British Kinematography (1952)

L58 BRITISH KINEMATOGRAPHY Vol. 20, No. 5 is not strictly a matter of storage, I think it may be of interest to enumerate some of them. The Library consists of films made at all times since the beginning of the industry in 1895. The copies which we have of films prior to 1936 when the Library began to collect films, are just those which have chanced to survive. They are the copies which merchants have not scrapped and which private collectors have stored or passed among themselves, while some are negatives or prints which have lain forgotten in some studio vaults until perhaps a new occupier wanted the space. They consequently very often suffer from damage and defect. A common condition is great shrinkage. Excessive shrinkage in length means that the film does not run properly on sprockets and repeatedly rides up on the teeth and then slips back. The result, in a print made on a continuous printer may be seen here. In a specimen print about every fourth frame was blurred ; but worse was the factor of shrinkage in width so that in addition to the trouble just mentioned, when the perforations on one side are engaging with the sprocket teeth, the perforations on the other side do not reach to the proper position over the other row of sprocket teeth, and good contact between original and duplicating films is impossible, with a resultant loss of definition in the dupe and this difficulty arises with a step printer as well. Further, an old film is frequently shrunk unevenly across its width. This is another condition which makes good contact impossible. Variations in Perforations The industry is at present afflicted with double or even triple standards of perforations shape and size, but for many years at the beginning of the history of the industry there was almost no standard. Perforation shapes and sizes varied from make to maker, and even among the product of a manufacturer. Many of these earliest films will not run on any present tvpe of printer. To duplicate these, Mr. H. D. Waley, of the British Film Institute, has constructed an optical printer from cameras contemporary with the films, and has made duplicates of a great many of the very earliest films in the Library. There remain a number of films with which his apparatus has not succeeded, and there is still a field for further trial and experiment. Most of the old films of course, have perforations torn and often there are several frames with no perforations at all on one side. There are also often many joins ; frequently they are excessively wide ; half a frame overlap is common, and we have found some overlapping two frames. Sometimes joins are unscraped, and sometimes over-scraped so that a white line or patch appears on one frame. We have found joins stuck together with glue and even stitched with sewing thread. All these must be repaired before the film is duped, and much of the staff's time is spent on this. When patching shrunk film, patching material shrunk to the same degree must be used in order that the perforations of the patch will match those of the film, and also because if new film is used its subsequent shrinkage will cause the film to buckle locally. With silent films which have no wide mask line in which the joins can be made, as is done with present standard sound films, every join must overlap into the picture itself. Normally joins only occur at a change of scenes and the scene change helps to make the join un-noticeable ; but when many joins appear during a scene they can be rather distracting, and we have one or two practices which help to render them less noticeable. Tinting and Toning Almost all the original films in the archives are used projection prints, which are not the type of copy to render the best dupe negatives. The highlights are too clear and the overall contrast too great, and of course nearly all are scratched and many of the scenes are tinted or toned. There may be some to whom a word about the distinction between tinting and toning may be welcome. Briefly: tinting is the effect produced by