Nitrate Won't Wait: A History of Film Preservation in the United States

by Anthony Slide

This study looks at the preservation process: newsreel, television, and color preservation; the often controversial issue of colorization; and commercial film archives. It provides detailed histories of the major players in the preservation battle including the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, the American Film Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and the Library of Congress. This first historical overview of film preservation in the United States is also highly controversial in its exposure and criticism of the politicization of film preservation in recent years, and the rising bureaucracy which has often lost sight of preservation and restoration as the ultimate purpose of film archives.

Genres: Film, History, Nonfiction, Media Tie In

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[suebeeinaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent summary of preservation needs and the history of film archives in the U.S. Good reference work for archivists. Includes a call-to-action for archives to tackle the need for immediate intervention before we lose these valuable cultural resources forever.

[Meredith Reese · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book that started the film preservation movement- in case you non-nerds didn't know.

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first book I have read about film preservation as it's considered a pretty foundational book on the matter. I myself, and that's just me, am hoping to find more technical details. Some terminology in this book I didn't quite understand, such as what is a "timing notch", and how did the two-color process work, etc., But, leaving that out it's a great history of the movement.

[Michael Neno · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author and documentarian Anthony Slide's 1992 Nitrate Won't Wait: A History of Film Preservation in the United States, is remarkably well researched and complete. After an introduction convincing of the need for film preservation, it proceeds to tell the history of all the U.S. archives and preservationists, detailing dates, the holdings of each archive, and descriptions of founders and succeeding executives (including strengths and weaknesses of the sometimes-sparring characters involved). If the voluminous collection of names and dates can make for sometimes dry reading, the book as a whole is a valuable and needed resource. Along the way, various methods of film
preservation are described, the help of private film collectors is covered, and the inclusion of TV programming is discussed.

This circa 2000 edition is published by McFarland Classics, a reprint of the first edition. Ironically for a book on preservation, the black and white photographs included in the McFarland edition are washed out, gray tones and detail missing. One assumes the earlier edition looked better.

Nitrate Won't Wait was published one year after the World Wide Web was introduced to the public and four years before the release of the first DVD, a medium that would open new possibilities for information storage. One chapter, on colorization, while interesting in its own right, has proven to be about a superfluous subject; over thirty years after the book was written, the only viewership who has any interest in "old" (pre-1970) films is an audience who rejects colorization. The process didn't create new audiences for previous B&W films, as hoped by those who invested funds in it; it just made audiences who like B&W films want all the more to see them as intended.

One facet of film collecting I wish the book had covered, although it's probably suitable for a book of its own, is the legality of private film ownership before VHS tapes were marketed to the public. The famous case of actor Roddy McDowell's private film collection being confiscated by the F.B.I. in the early '70s is mentioned. Although charges were eventually dropped, the book doesn't say whether or not it was legal to own films in that time period or why this facet of the government thought they had that jurisdiction.

As thirty-two years have passed since the publication of this book, an updated version of the work would be appreciated, especially since digital production, storage and retention has completely changed the parameters of movie preservation. Inés Toharia Terán's 2021 documentary, Film: The Living Record of Our Memory, in the meantime, does a good job of describing the current state of the profession, albeit with a global perspective.