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Author
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Topic: Nitrate film of 1924 Senators World series found
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Rick Raskin
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1100
From: Manassas Virginia
Registered: Jan 2003
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posted 10-10-2014 02:04 PM
My wife who works at the Library of Congress just told me about an exciting nitrate find.
See it here
Film of the Washington Senators Winning the 1924 World Series Found!
October 2, 2014 by Mike Mashon
Like any right-minded individual, I rejoiced in the return of baseball to the Nation’s Capital in 2005 and have certainly reveled in the Washington Nationals’ fabulous 2014 season. Exciting as it has been (the post All-Star Game surge, Jordan Zimmermann’s no-hitter on the last day of the season, the eager anticipation of post-season glory), I never imagined that a perfectly timed film find–the only footage yet discovered of the Washington Senators’ 1924 World Series victory–would be the icing on an already delicious cake.
It started with Lynanne Schweighofer, a Moving Image Preservation Specialist at the Packard Campus. Lynanne’s mother had been named executor of the estate left by an elderly neighbor who passed away last year in a suburb of Worcester, Massachusetts. While preparing the neighbor’s house for sale, Lynanne’s father found eight cans of film in the rafters of the detached and not climate-controlled garage, a space we archivists would not normally recommend for long term storage of motion picture film…especially since these reels were labeled as nitrate film stock.
Can containing nitrate film. Courtesy of Lynanne Schweighofer.
Now, nitrate film is flammable, creates its own oxygen when it burns, and we have 124 individual vaults at the Packard Campus, each at 39° F / 30% RH, to store the nearly 140 million feet of nitrate we have in our collection. Once it starts to deteriorate, the degradation proceeds rather rapidly and given the temperature fluctuations to which these reels had been subjected for years, we weren’t optimistic about their condition.
So, we contacted Liz Coffey at the Harvard Film Archive, who retrieved the reels on our behalf. She confirmed the film as nitrate and arranged with a certified hazmat shipper at the HFA to send the batch to Culpeper. They were in astonishingly good shape; only a couple evidenced any sign of slight mold or mildew. Many of the reels were printed on Bay State nitrate stock. Bay State was a Kodak competitor back in the day and its nitrate film has proven notoriously unstable, but miraculously not in this instance. The oldest film was from 1919 and the newest from 1926. The house had been sold a couple of times over the years; we expect the first owners placed the film in the garage, although we have no idea why. It seems very likely no one knew they existed until their discovery a few months ago.
Lynanne performed an initial bench inspection and immediately noted that one was a “Kinograms” newsreel featuring a prominent story on Game 7 of the 1924 World Series, won by the Washington Senators in a thrilling extra innings victory over the New York Giants. We baseball geeks (or, rather, historians) know the game for the heroic efforts of Senators ace Walter “Big Train” Johnson, who pitched the last four innings on short rest. It’s the only time a DC baseball team has won the World Series…at least until this year, we hope. I’ve seen pictures of the game but never any film footage, and to watch Muddy Ruel lumbering home with the winning run in the bottom of the 12th inning was, well, almost like being there. Ninety years on, you can feel the electric joy of the crowd surging on to the Griffith Stadium field.
That’s baseball.
We hustled the reel up to the film lab where it was prepped and cleaned for Datacine Operator Pat Kennedy to make the digital transfer; we’re photochemically preserving it on safety film stock as well. After the Senators story was excerpted and speed-corrected, I sent it to pianist/Nats fan Andrew Simpson for musical scoring. Perhaps more footage will eventually turn up, but for now we’re thrilled to present the 1924 World Series champion Washington Senators in hopes that what’s past truly is prologue.
LET’S GO NATS!
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 10-10-2014 03:42 PM
quote: Article
They were in astonishingly good shape; only a couple evidenced any sign of slight mold or mildew.
Paradoxically, the older rediscovered nitrate is, the better condition it tends to be in. It's often the stuff from the '30s and '40s that is too far gone to scan or print. When the Mitchell and Kenyon stuff was rediscovered it was around a century old, and many of the elements were in such good shape that they went through a Matipo (step contact printer) with little or no remedial work needed first.
The explanation I heard for this is that as the film industry grew, stock manufacturers took to using cheaper sources of wood pulp as the basic ingredient for the cellulose film base, which also worked better in the larger scale industrial machinery which by that time (late '20s onwards) was being used to make film. But the cheaper pulp needed stronger nitric acid to dissolve it: therefore, the raw stock was more acidic and therefore decomposed to the autocatalytic point more quickly.
As for the music, I think it's just as much as a conversation for those who show archival movies as for those who preserve and restore them: after all, it's us who bring them to the public. Theatres in those days almost all hired musicians, ranging from a single pianist to almost a full symphony orchestra. Quite often they only played during feature presentations, with newsreels and shorts being projected in silence (or rather, in the sound of noisy conversation of theatre patrons, though); so you could argue that composing a score for this type of film is not really authentic. But if the music being used has some connection to the time and place of the movie, I think it's a reasonable thing to do, especially it it makes the film more accessible for today's viewer.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 10-11-2014 10:13 AM
The preservation elements will be full aperture silent dupe negs (I'm guessing, assuming that the discovered, and now treated as original/master, elements are projection prints), and so won't have any soundtrack on them anyway, I'd guess.
The issue with recorded soundtracks is more curatorial. I think what Martin is driving at is that when an archive commissions a new score for a movie it's restored, it tends to come to be regarded as the authentic or authoritative one, and its existence tends to discourage screening venues from playing the movie with live music.
Part of this issue is plain, simple $$. We love to show silent movies with live music here at the Cinematheque, but doing so costs 3-4 times that of a sound film, or one with recorded music that comes "free" with the movie. But the downside to that is that when the "free" recorded music is on offer from the archive or distributor, the temptation of screening venues to use it is overwhelming. If you're a programmer in one of these places, would you rather show one 1920s movie with live music, or that movie with recorded music plus, say, two other 1930s films for the same outlay?
The downside is that any alternatives to the archive's commissioned score tend to get lost. It's now virtually impossible to see The Birth of a Nation with Carl Joseph Breil's original music (I'll be interested to see if there are any centenary screenings/performances of it next year), because various restorations after the Brownlow/Shepherd video-based one have all involved the commission of new scores, none of which even make any attempt to recreate the 1915 listening experience. The big archives tend to build up relationships with musicians/composers and go back to them for the scores for DVDs and things (e.g. the British Film Institute and Neil Brand, or the Nederlands Filmmuseum and Fay Lovsky), and so their work kind of becomes definitive by default, even though it doesn't necessarily represent what 1920s audiences would have heard, or even really attempt to.
I like Marty Marks's music for the Treasures from American Archives DVDs, because his approach is to go into archives digging out the scores that studios and distributors actually sent to theaters with the actual prints and base his music on those. But even then, a solo piano does not give you a sense of what the audience in a big, downtown house would have heard, just a small, neighborhood theater (and even then, Marks is a far better pianist than most of them would have had!).
There's no easy answer. There are probably no more than 20 musicians in the entire country who are competent to play live for a whole feature film, and getting one of them to your venue is seriously expensive. But the recorded alternative risks canonizing a single score into the definitive version, which we know is fundamentally inauthentic.
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