My Rights

The term “film preservation” now has an official ring to it. In one sense, that’s progress—it means that people take it seriously, which was not always the case. On the other hand, the fact that it has become official means that it has also ceased to be urgent, that the problem has been solved, and that it can now be taken for granted. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Film preservation is always urgent. It always will be urgent. For every neglected film print or set of film elements that is not being stored under optimal conditions, that has not been checked or cleaned or scanned, the clock is ticking. And even if a title has been transferred to digital media, the clock is still ticking. It is always ticking, just as it is for every painting and gives us something precious: a record of ourselves in time, documented and interpreted. The need to incorporate time and motion into our representations of ourselves goes back to the beginning of humanity—you can see it in the paintings on the walls of the caves at 

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In the late 1970s I went to a screening of a film made in the mid-’50s called The Seven Year Itch, by Billy Wilder, shot in the Eastmancolor process. This was the studio archival print of the picture with the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe. The lights went down, the screening began, and we were shocked by what we saw. The color had faded so dramatically that it was almost impossible to actually see the film. In those pre-home video days we’d grown used to seeing film prints that were a couple of generations away from the original negative, that were scratched and spliced and worn, and—in the case of pictures that had been shot in color—that were sometimes faded. However, this was beyond mere fading. This was visible evidence of deterioration and, since it was the studio print, of neglect. But beyond the fact that the color was lost, I realized that the performances were lost as well, and the characters along wit