I just purchased some DVDs of stuff filmed from this era. I’m curious as to whether the image that I’m seeing is the same as the one that a person might’ve seen had they actually viewed the movies during their initial showing.
The images of older movies always seems dark and ghostly —lots of visual artifacts and sometimes bad audio. Had the quality of the films degraded that much before the movies were transferred to DVD, or is that pretty much the quality of film for the era?
I’d really love to hear from someone who actually went to movies then, but any knowledgeable person will do.
Film degraded quickly. Studios didn’t think people would want to watch the same movie more than once so they took little care to preserve films, and the film stock itself was not great. Depending on who released your DVDs, there may or may not have been an effort to clean up the film before transferring it. Here is some information about film restoration, along with some links to various common film degradation problems.
You can get wildly different quality–crystal clear in 1928 or garbage in 1955. When they make DVDs they need either a very clean print, or they need to clean it up digitally.
Films after a certain year in the 1920s (it seemed to get much better around 1925 or so) were, practically speaking, as clear as films made today. Someone in the theater at that time would have seen a crystal-clear image (but as that print was used, it would degrade slightly–still true today).
Just what I have seen as a movie buff. More-expert opinions welcome.
BTW, I remember hearing that the negative for Star Wars had really deteriorated; that’s why Lucas was interested in making restored versions. So the cutoff date for the kind of problems you’re talking about is by no means 1945.
It also depends on whether or not the source of the footage was an original or a copy. I remember seeing a very dramatic demonstration of this effect on TV with an old Chaplin film. They first showed a clip made from a copy of a copy (which was probably itself a copy of a copy) and it looked like what most people expect old films to look like - grainy, shadowy, very high in contrast. You couldn’t make much out besides Chaplin and the door he’d walked through.
Then they ran a clip from an original print, and the difference was beyond amazing. Bright, clear, sharp - you could even make out the grain of the wood on a cabinet next to the door he’d walked through.
I’m certainly not saying that copies made from an original print can’t be bad quality; as others have said it depends on how well the film was kept and preserved. But that’s not the only factor contributing to poor quality.
Yeah, it depends on the quality of the “master” used (could be a copy) and how much care is taken with the transfer process. If you pick up a copy of this DVD you won’t believe it was made in 1941. The transfer is almost perfect.
You can see another eye-opening demonstration of the process of restoration if you get a hold of Criterion’s disc of The Passion of Joan of Arc, from (IIRC) 1928. The work that goes into cleaning up the image is extensive.
Most early movies were shot on film stock using silver nitrate (or something similar). It produces amazingly bright and crisp images, but it degrades very, very quickly. (It’s also highly flammable; more than one film warehouse went up in flames, destroying who knows what treasures). So the first audience to see a fresh print of a movie in, say, 1935 would probably be looking at something quite gorgeous indeed.
One serious problem with the film stock pre-WWII and probably through 1945 is that is was made of nitro-cellulose which deteriorates quite rapidly as compared to the film of today. So unless the original was remastered which expensive, the quality of copies made now will be bad.
I was a projectionist pre-WWII and we used to burn our old advertising film during the winter. We would unspool it, put it in the furnace and light it off. We could put steam up into the system with the heat from the film. If the film was in a confined space, like a film can, when it caught fire it became a bomb because it was the same material as some gunpowder.
As originally seen the film was of a quality just as good as today.
