film makers who served on the foundation's board of directors—Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Sydney Pollack, Robert Redford, and Steven Spielberg. In 2006, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Curtis Hanson, Peter Jackson, Ang Lee, and Alexander Payne were added to the board of directors of The Film Foundation, which is aligned with the Directors Guild of America. By working in partnership with the leading film archives and studios, The Film Foundation has saved nearly 600 films, often restoring them to pristine condition. In many cases, original footage that had been excised—or censored by the Production Code in the U. S.—from the original negative, has been reinstated. In addition to the preservation, restoration, and presentation of classic cinema, the foundation teaches young people about film language and history through The Story of Movies, an educational program claimed to be "used by over 100,000 educators nationwide". In the age of digital television, high definition television and DVD, film preservation and restoration has taken on commercial as well as historical importance, since audiences demand the highest possible picture quality from digital formats. Meanwhile, the dominance of home video and ever present need for television broadcasting content, especially on specialty channels, has meant that films have proven a source of long term revenue to a degree that the original artists and studio management before the rise of these media never imagined. Thus media companies have a strong financial incentive to carefully archive and preserve their complete library of films.

The group Video Aids to Film Preservation (VAFP) became active on the Internet in 2005. The VAFP site was funded as part of a 2005 Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant to the Folkstreams project. The purpose of the site is to supplement already existing film preservation guides provided by the National Film Preservation Foundation with video demonstrations. The preservation guides provided by the origination, while thoroughly depicting accurate methods of preservation, are mostly text based. The films and clips are copyrighted under the Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to use these clips with attribution—in this case, attribution to the VAFP site and to the author of the clip and his company.

Regardless of the age of the print itself, damage may occur if stored improperly. Damage to the film (caused by tears on the print, curling of the film base due to intense light exposure, temperature, humidity, etc.) can significantly raise the difficulty and the cost of preservation processes. The degrees of physical and chemical damage of film influence the incentive to preserve, i. e., as the business perspective states that once a film is no longer "commercially" viable, it stops generating profit and becomes a financial liability. While few films would not benefit from digital restoration, the high cost of digitally restoring films still prevents the method from being as broadly applied as it might be. Demand for new media, digital cinema, and constantly evolving consumer digital formats continues to change. Film restoration facilities must keep pace to maintain audience acceptance. Classic films today must be in near mint condition if they are to be reshown or resold, with the demand for perfection only rising as theaters move from 2K to 4K projection and consumer media continues its shift from SD to HD to UltraHD and beyond.