M-STEP Practice Test 14

Saving Films Before They Fade

¹For the first half-century of moviemaking, most films were printed on a material called cellulose nitrate. Nitrate film was clear, strong, and flexible, and it produced images with a rich, silvery glow that many film historians still admire. It had one serious flaw, however: it was extremely flammable. Nitrate burns so fast and so hot that it can keep burning even underwater, because the film releases its own oxygen as it burns.

²Nitrate also does not last. Over time, the film slowly decays, especially when it is stored somewhere warm or damp. First the image fades and turns brownish. Then the film becomes sticky, then brittle, and finally it crumbles into powder. Once that happens, whatever images the film held are gone forever.

³Because of these dangers, the film industry switched to a less flammable "safety film" around 1950. By then, however, huge numbers of older films had already been lost. Some burned in vault fires. Many were simply thrown away, because studios saw old movies as having little value once they had finished showing in theaters. Historians believe that most American silent feature films no longer exist in any form.

⁴Today, film archives work to rescue what remains. When an archive receives a reel of nitrate film, workers inspect it to judge how far it has decayed. They move the reel into a cold, dry vault, since low temperatures and low humidity slow decay dramatically. While it waits there, the film is copied, onto modern film, as a high-resolution digital scan, or both, so that the images survive even if the original eventually crumbles.

⁵Copying is slow, careful work. A feature-length film can contain more than a hundred thousand individual frames, and damaged frames may need to be repaired one at a time. Even so, archivists say the effort is worth it. Old films preserve more than stories. They show how people dressed, spoke, traveled, and lived. A crowd scene filmed on a city street in 1915 may be the only moving record of that street as it once was.

⁶There is also a surprising source of hope. Every few years, a film thought to be lost turns up somewhere unexpected: in a private collection, in an archive in another country, or even, once, buried beneath a hockey rink in a small Canadian town. Each discovery is a reminder that a missing piece of history may still be waiting to be found, if it is found in time.