The Material History of a Nitrate Film, Part 1: Exhibition - Text 1
Film genealogy: a Darwinian selection process
Every copy of a film appearing on a screen – as a print or in digital form – has a story. It is not an abstract entity brought to the present after a logical path designed by history on behalf of posterity. It is the survivor of a complex, often random process of selection, not much different from a Darwinian evolutionary scheme.
According to a dramatic formula adopted since the 1980s by the film community to raise awareness of the urgency to preserve the cinematic heritage, about 80 % of all silent films have been lost because of neglect, natural decay, and the intentional destruction of negatives and prints. After decades of research and painstaking efforts by archives and museums worldwide, the estimate should be revised in both a positive and a negative sense. If we first consider the total number of silent films released, close to one-third of them have now been rescued, albeit not necessarily preserved. The survival rate of silent cinema would then be around 32,5 %, a much better figure than the 20 % previously put forward.
