Paolo
Cherchi-Usai (George Eastman
House)
“What is an Orphan Film? Definition, Rationale and Controversy”
I
am reminded what happened about two years ago at Eastman House, when one day I
opened the side door, and there right in front of me were three piles of films,
very carefully stacked. There was a
message written on a piece of paper, covered by a stone. “Take good care of these films. I am moving to South Carolina. Hope they are of use to you.” No signature.
The films were 16mm prints made approximately in the 1920s. They were
arranged in alphabetical order. They
were not crying. They were in great
shape. So we took them in. Took them to the registrar’s office and tried
to find out what they were and what views we could do of them.
So this is the most obvious
instance of orphan films. They couldn’t
be more orphaned than that. In fact, the
very term 'orphan films,' to the best of my knowledge, was used for the first
time in a public context by David Francis in 1993 at the time of the Los
Angeles hearings for the National Film Preservation Plan. It was at that point the term orphan film
became officially part of the archival language and the scholarly language in
general. It is not the first time that
David Francis has come up with some very powerful definition. What is powerful about the term orphan film
is not only its effectiveness, it is something that is fairly easy to
understand without much explanation, but also its emotional resonance. Oh,
let’s save these poor, poor orphan films.
That’s what potential donors say, even those who know nothing about
film.
What these people don’t
know, and what we tend to underestimate sometimes, is the fact that under this
broad term orphan films, there is a very complex reality which I will try to
briefly describe. I will do it first by
pointing out that as in all good Dickens novels and all good orphan stories,
when it comes to orphans, there is one mother, but there is normally more than
one father. In our case the mother will
have to be defined as the negative from which the orphans were produced. As for the various fathers, the producers,
the bad guy, the filmmaker (s), and sometimes the archive. When I refer to the parents, which I will do
often, I would like you to keep in mind this.
The negative of the print, the producer, the filmmaker and the
archive.
So in general, what we
call orphan film is quite simple.
Earlier Karen Lund defined orphan films as films in public domain and
mute, which is great -- again Dickens, the poor things don't even talk.. According to Annette Melville and the
National Film Preservation Foundation, an orphan film is a film outside
commercial preservation programs and newsreels, silent films, avant-garde
works, documentaries and others.
This is all true
indeed. But this is a very small tip of
a huge iceberg. In order to agree on
what is an orphan film, we should first agree on what we mean by orphan. I will start with a little bit of history by saying
that, as the story goes, in the first chapter of our novel, in the beginning,
all films were orphans. They were all
orphans because from the beginnings of cinema to the summer of 1908, children
were sold. Producers would make the
films, make prints, and sell the prints.
From the moment you owned the print, you could do whatever you wanted
with it. You could cut the orphan into
pieces, force the orphan to labor, create your own film. Once you bought the print, the producer
didn’t want to know what was happening to it.
This state of things ceased to exist when a large group of film
producers, manufacturers, distributors, exhibitors decided that this had to end
and there was a better way to exploit children.
Instead of selling them, let's rent
them out. Which is exactly what
happened. The date of 1908 is a crucial
date exactly for this reason. From that
moment you could get the print from the production company or from the
distributor. You could show the film,
but the film was supposed to go back home to their parents. If you didn’t do that, there could be
trouble.
Here we have the first
great divide. Films made before 1908 are
technically orphans. The fact that they
were produced by Pathé or Edison or Biograph didn’t make much of a difference
in terms of their survival. Afterwards,
the world became divided into big categories.
The possessive parents, those who absolutely wanted to have their
children going back home, and those who would have perhaps care or perhaps not,
or think about it or maybe get the prints back home after a while or if they
were going too far away just forget about it, such as in the case of the film
sent up to Dawson City and never returned and actually buried in a swimming
pool.
In both cases, what
provokes the so called orphan phenomenon is what I would call the demographic
explosion of orphans. A demographic
explosion that derives from the decision of the producer to manufacturer and
distribute a fairly large number of prints.
So how many children were generated by these parents? The number goes from zero to several
hundred. In some cases, a negative was
made but no print was actually produced because no one wanted to see the film,
such as in the case of some American Mutoscope and Biograph films. In other cases, an average of 80-120 prints,
or in the most successful cases, several hundred prints. For example, some Chaplain films where even
before the film was completed over 130 copies were already produced.
Instead of trying to
describe in detail the circumstances of this demographic explosion, I’d like to
show you some sort of very simplified model of how this demographic explosion
occurs.
INSERT GRAPHIC
What you see there at the
top is Mother, a negative of a film made, for the sake of argument, in 1915,
and for the sake of argument we will assume that 9 children were generated, 9
prints. Over the years this first
generation was the starting point of further generations. Print #3 was used in 1931, and this is an
imaginary example. In 1931 reissue of a
film which was originally tinted and toned, but the new negative made from print
#3 was a black-and-white print with a sound track, and five prints were made
from this negative. In 1948 someone
found print #11 made another internegative and
produced three prints. We are not
interested in knowing why these prints were made. In 1952 someone else found print #13 and
decided to make another internegative unbeknownst to
the guy who made the internegative in 1948 and made
five more prints. Then nothing happens
until 1978 when someone, let’s say a collector, finds print #8 from the first
generation and decides to make a 16 mm reduction negative. With the same color, although not with the
same technique, a color reproducing the tinting and toning of the original.
From this negative #5 we have two prints, prints #23 and #24.
Now from the point of view
of the archive what really matters is what print ends up in the archive's
vaults? Let’s say we get print #22. We at Eastman House find print #22 of this
film. We realize that no other print of
this film is known to exist; and therefore, we take this orphan and cure him
and feed him, and we make sure he finds the most appropriate home. Automatically this means we have produced at
least 23 orphans, plus five other orphans of a different form. So, we tend to behave as if these other
prints almost never existed. If we
happen to find some other print that will be better, because we will compare
the two orphans, and maybe create a new orphan in better shape. The other prints disappear from our mental
horizon.
Forget about the dates of
this diagram, and imagine that all these generations were produced before a
certain date, a date at which a public domain film becomes a film under
copyright. Or let’s assume the copyright
for this film was not renewed. In this
case, all these prints are orphans, but they are orphans in a different
sense. They are orphans because nobody
can claim legal ownership on them. There
is no parent who can actually demonstrate with a piece of paper that this
orphan belongs to me. It is itself a
complex concept. Saying that a film is
in public domain or isn’t describes only one part of the reality.
In fact, we could at least
mention three possible realities within this category. The first, most obvious one, this film is an
orphan because the parents are just dead.
There is no more production company and the filmmaker is no longer
living, which may open an interesting strand of conversation about what is the
estate of the filmmaker going to say about the status of this orphan? There is a second possibility, as important
as the first. The parents are alive but
they are very old, so old they have forgotten they have these children, and
when you ask the owners about them, they may not acknowledge. . . . . inventories. These are orphans as well and are likely to
remain orphans for reasons I am going to discuss later. The third possibility is that the parents may
be unknown, both from the point of view of who produced it and who actually
made the film. This may open another
interesting case, the case of people who realize that the parents are completely
unknown and they show up and say "I am the parent of this child and I want
tutelage because it's mine and I can prove it.
They never do, but some how they claim that this is their child. This is
what "public domain" may mean.
Let’s now consider the
case where the parents are alive and well, young and wealthy, but they don’t
care. They don’t care because they think
they have already more beautiful children to take care of. Adoptive parents like to have a child who is
tall, blonde, blue-eyed, and here you have this rotten thing that is
decomposing and all scratched. I don't
want that. So, we don’t want this orphan
because we have a better print. Another
print of GWTW completely scratched on Eastmancolor? No, I don't want this. It might be mine, but I don't want it. Stay away.
Second, this might be a
nice print, but I have made my own internegative and
I have better prints. I certainly don’t need it.
Third, I am the parent and
I found the orphan, but my house is too small.
I don’t have room for these children, so could you please take this
child and keep it for me? This happens
often, and that’s why many production companies know very well what archives
have but have no interest in reclaiming the prints because in the meantime
there was an adoptive parent taking care of the orphan.
Finally, we have those
that become orphans because of what we defined as forced labor. Whatever is not useful for forced labor can
become an orphan. The production company
may realize this is our film, but how much money are we likely to make? No money, why take the child in my home? So even when producers know these are their
films, they are likely to become orphans.
A revealing and interesting shift happening today has to do with the
renewed interest of production companies in this kind of orphan because of the
increased awareness of the fact that these apparently useless children can be
used to make money. So the stock footage
business is what provoked the resurgence of the concept orphan films. Orphan films may be good for money.
An overlapping element over
all these categories is the fact that an orphan might exist because there were
too many siblings within a single generation. The mother died of exhaustion. If you look at a print of Manhattan
what you see is ectoplasm where you can recognize skyscrapers and other forms
and titles, but this is a print that no one how to take care of because it is
presumed that someone else has taken care of this film somewhere else. Taking any Charlie Chaplin film and I will
show you hundreds of orphans resulting from this phenomenon. You think someone else has taken care of the
orphan. As a result no one takes care of
these. Therefore, there are very few nitrate
prints of Chaplin films, in archives or elsewhere.
Now that we have a better
idea of what happens to orphans, let’s talk about the life of the orphans. What happens to them? From an archival point of view, orphans are
easier to find than legitimate children, and this is because no one reclaimed
them. Since 1908 whatever film was
produced by a company still surviving and caring for its children, this print had
to go back to its owner. On the average,
when you find 10 prints in some isolated location, the majority of these prints
are going to be orphans. They are likely
to be films in public domain or with parents unknown. They are likely to be orphans also because parent
production companies had quickly established some system in order to recognize
their children (a necklace around the baby) -- from the logo of the production
company on each intertitle, to the two or three systems used by the Disney
company in order to recognize their vintage prints from illegal
reproductions.
Both inside and outside
the archives, parents sometimes change their mind and claim the children years
later. As all archivists know, some of
these parents end up pressuring or harassing archives to regain possession of
the orphans. The best argument that
archives can bring forward is the fact before the parents showed up, archives
had to care for the orphans and had to preserve them and put them under
appropriate environmental conditions.
Even the best use of the
orphans can be damaging to the life of the orphan films. This is where we find the most frequent
instances of parental abuse. We are
dealing with poor parents, who do not have enough money to properly care for
the orphan.
Outside the archive we
have the case of home movies. The movies
that become orphans as soon as their owners, parents, filmmakers, producers,
exhibitors decide that they are no longer of use and throw them away or make
VHS of and discard originals. However
well known, these are not the only cases.
Take the case of substandard formats.
Prints of films that are known to exist in other forms and are neglected
because their format does not correspond to what is perceived to be the best
format.
When the films get
restored, they are subjected to another form of exploitation. That is the orphan because the potential
donor is not interested in a specific orphan.
This is creating a powerful subcategory of orphans, orphans that may or
may not be in public domain, but will never be restored for this reason. Public agencies are not interested and
private donors have no interest. Some of
these films are more unhappy than others because they are not only
uninteresting, they are also foreign films.
Finally, at the bottom of
the orphans is the unidentified film, and I think we tend to underestimate the
number of unidentified films that are in archives. These films are orphans from all possible
view points. People don’t go to archives
to see things without a name. They want
to know what they are looking at. The
look at unidentified films by mistake because a location number was wrong or
they have time to waste and a sense of adventure. Archives are not going to money into the
preservation of these films either. In
some archives policies there is the provision that you are not going to put money
on the preservation of something that is not identified or something that is
not complete. So orphans have to be
complete.
As if this wasn’t enough,
we come to the last chapter of the orphan story, the medieval digital age. Digital age is going to create a new massive
generation of orphan films and because of the digital age, a cyclical
conception of history is going to find a pretty good justification because all
the prints will be orphans more or less in the same way they have been orphans
before 1908. The will become orphans because the owners, producer filmmakers
and archive, will think transferring the films on a digital medium will make
the orphan more or less useless. Best case, some archives may choose to keep
the orphans in a vault without touching them.
Unless another new form of digital migration will make their use
necessary again. This has to do with the
commercial exploitation of the films and also the scholarly use of the
film. The very fact that it will be no
longer necessary to watch actual film because we will be able to look at them
in their digital form. I’m not saying
digital is a bad. The result is that as
soon as the industry stops producing prints there will be only a mother, a
child; and the mother will be the camera negative and the child will be color
separation, or CRI, or an internegative or there will
be nothing else.
What we have touched here
is at least four fold concept of orphan film.
There was the legal definition, having someone who can demonstrate in
legal terms that he owns the film. Then
there is the authorial definition. The
presence or absence of a filmmaker. This
is not a very relevant category in this country today. Then we have the material definition of
orphan, regardless of its copyright status. And finally, the archival
definition, that fact that whatever the other three categories are, there are
even within the archive films that are considered orphans. From the point of view of archives, we now
have a greater responsibility than ever.
Millions of orphans, the parents always away for business, except for
coming home when they need money. I
don’t like the term film archive. It
doesn’t really describe the reality of what is going on in this place. Why not film orphanage? Here is an alternative for you.
Thanks.