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Topic: Nitrate Fire in India Destroys Archive
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Gerard S. Cohen
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 975
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: Sep 2001
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posted 01-10-2003 08:48 AM
Causes of fires are often not what is reported in the media, in India, as well as elsewhere.
There was a huge scandal several years ago, when kerosene kitchen stove explosions were the reported cause of the death of many women.
Actually, civil rights groups claimed the women were murdered and their bodies torched. Apparently, the husbands' families were dissatisfied with the marriages, and their demands for additional dowry not being met, conspired to do away with the brides as a means of punishing their families. The deaths were written off as accidents,and were not investigated at the time.
Similarly, air conditioning, being a more recent technology, is sometimes blamed, since it is not well understood and is an easy scapegoat.
In the US, rural physicians sometimes used to list the cause of suicide deaths as "cardiac arrest", to spare the families emotional distress, and perhaps to benefit them financially, because of insurance requirements.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 01-13-2003 06:08 AM
The jury is still very much out on whether spontaneous ignition (or, more accurately, ignition induced by prolonged exposure to high levels of radiant heat) of nitrate is possible at all. Every other issue of the Journal of Film Preservation seems to carry a paper or report putting the case either for or against. I agree that the BBC article is ambiguous as to the source of ignition. As demonstrated by the mix-up over nitrate as a 'preservative', the author clearly is not engaging with the technical issues. When I read it, I assumed that by attributing the cause of the fire to the defective air handling plant, it was implied that the source of ignition was conduction from a fire which had already taken hold in an air handling unit. If the filters aren't changed regularly this is certainly a risk, quite apart from the possibility of an electrical fault having started the initial fire. However, the wording of the article certainly leaves open the possibility that a plain simple failure of the air handling plant created the prolonged exposure to heat which in turn caused some film to ignite. I personally would doubt that, because even in the Indian climate the AHU would had to have been broken for a very long time before heat levels got to the point at which spontaneous ignition is believed to be possible. Presumably a forensic examination to determine the location of the seat of the fire should shed some light on this.
The following statement from the National Film Archive of India's director, K.S. Sahidharan, has been posted on the AMIA list:
quote:
This is to convey our deep sense of gratitude to your kind gesture of solidarity and concern. It was rather unfortunate that we lost whatever little nitrate material we had in the fire. As you have correctly guessed, fortunately, there wasn't any human casualty. Our nitrate collection was very paltry as the NFAI was set up only in 1964, after a little over half a century of filmmaking history in India. Our only solace is that we could transfer more than 95% of the material we had in nitrate base to safety base. In fact the remaining 5% of the material comprises of fragments of various films without titles mostly some war footage... Although the media has made it out that NFAI has lost some landmark Indian films, that is far from the reality. I am planning screening of films which have been mentioned as lost forever to assure all those concerned that nothing significant has been lost in the fire from the point of view of the heritage of Indian Cinema."
So I guess they've now had time to assess what was lost: in the BBC story, the Indian Film Institute director Prem Mathiyani described the affected material as 'definitely a huge loss', whereas here it seems that most of the contents of that vault had already been copied. This kind of thing is what makes me worried about the archivists who argue for an emphasis on preserving the original (i.e. putting resources into temperature and humidity control) and downgrading the importance of copying. If the Indian archive had done this, the losses would have been far greater.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 01-13-2003 06:55 AM
Dan wrote:
quote:
According to that news story :
"According to the institute's director, Prem Mathiyani, all the original prints were on nitrate, an inflammable chemical used for preserving films in the 1950s. "
A film preservative?? NOOOOOO......
From that comment, something leads me to believe that the films might have all been just stacked on each other in a huge A/Ced room. Don't archives here in the US have separate fireproof cubicles that only hold a few reels each? (need to go check the book NItrate Won't Wait...)
Yes, I noticed that bit about the '50s film preservative.
The nitrate vaults I have been in, all in the uk, have had a door at one end, there are shelves on the other three sides. the shelves are about two feet apart and reach to somewhere above head level, maybe 2-3 metres from the ground. Each vault is about 3 metres long and the width is more or less the width of the door, plus the shelves on each side, maybe 1.5 metres. Each vault has either ventilation, or a small fan to draw off any gasses given off by the film. All light fittings are of a flameproof type, and I think the switches are outside. I would say that each vault could hold maybe 200 cans of 1000 foot capacity, so rather more than a few, but still quite a small amount of film, in terms of what a large archive would hold. The vaults which I saw at Elstree were very old, it's a long time since I was there, but I think they were brick built, with unpainted wooden doors, similar to you would find on an old style outdoor projection box. I think the vaults opened directly to the outside air, but I'm not certain about this.
I have also seen the nitrate vaults at the National Film and Television Archive, These are much more modern, with metal doors I think, and are indoors, with each vault leading off a corridor, which is subject to the same stringent fire precautions regarding electrical fittings, etc. These vaults are only used to hold the fairly small quantity of film actually being worked on at the time, the NFTVA's main nitrate vaults being in another part of the country, and, so far as I am aware, not accessible to the public; I've never even seen pictures of them. The last figure I saw was that they had 140 million feet stored there, so if these vaults are of a similar size, there must be a lot of them.
The last vaults I have seen are at the National Film Theatre, which has five vaults, on two levels, leading off the film reception area. These are about the same size as the others, but it stores mainly safety film and videotape, there were a few cans of nitrate in one of the vaults the last time I saw them.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 01-13-2003 07:28 AM
Leo, the 'Fire starting in faulty plant which then ignites film' theory seems to me far more likely than the other version.
I am not at all surprised to see the 'film preservative' quote. This story came from the BBC, at one time regarded as a world-class news organisation, but not any longer. Almost erery week there are posts on the uk.railway group about the quality of their reporting. This is not only in relation to highly technical matters, where their staff might not be expected to have knowledge, but in matters where no knowledge whatever of railways is needed to see that what is written is nonsense, and often contradictory. It makes me seriously question the accuracy of BBC reporting on all maters, if they cannot even get simple facts such as these right.
I'm glad to hear that the losses in the Indian fire are not as great as was first thought. While I agree with what you wrote about the importance of copying archive material, and I would be concerned about all material of any historical importance where only one copy is known to exist in any form, I think we have to be careful. There have been cases in the past where safety copy copies have been made, and the nitrate originals disposed of, only to discover years later that the copies are of poor quality, and there is no way of going back. It is fortunate there were other copies of, for example, the Ealing Films, the original negatives of which were lost in the Henderson's fire a few years ago. What I think could happen is that if there were to be a bumber of serious film fires in the near future, there could be a panic, restrictions could be put on the storage of nitrate which are quite unrealistic and unreasonable, and which could lead to material either being discarded without being copied at all, or the copying being rushed to get the job finished quickly, abd being done badly.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 01-13-2003 07:46 AM
Agreed on both points. Most of the stuff I've read arguing for the possibility of spontaneous ignition in specific cases translates as 'we don't know how the hell this fire started, so let's assume it was spontaneous'.
As for copying, I wasn't suggesting that original nitrate elements should then be discarded. Even if the copy is produced using state-of-the-art lab technology and by expert technicians, the technology will still get better (e.g. finer grained duping stocks, better optics in printers) over time, and if the original has still been kept that gives you the opportunity to make a better dupe. We have one nitrate original reversal positive of a 1923 local topical which has now been duped several times: a b/w fine grain and tint record have been made for preservation, which have never been touched since it came out of the lab, then a colour dupe neg and print was made so that we could show it as tinted at a conference. The nitrate original has also been telecined. My attitude in this case is that the polyester dupe is our master status preservation original for the simple reason that it is virtually guaranteed to outlast the nitrate; so as long as the nitrate is in a serviceable state I intend to use it for further copying because the dupes will be of higher quality than ones made from the poly master.
As for BBC News Online, I do agree that some of their reports do tend to be inaccurate and badly written - in this case both (I counted one missing definite article, two sentences with conflicting tenses and a split infinitive). Generally speaking it's not as bad as The Guardian, but that's not saying much! BBC Television current affairs coverage does now seem to be targetted at viewers with serious learning difficulties, though IMHO Radio Four and the World Service still manage to maintain far higher standards.
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