[HN Gopher] 'Films are vulnerable': The battle to preserve Easte...
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'Films are vulnerable': The battle to preserve Eastern Europe's
analogue movies (2022)
Author : robtherobber
Score : 99 points
Date : 2023-01-10 15:09 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.calvertjournal.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.calvertjournal.com)
| WalterBright wrote:
| It seems like the primary obstacle to film preservation is
| copyright law. Allowing people to freely copy those old films
| means they are far more likely to survive.
|
| Sometimes I hate copyright law. I bought a set of all the
| Rocky+Bullwinkle cartoons. Surprise, surprise, the original music
| was removed and replaced with some generic noise. The cartoons
| are just unwatchable.
|
| Married with Children also replaced their Sinatra theme song with
| some generic awful music. I just have to grind my teeth and fast
| forward over that.
| [deleted]
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| Copyright is a ban on historical preservation. Having to wait
| more than a century just to not fear legal reprecussions for
| trying to do something about history is abysmal.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Copyright is amyloid plaque for the global brain.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Copyright is _a_ barrier, but not the _only_ barrier.
|
| For example, Hollywood is finding out the hard way that all the
| LTO tape libraries they bought to archive movies onto are
| incurring large migration costs, since nobody makes the same
| format tape drives for multiple decades. Every other digital
| storage medium also requires periodic data migration. The
| assumptions and budgets of pre-digital preservation projects
| was that "archival conditions" and original (non-exploding)
| media was enough.
|
| The ideas that you're probably having in your head - i.e. of
| using BitTorrent and the hard drives of strangers with a data
| hoarding addiction as cultural preservation - would have been
| absolutely ludicrous any time before the Internet. Nowadays
| it's vaguely feasible that at least the Internet Archive or
| Wikimedia could handle the data storage requirements for full-
| take cultural preservation.
|
| My personal opinion is that these sorts of modifications to a
| creative work to dodge a relicensing obligation should be
| prohibited by some kind of moral rights regime. The original
| creators are being done a disservice by having the music
| stripped to cut costs. But the US in particular is extremely
| hostile to that sort of thing (despite having agreed to
| implement it in treaties).
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| The article is so wrong that I do not know where to start.
|
| First off, historic Western films are no less vulnerable, because
| businesses do not want to deal with copyright issues, and
| citizens are taught from the childhood that sharing is stealing.
|
| OTOH, copyright is still a fairly new idea in Eastern Europe, so
| fans tend to digitize and share more often.
|
| Compare rutracker to the pirate bay. Even in its heyday TPB did
| not have the level of commitment of the community that rutracker
| consistently exhibits for 18 years already.
|
| P.S. Here is the Lighthouse (2006) refered in the first
| paragraphs in FHD quality [1]. Enjoy.
|
| [1] https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5979083
| jedberg wrote:
| > First off, historic Western films are no less vulnerable,
| because businesses do not want to deal with copyright issues,
| and citizens are taught from the childhood that sharing is
| stealing.
|
| This is completely inaccurate. There is big money in storing
| original film prints. There are a ton of commercial warehouses
| (mostly in/near Los Angeles) that specializes in such things.
| The copyright remains with the studio, but the actual print is
| stored in a warehouse.
|
| The bigger issue is the opposite -- because of real estate
| prices, the warehouses keep moving, and sometimes they sell off
| part of their collection to another warehouse. The owners of
| the films have no idea where their originals are. When I worked
| at Netflix we would often have the problem where a studio sold
| us the rights to stream something, so we would ask for the
| original print to digitize it, and it would take months to
| track down which warehouse actually had the original print. But
| once found it was easy to digitize because it was usually in
| really good shape.
|
| Eastern Europe doesn't have the film economy to support such
| warehouses.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > There is big money in storing original film prints. There
| are a ton of commercial warehouses (mostly in/near Los
| Angeles) that specializes in such things.
|
| Until the studio decides to, you know, just destroy them or
| they are destroyed by fires
|
| --- start quote ---
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_film
|
| A report created by Library of Congress film historian and
| archivist David Pierce claims:
|
| - 75% of original silent-era films have perished.
|
| - Only 14% of the 10,919 silent films released by major
| studios exist in their original 35 mm or other formats.
|
| - 11% survive only in full-length foreign versions or film
| formats of lesser image quality.[1][3]
|
| Of the American sound films made from 1927 to 1950, an
| estimated half have been lost
|
| https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-04-fi-
| unive...
|
| In addition to the ruined "King Kong" attraction and the
| burned New York street scapes, the Universal Studios
| Hollywood fire has claimed another casualty: perhaps hundreds
| of classic 35-millimeter film prints, the studio said
| Tuesday.
|
| The fire also claimed about 5% of Universal Music Group's
| recordings...
|
| In an e-mail sent to several dozen film exhibitors Monday,
| Universal said the "fire destroyed nearly 100% of the archive
| prints kept here on the lot.
|
| --- end quote ---
|
| etc.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Your keyword is "storing" while I am speaking of _sharing_.
|
| The number of films revived by Netflix is small compared to
| those largely forgotten.
| [deleted]
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| If you want to watch some of these films and other old East
| European films with English subtitles:
|
| https://easterneuropeanmovies.com/
|
| Searchable by decade and by country
| achairapart wrote:
| Is this legit in some way? I can't find no terms of service,
| privacy policy, even the name of the company behind it.
|
| Honestly, looks like a cool designed website selling pirated
| content.
|
| I guess no one is going to fill DCMAs for old eastern/russian
| movies?
| wmil wrote:
| Determining status of copyrights and ownership for movies
| produced under soviet block communist governments is going to
| open up thorny legal questions.
|
| Who would even own the copyright? The government? The
| director? Are they public domain? What's the continuity of
| the copyright?
|
| They probably don't have enough commercial value to fight
| over.
|
| Now if Ye used a sample of a soundtrack without authorization
| in a hit song, there's suddenly real money involved. Lawyers
| and artists would come out of the woodwork and start filing
| claims.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I almost think parent is trolling.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Feel free not to watch? Here are several hundred released for
| free by Poland's culture ministry:
|
| https://35mm.online/en
|
| Also with English subtitles.
|
| You can find some Russian ones on YouTube, like the original
| "Solaris" -- which I highly recommend. It is from the early
| 70s. No George Clooney or Steven Soderbergh.
| achairapart wrote:
| Just to be clear: I appreciate you sharing the source (and
| yes, I already have an account on 35mm.online, thanks to
| HN[0], and I already know by heart every Tarkovskij film).
|
| Also, I'm not the biggest fan of copyright either.
|
| What left me a bit sour about that website is not even that
| they are asking money but really just how they are
| pretending to be a legitimate business.
|
| Instead, I'm more inclined to donate to people who make an
| effort to share rare and interesting content, for its own
| sake, like https://rarefilmm.com
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32166636
| sofixa wrote:
| Does the DMCA even apply here? The movies in question are
| from counties that have local copyright laws (reminder that
| DMCA is an American thing with reciprocal agreements with a
| bunch of countries including the whole of the EU), decades
| old and in some cases in the public domain.
| ectopod wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_Univ
| e...
| AntoniusBlock wrote:
| Very cool! Here are some of my favourite Eastern European
| films, in case anyone wants recommendations.
|
| Poland:
|
| Rekopis znaleziony w Saragossie (1965) !!!!
|
| Sanatorium pod klepsydra (1973) !!!!
|
| Ziemia obiecana (1975) !!!!
|
| Osobisty pamietnik grzesznika przez niego samego spisany (1986)
|
| Pociag (1959)
|
| Pokolenie (1955)
|
| Kanal (1957) !!!!
|
| Popiol i diament (1958)
|
| Czechoslovakia:
|
| Holubice (1960) !!!!
|
| Ostre sledovane vlaky (1966)
|
| Marketa Lazarova (1967) !!!!
|
| Obrazy stareho sveta (1972)
|
| Spalovac mrtvol (1969) !!!!
|
| Slnko v sieti (1962)
|
| Zlate kapradi (1963)
|
| Udoli vcel (1968)
|
| Hungary:
|
| Csillagosok, katonak (1967)
|
| A Pal utcai fiuk (1968)
|
| A tanu (1969) !!!!
|
| Karhozat (1988)
|
| Ket felido a pokolban (1961)
|
| Az otodik pecset (1976)
|
| Szegenylegenyek (1966)
|
| Szindbad (1971)
|
| Szurkulet (1990) !!!!
|
| NOTE: the films with !!!! next to them are my absolute
| favourites and if you don't have time to watch all of these
| films, I implore you to at least watch these.
| jacquesm wrote:
| "Irony of fate" (1975) (Traditional new years even movie).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irony_of_Fate
| AntoniusBlock wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation. I've added it to my backlog.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Bookmarked, thanks!
|
| Sadly no Yuri Norstein. I know he's an animator, but I figured
| he's famous enough to be on there. A couple of years ago there
| was a new 2K transfer of all of his (released) films too.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 2k scans? Were they only 16mm or 8mm films?
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I honestly don't know, but I'll take 2K over the 360p
| upscaled videos I've seen on YT so far
| dylan604 wrote:
| I agree. Hope I didn't sound snobby about "2K only"
| scans. I know that the smaller film sizes don't hold up
| well to greater than 2K scans. It could also be a limit
| of that's the only scanner that was available to them.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| See also https://35mm.online for Polish films
| jacquesm wrote:
| Old celluloid is also crazy flammable. The activation energy very
| low and even during the manufacturing process explosions
| happened. Archival storage of old celluloid prior to digitization
| is not something you want to undertake in quantity without the
| proper gear and storage equipment, as well as a fire
| extinguisher.
|
| The problem with the film is that as it ages it becomes even more
| flammable than it originally was and it has a huge surface area
| to react with (unlike say a billiard ball or a pen made of the
| same material).
|
| Quite a bit of historical material was lost to time in several
| huge fires. To make things worse: it doesn't necessarily require
| a source of ignition.
|
| https://www.nontoxichub.com/celluloidfilmhazards
|
| Not quite at 'stuff I won't work with' level but definitely
| worthy of respect.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Yes but what to convert it to and who will store it?
|
| There should be a UN like international effort to set up
| resources for storing digital media (books, music, film, tv,
| games, journals, comics etc) for the long term.
|
| A few hundred years for sure.
|
| All digital media made in the entire world and all that can be
| digitized stored from the beginning until the end. A constant
| accumulating treasure.
|
| Doesn't have to be streaming, but there should be a way for a
| person to request a copy. (if permissible by the copyright
| holder)
|
| One thing that hurts me to think about are the hundreds of
| thousands of books that you cant read.
|
| The book has a small run, never republished, and for the most
| part never to be seen again. I wish each one was submitted to the
| above archive,
|
| The copyright holder is making 0 by holding is hostage from
| people reading it. Allowing people to read it thus would not lead
| to less of revenue.
|
| Perhaps a system of micropayments for still copyrighted but will
| never be seen again media.
|
| I say books because I love books, but movies, etc as well. All of
| it.
|
| I have started making a tiny effort myself by scanning and
| typesetting book published by members of my family a ways back.
|
| I know that Library of Congress has a lot of good stuff, but it
| only collects fromt he US (I think) In Norway Nasjoanlbiblioteket
| has a lot of stuff that is Norwegian.
| danuker wrote:
| All I can tell you is that distributing via torrent will
| significantly increase the effective bandwidth.
| runjake wrote:
| I remember back in, probably the late 1990s or early 2000s, when
| my org was scrambling to copy analog media to "immortal" digital
| CD-Rs.
|
| 20 years later, they went into some of the archives to discover
| that most of the CD-Rs were unreadable. The material had degraded
| severely enough that the material had observable pits (holes) in
| them.
|
| Plan accordingly. Digital copies require it, too.
|
| Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The dyes used in writable CD's are fairly long lasting, as are
| the dyes used in writable Blu-Ray. There are some writable
| DVD's which use a media similar to Blu-Rays but they are
| unusual.
|
| This book talks about the sordid story of fugitive color media:
|
| http://www.wilhelm-research.com/book_toc.html
|
| how wedding photographers got blindsided when, 20 years later,
| people discovered that Kodak prints and negatives of their
| special day were severely faded. Or how Hollywood woke up in
| 1980s and realized there was big money in old movies and went
| looking for a solution: early on there was the bad idea of
| splitting out the three colors into three separate wheels, but
| later people realized that color film lasts much longer if you
| keep it in the freezer.
| thatoneguy wrote:
| The first organic dye (cyanine) used for CDRs back in the
| '90s rotted faster than the more expensive phthalocyanine
| (20-50 years vs 50-100 years)[1].
|
| [1] https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-
| institute/services/con...
| dylan604 wrote:
| The separating into 3 B&W negatives of the RGB separations
| was (is?) still a thing. In 2012, I was involved in film
| restoration projects that used laser recorders to take the
| processed digital files to 35mm B&W negative. The fun begins
| on trying to restore from one of the archives. Film shrinks
| and at different rates depending on how they are stored. So
| scanning each of the R+G+B negatives is one things, but
| getting them stacked and aligned taking into account the
| distortion distinct to each frame x3 is just glorious!!
| PaulHoule wrote:
| That's why you are better off keeping the negatives in the
| freezer
| digitallyfree wrote:
| If your only digital archives are on cold media (e.g. optical
| disks, tape, offline HDDs) and are never replaced you have a
| problem. Keep them on readable hot storage that can be easily
| checked and upgraded over time and that should not be an issue.
|
| I've lost personal archives on CD-R/DVD-R myself and now I keep
| my archives stored hot on ZFS (has redundancy + bitrot
| protection), with additional hot and cold backups that are
| checked regularly. When disks fail they are quickly replaced,
| thus ensuring that the data is on relatively "new" as opposed
| to aging media.
|
| The article also mentions the problem with old/proprietary file
| formats for digital media which can't be opened in the future.
| Someone I knew actually had a story about how he had pictures
| stored in some obscure digital format (this was in the 90s when
| digital cameras were in their infancy) and he had to set up a
| equally old computer and software just to get the images
| reexported into something more modern. For something like this
| again regular checking of the archives (and keeping them hot)
| helps. Also I'm pretty sure the most basic standardized formats
| like BMP and JPG aren't going away for a long time.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| chadlavi wrote:
| Film is vulnerable, but at least the CEO of a streaming service
| can't just capriciously decide to delete it. Also servers are
| just as vulnerable to fire, earthquake, sabotage, etc.
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