The Material History of a Nitrate Film, Part 1: Exhibition - Text 2
Yet, if we instead take into account the total number of prints struck, the survival rate drops to 0.43-0.69 %, an almost insignificant fraction of the total, meaning that for every 1,000 prints made, at least 995 have disappeared. Vague as they are, because of the number and magnitude of the variables involved, such estimates give an eloquent idea of the fate suffered by nitrate prints after they ceased to be profitable to their owners. The destruction of silent cinema was a phenomenon of massive scale, compounded by the inherent fragility of the medium. In that sense, the very existence of a silent nitrate copy may be seen as something close to a miracle.
The Dawson Film Find
One of the most famous of those miracles was the discovery in 1978 of a large number of nitrate reels under an abandoned ice-hockey rink in Dawson City, Yukon, the most unlikely repository for a time capsule of silent cinema. The severe cold temperatures in northern Canada, and the unusual protection given to the prints in the underground shelter – uncovered by an excavator half a century after their burial – contributed to the physical survival of more than four hundred of these long-forgotten relics. The films had been left there at the end of their commercial life, as they were not deemed worth the expense of returning them to the distributors.
The temperature shock caused by the fortuitous retrieval of so many projection copies from near-arctic permafrost, and their abrupt exposure to sunlight and humidity, contributed to the melting of the emulsion close to the surface of many reels in their metal containers. Duplicates from the nitrate prints in the Dawson City Collection at the Library of Congress are still showing the scars from the rescue operation, in the form of decayed emulsion fluttering at the vertical margins of the frame during projection, as shown in Bill Morrison’s 2016 documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time, an artist’s interpretation of the events.
