The Establishment of a Film Archive: Search for the Lost Films

YOU are in Connecticut happily antique-hunting with your mother. You stop off at an auction and spend $3.50 on a "mystery chest." Six men help you carry it to your Ford station wagon, and when you open it, you find 40 metal film tins marked: Greed, Reels 1-40. "What a long film to make about such an unpleasant subject," your mother says as you open one of the tins. The film wound around the rusty reels is brown and moldy: fungus-like organisms have sprouted from the innumerable folds. Overcome by a powerful smell, you sneeze on it, and the brown film crumbles into dust.

If you told this to George Stevens Jr. and Richard Kahlenberg of the American Film Institute, they would probably go off into a corner and cry quietly. As President and Archive Director respectively, Greed is of more than routine interest to them: Erich von Stroheim made it in 1924 and his first edited version was eight hours long; making concessions to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he re-edited the film, finally stopping at a four-hour cut. At that point MGM seized it, cut it to two hours and ten minutes, and the remaining six hours has been missing ever since.

Greed, as Stroheim's masterpiece and one of the highest-echelon Establishment classics, is known only in a version one-quarter the length of the original. Rumors-and-little-else have kept alive the hope of seeing the complete 40 reels someday--prints have been said to exist in secret vaults from New Mexico to Denmark. And Greed is only one of 250 films on the American Film Institute's "preliminary rescue list" of films which do not exist in America on 35mm acetate stock.

At present the best collection of American silent films resides not in the American archives at Eastman House and the Museum of Modern Art, but in the Cinematheque Francais in Paris. The AFI, a private corporation based in Washington, D.C., initially endowed by the government, the Ford foundation, and the Motion Picture Association, is bringing it all back home. As archive director, Kahlenberg ferrets out American films of artistic and historical value that have disappeared for one or another reason. Some have vanished (like Hawks' Scarface, produced by the ubiquitous Howard Hughes, and all 35mm prints of Ford's Stagecoach) and the problem is one of location; others, like whatever remains of Stroheim's original cut of Greed, are in serious danger of destruction by decay. Until the last decade, film was made from a nitrate base, both flammable and subject to erosion. The film archivist works against time: the older the film, the more likely the chances of physical degeneration -- and the chance of its vanishing forever in a pile of dust.

The genesis of the dilemma lay in the industry's lack of foresight and a still-prevalent attitude where movies were regarded as commercial property, not art worth preserving. When William S. Hart didn't sell any more popcorn, Hollywood didn't care much about preserving his films. A no-longer-commercial commercial film fell subject to varying fates: films were allowed to rot in forgotten Hollywood vaults; original producers sold their distribution rights to smaller distributors; copyrights elapsed and films were turned over to family heirs; others were chopped to ribbons, sections used in the making of other films; legal problems of ownership and distribution rights mounted until films became hopelessly inaccessible (Hughes's, for example), or until studios found it convenient to forget about them.

And many simply got lost in the shuffle. A surprisingly large number of famous first films are missing in America: Sternberg's The Salvation Hunters, De Mille's The Squaw Man, Ford's first feature Straight Shooting and many of Griffith's earliest films, to name a few.

In attempting to assure the missing classics a permanent fireproof posterity, Kahlenberg's job, in his own words, resembles a miniature CIA operation; the search for a missing film can only be completely conducted in the open in rare and lucky instances. Say, for example, Kahlenberg sets his sights for a print of John Ford's Air Mail (Universal, 1930), a long-gone drama of some considerable reputation. His first move is to contact Universal Pictures, which may still have a print tucked away, or know the location of one. If they do, and Kahlenberg can convince them to contribute it, the quest comfortably ends.

But, we discover, Universal junked all its printing materials (either negatives, or prints in good condition) of their early films in the first years of the thirties, and have no clue to its whereabouts. Kahlenberg then goes to Willard van Dyke, curator of the Museum of Modern Art film Library, and James Card of Eastman House in Rochester--they may have access to a print or know of one also. But if they don't (and often even when they do know of one), Kahlenberg must go underground.

Film historian William K. Everson, for example, tells Kahlenberg that he knows a private collector with a 16mm print of Air Mail. Although Air Mail is legally owned either by Universal, or Ford and his producer, it has slipped into one of the hundreds of excellent underground collections of films throughout the country: collections which possess all of Chaplin's features, and such classics as Murnau's Tabu, Rosselini's Paisan, complete versions of Fritz Lang's first Doctor Mabuse, and early films by Jean Renoir, to name some of the most popular items in the underground market.

How these prints (and they are almost always 16mm prints, due to the expense of 35mm printing) came into the country or into existence is a question without precise answer. Many are reduction prints from 35mm, made quickly by people tangential to the distribution profession who had brief access to a print during theatrical release. Many others are known as "dupes," referring to prints made directly from other positive prints; a "dupe" print can usually be detected by its quality: contact printing positive to positive invariably results in higher grain, higher contrast, and consequent lack of image clarity and detail.

Kahlenberg goes to the private collector and begins a series of complicated negotiations for the film. The collector knows he owns something he has no right to own, and consequently must be handled with kid gloves. If he donates the print directly to the American Film Institute, a private corporation, and its owners discover its existence, they can legally claim the print and sue the collector.

Kahlenberg's sole interest is to secure a permanent copy and rest assured that the film exists and is not steadily disintegrating. He asks the collector to lend his print to the Library of Congress, which is ready and willing to make a copy of it. Funds for the copying are supplied to the Library by the AFI; once the film has been transferred to acetate, the print is returned quietly to the collector. As soon as the print enters the Library of Congress, it becomes federal property and cannot be seized, therefore protecting the owner of the black-market print to some extent, and completely protecting the permanent copy.

The pay-off may come years later: when all of Air Mail's owners are long-dead and the property comes into public domain, then, and only then, can the AFI make use of the print, make it available for study and screening. In the meantime, however, they know it does exist and that they will someday be able to make its existence known.

Kahlenberg's chief frustration is the necessity of tedious and tactful nego- tiation in bringing collectors out into the open, and convincing them to help. Like the studios, collectors sense the complex nature of the legal problems involved in film ownership and often prefer to hide their prints rather than risk legal battles and long expenditure of time. Although the AFI's cordial connection with the Library of Congress gives them an invaluable aid in negotiating for copies of rare films, they cannot legally guarantee an amnesty to collectors who admit ownership of black-market prints. Consequently, no uncertain skill is needed in making different deals for each film; the need to create an image which convinces collectors that their prints won't be impounded pulls Kahlenberg toward cloak-and-dagger tactics of secrecy. "I know where three negatives of Scarface are," he will say with a mysterious smile, or "I think I can lay my hands on most of Salvation Hunters." And that's all he can tell the world for fear of driving an owner further underground.

Although the AFI represents a rare example of America rising to meet a crisis before it reaches insane proportions, much of an archivist's dream can no longer be made into reality: many films are permanently lost, and Hollywood's history includes stories that fill a modern-day film anthropologist with disgust. Directors rarely had the right to edit their own films, and it became common practice for studios to re-cut and mangle films they thought potentially commercial.

We will never see Orson Welles's own cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, drastically altered by RKO, or Touch of Evil, re-edited by Universal. Most tragic, Welles was sent in 1942 to South America to film a color documentary shortly after the completion of Citizen Kane; after Welles had shot thousands of feet of film, RKO withdrew financial support, recalled Welles, and put his uncut footage into the vaults. For years unidentifiable random shots from the film, It's All True, turned up as stock footage in Latin American thrillers, the only Welles color footage thereby becoming scattered and hopelessly lost.

Greed's tempermental director Erich von Stroheim, known when acting as "the man you love to hate," consistently made films Paramount considered too long and too morbid. The Merry-Go-Round was taken away from him and completed by Rupert Julian (The Phantom of the Opera), and no one knows how much was shot by Stroheim; The Wedding March, originally almost four hours, was halved, the second half, Honey-moon, never released and probably non-existent now.

Stroheim's only sound film, Walking Down Broadway, was ripped apart by Fox, small pieces of it used in a later film entitled Hello Sister, also missing apparently. Similarly, Chaplin hired Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel) to direct a film, The Sea-Gull, which Chaplin took home with him upon completion and never released. Chaplin never gave a reason for his capricious suppression of the film, and its existence now is doubtful.

Such stories plague the careers of our greatest film-makers, including King Vidor, Howard Hawks, John Ford, Ernst Lubitsch, and Frank Borzage, as well as stars like Gloria Swanson, Rudolf Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Lon Chaney Sr., and even W. C. Fields, one of whose two films directed by D. W. Griffith is lost.

On the positive side, the problem of locating missing films is largely finite. The Library of Congress has always had the right to demand a print of any film copyrighted; according to Kahlenberg, they began exercising this right in 1934, and have prints of all American films made since. Although many of these are on nitrate and must be treated or transferred, the essential fact remains that when the rights to post-1934 films lapse into public domain, they will be available for library use and study. But the Library is not the same as the AFI: when Kahlenberg succeeds in inducing a collector to have a copy placed in the Library, it is still one long step away from having been placed in the much-desired national archive of the American Film Institute. Consequently, Kahlenberg must attempt with equal vigor to secure prints of post-1934 features for the archive itself, with permission from owners to make screening possible to students, critics, and historians. The size of the job has prevented the AFI from setting any rules about use of films: no screenings are planned resembling those of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cinematheque, or London's National Film Theatre--and Stevens can only hope that a student writing a thesis on Stroheim will be able to come to the AFI offices in Washington, D.C. and see his films. Both Stevens and Kahlenberg are looking into plans regarding closed-circuit televising of films for study purposes.

America has been fifty years late in establishing a national archive, and its success is far from certain, if only taking into account the diverse goals of the seventeen-man staff of the Institute. Nonetheless, Kahlenberg is as optimistic as he is resigned to a long haul: asked if the archive would include any foreign film, he laughed and said resignedly, "We only have 32,000 American films to get first."Erich von Stroheim (1952)