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Mr. Ottinger. His knowledg:e of the subject and his expert awareness of the hazards of nitrate film enable him to depict with what I am afraid is frightening detail the vast number of threatened film in our Archives.
I would like to say that I think this is a case of the Grovernment being pennywise and pound-foolish. For a relatively small amount of money, we could by now have preserved our film and eliminated a very serious safety hazard.
For failure to do that, we presently have a considerable hazard on our hands. We have a good deal of our history in jeopardy.
A new start is needed because the story of our film preservation endeavors is the sad tale of a project well begun and then forgotten.
One year ago today, on June 19, 1978, the General Accounting Office released a report whose title was a warning that "Valuable Government-Owned Motion Picture Films Are Rapidlv Deteriorating."
The report could not have been more explicit. It presented overwhelming proof that the many nitrate film storage vaults scattered across this country do not preserve film, but instead, turn thousands of reels of film into bombs. The GAO report even contained photographs of a nitrate film explosion and its devastating results.
Even when, through luck, no explosions occur, the nitrate film is deteriorating, inexorably and inevitably. And when it does, we are robbed of the record of our past.
The GAO report left no doubt of this dual danger : nitrate film disintegrates and, in doing so, creates the hazard of a powerful, spontaneous explosion.
Six months after the release of the GAO report, an explosion and fire destroyed the film vaults in building A at the National Archives facility in Suitland, Md. The danger, of which the GAO report had warned, had become a reality.
Worse still, the danger has not passed, has not been dealt with, and the threat of spontaneous combustion exists now in archives across this country.
This, incidentally, is true, both with respect to Government facilities, and with respect to manv of the film studio archives that we probably ought to be interested in, as well.
My concern is tliat we have not addressed these problems— have not taken the dramatic, determined steps necessary to prevent the dangerous deterioration of nitrate film.
The fact is that the efforts to transfer the nitrate film to safety film have been, in large part, paltry.
The Suitland fire was a hint, an intimation, of the losses we will suffer unless we act.
This deplorable situation was brought to my attention by Marvin Bernard. As I indicated previously, he is an expert in the preservation and restoration of old films. Mr. Bernard has come to Washington today to submit for the record a statement of the continuing and growing danger posed by the storage of nitrate films.
I wish to draw your closest attention to Mr. Bernard's submission to the record. His knowledge of this subject and his expert awareness of the hazards of nitrate film enable him to depict with frightening detail the vast number of threatened films and archives.