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is Time Rotting Our Film Records?
To Our Grandchildren, Screen Stars of Today May Be As Invisible As the Face of Cleopatra
A HUNDRED years from now," Rod La Rocque said tragically, "if people look at our pictures at ail, it will be as curiosities. Our names will be forgotten.
They -will laugh at us "
A hundred years from now, what will be left of the pictures we make today? Pictures that each one cost more than the building of a pyramid ! How many times we hear sentimentalists bewail the fact that the movies had not been invented centuries ago, so that we might look on the fabled beauties of Helen with our own eyes (and say with a sniff "We-ll! I don't see anything to make such a fuss about in her") or watch Cleopatra gliding down the Nile on her flower-decked barge in some B. C. newsreel.
But even if there had been a camera grinding when the Wooden Horse moved on the walls of Troy, even if Anthony had wooed Cleopatra in a screen close-up, these things would probably have disappeared long ago ; for the fame of the movies is a chemical fame. The exotic loveliness of a Garbo, the romantic passion of a Valentino are held caught in a film of jelly smeared on a substance composed of guncotton and camphor, ether and alcohol. This is celluloid.
Forever and a Day: the eternal element in the scene being the vault, wherein films are sealed for ages to come; and the Day being Marceline. The vault is -in the Smithsonian Institute, shown above
By LYNN FAIRFIELD
Air is the Enemy of Film
THE action of air on celluloid is slowly but surely to destroy it. Heat dries up film, makes it brittle,
humidity dissolves it, light turns it brown. Even the pictures made ten years ago show plainly the devastating effect of time.
No art in the history of the world has ever been so temporary as that of the motion pictures. Where the ancients immortalized their heroes and heroines in marble, we capture ours oti a two-inch strip of film. Where earlier craftsmen kept a record of their times on canvas or tapestry, we entrust the chronicling of our day to the news camera, with what result?
The screen idols of twenty years ago — Arthur Johnson, Mary Fuller, Florence Turner— names as beloved as Pickford and Fairbanks today, have completely disappeared. Not a scrap of film with their faces on it remains. In those days no .one thought of the movies as anything but a temporary device for amusement As soon as a picture was out of date, the film was destroyed. It is only comparatively recently that studios have even considered preserving some of their best pictures for future generations.
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