Taken in context of the film’s journey through history, the prologue to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc is mildly amusing. Dreyer takes care to establish that the film is based off the transcript of Joan of Arc’s trial (three of five original Latin copies of the transcripts are remarkably still in existence), even though (hilariously, in retrospect), the master print of Dreyer’s 1928 film was lost to a fire and thought gone forever. Although Dreyer attempted to reconstruct the film from outtakes and remaining prints, he was never able to provide a complete print. For decades, only bits and pieces of the film remained. He died thinking that his masterpiece would never be seen again.
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How could we have lost it?
It’s not as if Dreyer made a film whose prominence was not recognized. Unlike, for example, the novel Moby-Dick, which received a lukewarm reception on its debut in 1851, was later claimed by critics half a century later as a definitive part of the American canon, critics identified the importance of The Passion immediately. In a 1929 New York Times review, Mordaunt Hall claimed,
“as a film work of art this takes precedence over anything that has so far been produced. It makes worthy pictures of the past look like tinsel shams. It fills one with such intense admiration that other pictures appear but trivial in comparison” (Hall).
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| Renee Falconetti as Joan in The Passion of Joan of Arc, via criterion.com |
Not exactly the kind of film you’d just throw away. So what happened?
The easy answer is that it burned. Silver nitrate film stock, on which the film was printed, was known not only to be a highly combustible substance but one that easily yielded to decomposition if not properly stored. (For a full explanation of the process click here.) For a long time, fires involving film stock were not uncommon.
But besides the problems inherent in the preservation of silver nitrate film stock, there was the additional, overriding issue of wanting to preserve the film at all. Once the films were out of theaters, they were looked upon as largely useless (home screenings being out of the question). There are statistics out there (granted, with some dubious research behind them) that claim up to 75% of all U.S. silent films are now lost. People didn’t care about them once they were out of theaters.
In 1975, headlines were made in Dawson City, Yukon Territory when contractors bulldozing an old hockey rink discovered hundreds of reels perfectly preserved by the Canadian permafrost. The films had been preserved in the local library until 1929 when the library ran out of room. The films were then used as to fill in an old swimming pool. The films were junk as far as anyone at the time was concerned. (from Nitrate Won’t Wait by Anthony Slide)
Slide’s book also investigates the issues of funding for film preservation projects. Slide notes, “despite a plea by the well known independent filmmaker Stan Brakhage to George Stevens, Jr., director of the American Film Institute, it was obvious that both the Institute and the Library of Congress had higher preservation priorities than saving the works of America’s experimental and avant-garde filmmakers…” (Slide p. 89). So…some types of film are more important than other types of film?
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These issues and arguments of preservation, of course, are not constrained to film. In recent memory, film stock has presented the most problems in terms of preservation. But before the invention of the printing press, books were also quite a quandary. Everyone has heard of the burning of the Library of Alexandria and the lost books of the Bible. (If you haven’t, follow those Wikipedia links!) Books—for as long as writing has been around—have been lost.
And music! We may have cuneiform musical notations left over from ancient Greece, but we don’t know how to read them and thereby don’t know what the ancient music would have sounded like. Scholars are still working to figure out the intricacies of the Greek system, different from that of the Western canon (pretty much every song you’ve ever heard).
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| Music in ancient Green was notated using a cuneiform system, via wikipedia.org |
But not too long ago (skipping ahead a few millennia), an article in Rolling Stone touched on a very different kind of music loss. This Rolling Stone article, “File Not Found: The Record Industry’s Digital Storage Crisis” by David Browne, took off from a Council on Library and Information Resources journal piece “The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States.” Rather than paraphrase the CLIR study, I think it would be helpful to quote it at length:
“For decades, archivists have harbored hopes of discovering a permanent [sound] preservation medium—preservation’s own Holy Grail. They have now acknowledged the futility of the quest. There will never be a permanent preservation medium, at least one practical enough for widespread use. Any medium used for sound recording will eventually deteriorate. When preservation copies took the form of analog audiotape, archives produced a succession of fresh copies over time as the old tapes deteriorated—a process that some call migration. Each fresh copy suffered generation loss, losing a little quality when compared with its predecessor. In contrast, the production of high-quality digital audio files means that subsequent copies produced in digital migrations will be bit-for-bit identical with their predecessors; no quality will be lost. But the digital environment is not risk-free: bits can be lost during storage or when files are migrated. These risks can be mitigated by good data-management practices.” (CLIR study; emphasis mine)
My italicization points out something that anyone familiar with reproduction of prints and tapes will know. Every copy is worse than the original. Analog becomes a dead end at some point; after so many reproductions, the sound will have entirely deteriorated. Digital, more or less, sounds like the way to go. Right? As long as we have “good data-management practices”?
Digital music, however, as the Rolling Stone article points out, is subject to the shifts in technology unlike analog or analogous (pun!) forms: computer programs will undergo upgrades, old plug-ins will be discarded for new ones, computer systems will change… The truth is that it’s a real crapshoot trying to preserve music digitally. Browne’s article provides a few examples of artists returning to the digital masters of previous songs and being unable to find them complete. Smash Mouth went looking for the master of their 1999 song “All Star” for a TV placement, but found that the digital master was missing certain tracks. The band had to go back into the studio and rerecord the missing tracks. Steve Webbon, head archivist of the Beggars Group, told Rolling Stone that this sort of loss is “the problem with digital […] when it goes, it’s just blank. It’s gone.”
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But the struggles with digital music, I must admit, are different from those of film. In comparison with film preservation, we’ve gotten a head start with music only to discover that it may not be so easy…or even possible at all. It’s unlikely that all copies of a Beatles album will go missing in the same way that The Passion of Joan of Arc did…but the remotest possibility lingers…
The Passion of Joan of Arc, by the way (film buffs will have seen this coming), was rediscovered in the janitor’s closet of a Norwegian insane asylum in 1981 in nearly perfect condition. Other lost works may be waiting in the wings for discovery, but it’s always worth looking into why they’re lost in the first place—whether it be through accident or ones that have been, for whatever reasons, technological, political (think avant-garde film) imposed on us.
See more:
Browne, David. “File Not Found.” Rolling Stone. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/file-not-found-the-record-industrys-digital-storage-crisis-20101207
Cinecon: Silent Film Festival. http://www.cinecon.org/cinecon_filmpreservation.html
CLIR report. http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub148/pub148.pdf
Hall, Mordaunt. “Poignant French Film.” New York Times. 3/31/1929. http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9806E0D71F31E33ABC4950DFB5668382639EDE
Lost Film. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_film
Slide, Anthony. Nitrate Won’t Wait.
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