So what we've got is is a four-hundred foot sixteen millimeter film on a metal reel that appears to be
fused, which means trying to wind it off the proper way--using a set of rewinds--most
likely will not work because the film will either be stuck to itself, or it
will start breaking and just causing overall damage to the film itself. It is
amazing what technology has enabled us to do in this age. We are capable now,
today, in 2016, to capture image content off of original motion picture film from the
1920s, the 1930s, and the 1940's in ways that were
impossible just a few years ago. My name is Lindsay Zarwell. I'm a film archivist
at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and today I am in our
offsite storage facility, where we house, store, and preserve our original film
materials. Today I'm gonna talk about Robert Gessner and his collection of
films and photographs that he donated to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2014.
Robert Gessner was a Jewish American screenwriter and the author of several
books. In the 1930s, especially 1934, he was very interested
in the rise of antisemitism in Europe at the time. When Robert Gessner
traveled overseas, he carried with him a
movie camera, and he also carried with him a still photographic camera. He was
very keen on capturing the life of Jews before the war in Paris and in Berlin,
in Vienna, also in Minsk, and in Palestine as well. He captured at least 10 reels of
motion picture film and hundreds and hundreds of photographs. The film reels
arrived to us and immediately we could tell that we had a little bit of a situation.
Motion picture film is very vulnerable and is fragile, and it can deteriorate
when it's kept in poor conditions. The films were in pretty poor condition--
Severely deteriorated, compromised very badly shrunken--
and there was an odor emitting from the reels themselves that we in the archival
profession call "vinegar syndrome."
This is the chemical composition of the decay of the physical film itself. We
work very closely, especially with Colorab and Video & Film Solutions. This
particular film lab is a state of the art facility. They work with old
equipment and new equipment in order to create high-level motion picture
preservation copies of films and to scan severely compromised and brittle film
and to make that accessible in a digital format or in a physical format for
future generations. They are able to rescue the content, the visual and aural
conten,t of what is on that piece of film, on that frame of film, and we are able to
see what is there, what was recorded by Robert Gessner in the year of 1934, and we--not
only we as archivists, but we as in the public or documentary filmmakers,
academics, scholars--can evaluate this film and reinterpret and interpret history.
One of the most important things that Colorlab did with this particular film
collection was a replasticization process. The film is carefully hand-
unwound off of the projection reels into smaller, individual little reels, and then
a chemical compound is put in with the films, and the fumes of that chemical
compound actually bring a plastic feeling back to the film, so actually
bring the film back to life, to a pliable situation where it can be put on to a
scanner, and the film itself can be captured and reproduced in a digital
format or reproduced
into a film format. It's a very time-consuming process. In this case the
Gessner collection took six or seven months in order for the replasticization
procedure to work to a place where we could put the films onto a very high-end
3.5 K scanner and scan those films without compromising the original film.
When the film' come back to the Holocaust Museum, our main goal is to
catalog them and to make them accessible for researchers, for the public, and for
filmmakers. We place the film copies into long-term storage, into climate
controlled storage, and in that way we don't cause any unnecessary handling to
the original materials. Robert Gessner's pictures and motion picture films of the
Jewish life in Berlin and Vienna and Paris is so rare and so unusual, and it's
something that we have very little evidence of. The time by which individual
people take to take out a movie camera, put in a reel of film, record an
important or significant experience for them, and then decide, through family members,
to donate it to the Holocaust Museum. It's my job, but it's not only my job.
It's important for us to take that stuff and to make it accessible to many,
many young people, to teachers and to do our best to show what this one person
felt was important during that period