Reprise or Reprieve for Altered Images

Imagine future studies of twentieth-century history without the moving images of the Battle of the Somme, the Delhi Durbar, the Nurenberg rallies, or the early films of Charlie Chaplin. Too distressing a prospect to contemplate? You can breathe again since most of these events are now safely incorporated into modern film material. Yet much of the film that captured other key events of the last ninety years, particularly the details of everyday life invaluable to the social historian and especially most of the weekly Movietone newsreels seen at the cinemas, was shot on nitrate stock, highly flammable (hundreds of lives were lost in projection booth fires at cinemas in Paris and Chicago earlier in the century) and chemically dangerously unstable. This built-in self-destruct mechanism means that as you read this literally hundreds of feet of film in British film libraries and private collections are rotting away, their flexible transparent support turning into a gooey mass before finally crumbling to powder.