AFI’S MAJOR MISSION AS PRESERVER

Reading early film history can be frustrating, because it is likely to be strewn with references to film titles that were known to have existed but of which no trace can now be found.

The materials were fragile and the nitrate film is dangerous as it decomposes. But more dangerous to history was the prevailing attitude among those who sold film that it was a perishable crop rather than a preservable art.

When a film was played out, it was dead (although you could squeeze out the last few pennies of devotion by soaking the silver out of the emulsions on the film).

Film preservation was one of the founding priorities of the American Film Institute, and a few years ago the AFI made a sort of shopping list of lost film treasures. One thing that became clear was that stardom was no guarantee your films would be handled more reverently than anybody else’s.

Where, asked the AFI, were “Angel of Contention” with Lillian Gish (1914), Theda Bara’s “Cleopatra” (1917), Rudolph Valentino in “The Young Rajah” (1922), W.C. Fields in “That Royle Girl,” directed by D.W. Griffith in 1925? Where was Henry King’s “The Winning of Barbara Worth” with Gary Cooper (1926)? Where, indeed, were Norma Talmadge in “Camille” (1927), Greta Garbo in “The Divine Woman” (1928); where are all 40 reels of Erich von Stroheim’s “Greed” from 1925, and what became of Tod Browning’s “London After Midnight” with Lon Chaney from 1927?

It is probably true that the great majority of the thousands of lost films made from the beginning (1896) through 1950 are forever lost, taunting reminders of our wastrel ways.

Then again, some treasures do keep turning up, in private collections, in dusty vaults, abandoned in warehouses (where Prof. G. William Jones of Southern Methodist University found an invaluable archive of early films by and about blacks), in Europe (where the late Sol Lesser found a silent “Oliver Twist” he had produced but had feared was gone forever).

One problem has been the lack of a master catalogue of the holdings of the many public and private film collections in the United States. But now, says Jean Firstenberg of the AFI, through the twin miracles of computers and financial grants, that problem is being tackled.

Computer experts at the AFI’s National Center for Film and Video Preservation, which coordinates the preservation efforts of several U.S. archives, have begun work on the years-long task of creating a data bank that will show where every known film is, what shape the print or negative is in, who owns it (an often very ticklish question) and what its availability is.

Ultimately, Firstenberg says, it would be invaluable to expand the data bank to include foreign archives, particularly the rich international holdings of the Cinematheque Francaise founded by the ruthless collecting zeal of the late Henri Langlois. But for the moment it will be chore enough to sort out what exists in the United States.

The AFI is far from alone in its quests. The Museum of Broadcasting in New York, largely funded by the industry, is an active library of rediscovered radio and television programming. UCLA has active film and television archives, and there are others, notably the pioneering Museum of Modern Art.

Historically, there has been competition as well as cooperation, and resistance from producers who have discovered that their perishable art is not so perishable after all. But the preservers, Firstenberg insists, are increasingly agreed and mutually helpful in their common cause. Compounding the preservation problem is the hard truth that it won’t stop growing. While the use of nitrate film ceased in 1951, the switch to safety film came just as the industry was switching almost exclusively to color. And color has proved to be notoriously and quickly fugitive, the prints and negatives losing their original freshness and accuracy within a very few years.

But the most effective process for preservation can cost $40,000 per film.

Television must worry about the durability of videotape (estimates on its shelf life vary from five years to a century). At that, the larger worry about videotape is that it can be erased and reused, and it often is, leaving memorable television moments only memories.

From the beginning, the most conspicuous aspects of the American Film Institute have been its Life Achievement Awards and its advanced training program for young film makers.

But down the longer corridors of time, the AFI may turn out to be just as gratefully regarded for its role in film and television preservation. It has become a focal point for previously scattershot efforts and it has won major support for the cause from the National Endowment for the Arts under Frank Hodsoll. At a time when the government philosophy toward support of the arts has been “less is plenty,” that’s remarkable.

Meanwhile, if your grandfather ran a theater and stashed away a print of Edison’s “Frankenstein” (1910), you can reach the National Center for Film and Video Preservation at (213) 856-7637.