PBS: Keeping America's Heritage of Sights and Sounds Fresh f

[silentfilm]

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertai ... 05-07.html

Keeping America's Heritage of Sights and Sounds Fresh for Future Generations


REPORT AIR DATE: May 7, 2013
Keeping America's Heritage of Sights and Sounds Fresh for Future Generations
SUMMARY
These days it may seem like you can find any movie, TV show or song you want online. But a vast amount of America's cultural treasures is in danger of extinction. Jeffrey Brown reports on conservation efforts at the Library of Congress, which holds the largest audio and visual collection in the world.


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Transcript

JEFFREY BROWN: And finally tonight: movies, music, and more helping define and preserve our cultural heritage.

The 1894 silent film "Annabelle Butterfly," created by none other than Thomas Edison himself in his New Jersey studio, now one of the oldest movies ever restored. As with other films from this period of experimentation, when frames were mostly colored by hand, restoration like this is a painstaking process.

It's all part of the work done here at the Packard Campus of the Library of Congress, the largest audio and visual collection in the world.

PATRICK LOUGHNEY, National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, Library of Congress: Movies and sound recordings were an essential glue that helped create and form American culture, just as important as any other cultural aspect in America.

JEFFREY BROWN: Patrick Loughney heads the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, millions of recordings and films on some 100 miles of shelves.

The 45-acre campus is nestled in the hills of central Virginia, a state-of-the-art modernized facility that once served as a Cold War-era outpost for the Federal Reserve Bank, designed to withstand a nuclear blast. Today, the treasure being protected is cultural, an effort born of a growing concern that audio and visual recordings were disappearing, in some cases misplaced, ignored, or forgotten, in others due to film and tape literally disintegrating.
Click here for more on the Library of Congress' effort to save recorded history.


Gene DeAnna, who heads the vast Recorded Sound Section at the Library of Congress, says cylinders invented by Edison in the 1800s were the very first mass produced sound format.

GENE DEANNA, Recorded Sound Section, Library of Congress: If Columbia Records, who manufactured these, wanted to make 10 cylinders, they would have to have 10 recorders, and the singer or the band or the speaker would speak or sing into the horns and make 10, and then they'd reload and do it again. And these would be mostly heard not in private homes, but in nickelodeons.

JEFFREY BROWN: One example here, President McKinley's 1896 campaign songs recorded on wax cylinders.

Years later, technology had evolved. This 1936 Louis Armstrong recording was made on a nickel-plated copper disc. The goal here is to extract as much of the sound or sonic information as possible from the old format in order to create a new high-quality digital version that can be preserved for the future.

We watched that process, stripping off the audio DNA in a sense, undertaken on a lacquer disc of Arthur Smith's "Guitar Boogie" from the 1940s, and American composer Roy Harris' "Duo for Cello and Piano" from the 1970s.

But a tremendous amount of material has been lost, even historic recordings by the likes of George Gershwin, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland. The Library was mandated by Congress to develop a new audio recording preservation strategy, and brought out a plan earlier this year, among its goals: create a publicly accessible national directory of collections; develop a coordinated policy, including a strategy to collect, catalogue, and preserve recordings; construct storage facilities for long-term preservation; and simplify and clarify disparate copyright laws governing historical recordings.

It's not an easy task, says James Billington, the librarian of Congress, but it's a necessary one.

JAMES BILLINGTON, U.S. Librarian of Congress: There are all kinds of obscure places where things have been preserved, sometimes in people's attics. It's detective work reassembling what the original product was, as close as possible and as permanent a new material of reformatting as can be made.

So, you look at the recorded sound one, it's so diverse, it's so interesting. It's not just music, or it's a lot of music. It's also comedy, and it's the sounds of -- that we no longer hear, even the sounds of a foghorn or a distant train whistle. All of this is the soundscape of our world, and our country has been very -- a very noisy participant and a very creative one.

JEFFREY BROWN: When it comes to film and TV, the loss is also great. A recent study, for example, estimates that 80 percent of motion pictures made before 1930 have been lost.

At the Conservation Center, technicians work on those that have managed to survive, however damaged, in an effort to bring them back to a form that can be copied, preserved, and shown once more. That can entail cleaning of the old film, repairing of sprockets and splices, and resetting exposure levels.

LUCILLE BALL, Actress: Oh, you great big Latin lover, you.

JEFFREY BROWN: More recent films and video require repairs as well, episodes of "I Love Lucy"; the only appearance by the rock band The Doors on "The Ed Sullivan Show"; and a 1975 documentary on the Memphis blues, a technician rescanning the film version, toggling between the grainy original and the tweaked vibrant version of blues great B.B. King.

The 1940 film "Road to Singapore," with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour, is taking months to fully mend. Of course, technology has changed again, as video and music are delivered digitally. But even in the Internet age, Patrick Loughney says, the nation must take care to preserve its cultural heritage.

PATRICK LOUGHNEY: There's a belief among the younger generation that everything has been digitized that ever existed before or will soon be and will be available on the Internet. And that's factually not accurate.

JEFFREY BROWN: In the meantime, a constant flow of new treasures, about 150,000 sound and moving image recordings, continues to be taken in each year at the Packard facility.

And there's a renewed focus on helping preserve the rich material held by other institutions.

PATRICK LOUGHNEY: There are vast amounts of audiovisual history in the United States that are -- have not been preserved, that are being held by institutions or private collectors who should be acknowledged for recognizing the importance of those materials, but they need help.

JEFFREY BROWN: To that end, the Library has created a foundation to raise public and private funds to award grants to smaller archives for their preservation work.

And, online, you can see and hear more about the preservation efforts. That's all on our Art Beat page.

[momsne]

Interesting article. What I find rather bizarre these days is how media corporations do everything in their legal (and sometimes illegal) power to make it more difficult for Americans to possess unauthorized recordings of audio and video material that almost no one is interested in. I am talking about stuff like silent movies and audio recordings from groups no one under 35 ever heard of. Media conglomerates revel in shutting down online indexing services by hook or crook. UKNova was a British indexing service that only indexed stuff like BBC airings with no copyright issues. A law firm sent UKNova a cease and desist letter and UKNova shut down rather than spend money to hire a lawyer to contest the letter.

Some 80% of silent films are lost. Some silent films are only around now because a collector kept a print of the movie while the film studio that made the movie let the movie turn to brown dust or sent the movie prints to a silver recycler. The talent that made those lost silent movies would have wanted their movies to survive. We have the technology now to convert movies to digital files. 500 movies can easily be stored on a terabyte hard drive as digital files with formats having descriptive names like XviD, mkv and x264. One problem now for movie copyright owners is that they have copyrights on movies that no longer exist. Try to make a bootleg copy of a lost movie, buddy.

I am waiting for book companies to follow the lead of movie studios and call for the closure of libraries that lend books out to the public. I am sure the studios will find some crooked politician like the late Congressman Sonny Bono to push for a law to bar libraries from lending out books like current New York Times bestsellers. Thomas Jefferson was for the free dissemination of knowledge. If Jefferson were around nowadays, the media companies that control the crooks in Congress would have Jefferson branded an apologist for movie pirates.

[silentfilm]

There certainly are films that exist because a collector saved them, but there are many, many more films that exist because an archive has preserved the film for decades. And some studios like MGM certainly did their best to preserve their catalogs. You have to remember that after the talkie revolution very few people thought that silent films had any value at all. The MOMA and the George Eastman House started collecting and preserving movies in the 1930s and later, but they had limited budgets and sometimes only collected films that were acknowledged as "classics" at the time.

Nobody has called for Netflix or public libraries to stop lending DVDs and BluRays of silent or sound classic films. There are plenty of ways to stream silent films on the internet, whether it be archive.org, YouTube or the Warner Archive or the new Silents Channel. Yes, copyright law can be messy and confusing, but it sounds to me that your major complaint is that you cannot download it all for free. It takes money to preserve films, restore them, add a music score to them, and market them. Companies like Flicker Alley, Milestone, Criterion and Kino make heroic efforts with very little return. I wish Fox and Paramount would release more of their silents and early films, but they have at least done

If you peruse the copyright news coming out of Washington, D.C. (and posted on Nitrateville), the suggested changes to the law deal with orphan works where the copyright owner cannot be found, and making it easier to determine a work's copyright status. It's pretty unlikely that another copyright extension would be approved.

[momsne]

I don't want to think how many store bought DVDs I have, but it is probably over a thousand. Pressed DVDs are pretty much age proof as long as you don't let them heat up. DVD-Rs are another story, longevity-wise, yet to save money, some movie distributors sell MOD DVD-R that use dyes as the recording substrate. I can't read the future but I can extrapolate from the past. The Walt Disney corporation will spend whatever it takes to extend their Mickey Mouse copyright when that copyright looks to expire. Did you ever notice that many Walt Disney movies do not include the year of copyright on the movie credits?

When I look now for DVDs to rent on NetFlix, I find that many of the DVDs I look for, some of them recent releases, my only option is to "save" the DVD, it is unavailable. NetFlix now concentrates on streaming video, which turns out to have been a profitable decision for NetFlix stockholders. Of course, some customers don't like movies on streaming video, for reasons like there are no subtitles. Tough on those guys who won't follow the program.

In part, life is about choice. The choices you have these days regarding out of print movies are getting more limited when those movies are nowhere to be found anywhere. One of my favorite westerns, "The Hanging Tree," was tied up in rights litigation. Somehow, a French DVD release of this movie came out, which I downloaded from a bit torrent site. That was maybe five years ago. Warner Archive did not release this move here until about 18 months ago, on DVD-R, which I reluctantly bought (I don't like DVD-R versions of movies, no extras).

I try not to make assumptions about posters. Still, any poster here who wants to act as a cheering section for the giant media corporations should consider this fact: If not for Turner Classic Movies, with its cable channel and its releases of old movies, a big chunk of Hollywood's movies from the silent era and early talkie era would have remained in film vaults, only to reappear at some film festivals. Thanks to Ted Turner, we have a choice now to see and buy those old movies uncut. That fact indicates that before Turner, the media companies had no problem just letting their really old films molder away.

Everyone here knows that MGM under Louis B. Mayer and production chief Joe Cohn made a conscious decision in the 1940s to preserve their film library. That fact has nothing to do with the current situation, where giant media companies have bought off the USDOJ. If you want to put your faith on fair enforcement of copyright laws with Attorney General Holder (who denies any involvement in the AP reporters wiretapping matter) go ahead.

[sc1957]

What an odd rant… "Sonny Bono, libraries, Jefferson... movie pirate, some customers... Tough on those guys, I downloaded from a bit torrent site, giant media corporations... Ted Turner, USDOJ...."

Where's my tinfoil?

[momsne]

SC, people don't use tinfoil anymore. Whatever you put on your fat head, that's what they use.

[Danny Burk]

It looks like this thread has run its course if infantile banter is the new topic. Let's put a lid on that, ok?