Vanishing Culture: No Film Left Unscanned

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The following guest post from archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

Soon after the cinema was born in the 1890s, a few visionaries realized that film could become one of the most vivid and engaging means of recording history. But when they proposed creating archives to collect and color correction moving images, no one seemed to respond. Most movie studios treated films as expendable objects to be discarded after their theatrical runs, and most collections that actually survived were hidden in specialized spaces: newsreel archives, stock footage libraries, universities, and collectors’ basements.


In the 1930s, a handful of courageous archivists in Europe and America inaugurated the modern film archives movement. Asserting that cinema should be seen not only as valuable documentation but as an art in its own right, they collected as best they could. But they encountered great resistance. They fought pushback from copyright holders who saw archives as a violation of their ownership, aesthetes and government bureaucrats who considered movies to be vulgar commercialism and unworthy of preservation, and fire inspectors who treated film as explosive hazmat. Ultimately, film’s immense popularity won out. In half a century, the first four film archives expanded to hundreds, and today it’s impossible to count how many thousands of archives collect film, video, and digital materials.

But film has always been hard to collect and preserve. Until the 1970s, film was generally made from organic gelatin bonded to various forms of plastic that inevitably decomposed. Much but not all pre-1951 35mm film was doubly vulnerable, made from cellulose nitrate stock that if heated or exposed to flame could burn rapidly or explode. Film, therefore, was and still is a deeply inconvenient object, requiring very cool and very dry storage in order to survive. Archives fires throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have destroyed large collections, and almost every film is still at risk from decay and decomposition.


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For many years the gold standard of film preservation was film-to-film copying coupled with restoration—aiming to preserve films as their makers intended, and trying to preserve the theatrical film experience. This process is difficult and expensive. The turn toward digital technologies came in the 1990s, and now almost all film preservation is digitally-based, even if the product is a long-lasting film print for storage projection.