***** NYT 22 December 2002 Sublime Decay By LAWRENCE WESCHLER
...From the earliest days of cinema, Thomas Edison, George Eastman and their fellow trailblazers zeroed in on celluloid, the world's first synthetic plastic, which is produced by treating cellulose nitrate -- cotton combined with a mixture of nitric acid and sulfuric acid -- with camphor and alcohol. It was the ideal flexible, spoolable and transparent base upon which to slather their various arcane photographic emulsions. The nitric cellulose medium, however, suffered from two serious drawbacks. For starters, it was highly explosive -- a close cousin of nitroglycerine -- and even once its explosive potential had been tamed, the material remained extremely flammable. It burned far more fiercely (in fact, 20 times faster) than wood: 20 tons (the equivalent of 8,000 reels of 1,000 feet each) can easily burn itself to pure ash in just three minutes. And these sorts of disasters happen on a fairly regular basis. In 1937, for example, a massive nitrate explosion and fire in Little Ferry, N.J., consumed almost all of the silent films ever produced by the Fox Film Corporation. Similar calamities, in 1977 and 1978, at the National Archives film depository in Suitland, Md., took out the preponderance of the Universal newsreel legacy.
But for all their momentary drama, such catastrophes pale in comparison to the slower-motion conflagration afflicting virtually all nitrate film stock (and nitrate film stock was the medium for most filmmaking until the 1950's). Because it is chemically unstable, cellulose nitrate film stock begins decomposing the moment it is manufactured, a process that accelerates with the passage of time. (Vast expanses of our nation's film stock has been wrested from nature, and nature wants that film stock back.) The silver image -- the singularly rich and deep and luminous image that is the glory of nitrate projection -- undergoes a brownish discoloration; the emulsion becomes sticky, exuding a brown frothing foam (known to conservators, quaintly, as honey) and provoking a pungent odor (''the smell of dirty laundry,'' as one conservator delicately parsed the matter for me). Soon the plastic depolymerizes and the entire film reel begins to congeal (moving from a ''doughnut'' into its final ''hockey puck'' phase), after which the brittle mass disintegrates further into an acrid, reddish powder, which is extremely combustible (and has been known to spontaneously ignite at ambient temperatures as low as 105 degrees).
All of this is inevitable -- it cannot be avoided (although as conservators now realize, the processes of decomposition can be significantly forestalled if the archives are maintained at low temperatures and low humidity). Sooner or later -- and generally speaking, far sooner than we would like -- all nitrate films crumble into dust.
It's not a pretty picture -- and one that in fact has already been estimated to have cost the nation's archives more than half of the 21,000 feature films produced before 1950. The great and marvelously sexy 20's film icon Colleen Moore, for example, was fated to outlive most of her films -- and such seminal performances as Greta Garbo's in ''Divine Woman'' and Theda Bara's in ''Cleopatra'' have been relegated to powder, smoke and rumor. They are presumed to exist no more.
And yet -- and this was to be Bill Morrison's key discovery -- for all the sorry ugliness of the situation, the actual pictures that this relentless disintegration was producing could be more than just pretty. Sometimes, indeed, they were ravishingly, achingly beautiful....''I managed to dig up the nuns with their wards at their Arizona mission that very first day, along with that footage of a boxer...The boxer footage in particular was unbelievably evocative: the guy -- according to the reel's label, his name was Ritchie -- had clearly been jabbing at a punching bag, only for some reason the chemical content of the bag imagery had deteriorated far in advance of the rest of the frame, so that it looked for all the world as if Ritchie were engaged in a desperate struggle with the roiling abyss itself.''
He kept returning to Columbia, and after digging through the archives for more than 100 hours, he managed to excavate footage (including the camel caravan, the Indian Ferris wheel, the Central Asian wool-spinner, the planes and the parachutists and an uncanny sequence of a high diver hoisting herself up a silhouetted ladder that itself looks like a strip of film) that would come to comprise 36 minutes, a good half of the eventual completed film.
He also ventured out to the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside Dayton, Ohio, where the Library of Congress houses its phenomenal (and phenomenally volatile) nitrate-film collections. Here Morrison tracked down the silent melodrama footage of the judge and the harridan, the waves breaking on the shore and the solitary man traipsing across the mission plaza (further shades of his grandfather). ''It was a bit of a challenge,'' Morrison concedes. ''After all, I was looking for the stuff most archivists tend to hide.'' But he gradually got the archivists to warm to his daffy quest. ''Many visitors are amazed at the sorts of decay you come upon around here,'' Kenneth Weissman, the head of the Library of Congress's Dayton operation, subsequently told me with a sardonic drawl. ''But few seem to enjoy it as much as Bill.''
In addition, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an avid collector of much of Morrison's work at the Ridge Theater, granted him unprecedented access to their film vaults.
''I wasn't just looking for instances of decayed film,'' Morrison recalls of his two-year excavation. ''Rather, I was seeking out instances of decay set against a narrative backdrop, for example, of valiant struggle, or thwarted love, or birth, or submersion, or rescue, or one of the other themes I was trying to interweave. And never complete decay: I was always seeking out instances where the image was still putting up a struggle, fighting off the inexorability of its demise but not yet having succumbed. And things could get very frustrating. Sometimes I'd come upon instances of spectacular decay but the underlying image was of no particular interest. Worse was when there was a great evocative image but no decay.''...
Lawrence Weschler is the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at N.Y.U.
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