In the late 1920s, at the height of Hollywood’s confidence and productivity, a quiet dread began to creep into the margins of popular culture: the fear that motion pictures—so new, so dazzling, so seemingly permanent—might not last at all. A widely read 1928 magazine article by journalist Lynn Fairfield posed the unsettling question bluntly: Is time rotting our film records? It was not a metaphor. It was a warning.
By Allan R. Ellenberger
MGM technician John Nichols inspects the seals on the containers holding The Big Parade before placing them in the Smithsonian's fireproof vaults.
Fairfield opened with a remark attributed to silent screen star Rod La Rocque, who speculated darkly that a century hence, audiences might look upon the films of his era as curiosities, if they survived at all. Names would be forgotten, faces erased, laughter misplaced. What would remain of pictures that cost more than pyramids to build, yet were printed on a strip of chemically unstable celluloid? The concern was not sentimental but scientific. Film, Fairfield explained, was inherently mortal.
Celluloid, composed of guncotton, camphor, ether and alcohol, was inherently unstable. Heat would dry it out and make it brittle. Moisture caused it to dissolve. Exposure to light would turn it brown. Oxygen, the very air we breathe, was an enemy which inexorably ate away at the image. Films that were barely ten years old were already showing the effects of age. Marble statues and oil paintings may deteriorate, but at least their art form doesn't. Movies require a medium that is susceptible to decomposition, contraction, cracking and even catching fire. Cinema was the most modern of the arts and might become the most ephemeral.
Fairfield cast the problem as one for future generations. Could they watch John Gilbert strut his stuff? Would they see Clara Bow capture the essence of the 1920s flapper? Could students learn about the Great War or Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic see real images from the era or would their textbooks only offer descriptions? If nothing was done, he warned, today's movies would be as lost as Cleopatra's face.
Others had tried to meet that question head-on. For years, Smithsonian Institution personnel had archived and canned newsreel footage it considered valuable history. Locked away in airtight canisters and stored in temperature-controlled vaults beneath sprawling museums, this undeveloped film was light-tight stored because somebody long ago realized motion pictures were documents of history, not fleeting junk. Hollywood had capitalized on this discovery once. When making The Rough Riders filmmakers unearthed some negatives and used actual film of Theodore Roosevelt giving his inaugural speech.
Rare were the occasions when film was treated with such care. Studios generally considered motion pictures disposable. After a film had run its course in theaters, prints were dumped into cutting rooms, recycled, or sent to die in damp storage closets. Newsfilm was sent through its processing baths with more concern for tomorrow's delivery deadline than decades-old archival life. Quicker was better because speed equated with short life expectancy. "Impatience and preservation don't mix," conceded one studio technician.
Actress Marceline Day inspects film cannisters before placing them in the vault at the Smithsonian Institute.
Fairfield quoted a Metro-Goldwyn technician, John Nichols, who explained that preserving film properly required meticulous washing and slow drying—steps rarely afforded to newsreels or even features intended for quick consumption. Residual chemicals left on film stock would, over time, eat away at the image itself. The result was inevitable decay. A film hurried into existence would die just as quickly.
Ironically, while studios neglected their own dramatic productions, natural history institutions were sealing away thousands of feet of wildlife footage in vacuum containers, hoping to preserve images of animals that might one day vanish from the earth. Elephants, tigers, giraffes—saved on film even if lost in life. Hollywood, by contrast, risked losing the very faces that defined an era.
In a striking irony, Fairfield observed that silent-era legends such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks had already taken steps to preserve portions of their work, sealing prints in lead containers with instructions not to be opened for decades. Studios, too, had begun to “can” their most important features, raising the possibility that films like The Big Parade or The Trail of ’98 might someday be screened in a future world utterly unlike the one that produced them.
Still, Fairfield remained cautious. Even the best-preserved newsreels of Lindbergh might not outlast the memory of his flight. Feature films were rarely printed with tomorrow’s audience in mind. The stars of the present might hope for lasting fame, but the medium itself offered no guarantees. Unless preservation became standard practice, cinema would remain a chemical flame—bright, beautiful, and brief.
In retrospect Fairfield's article reads like both prophecy and cri de coeur. Hollywood was facing down annihilation long before film archives were established, before restoration and digitization provided hope. Would anyone care enough to save film history? In the uncertain space between certainty and oblivion grew modern film preservation born not of nostalgia but fear that time was already deleting the screen.
I’d love to hear your thoughts—please share your reactions, questions, or experiences with film preservation in the comments and help continue the conversation about saving cinema’s past.
Add comment
Comments