Narrator: This is a scene
from the silent Western "Pinto Ben."
And here's what it looks like after it's been restored.
All that gunk in the before is chemical decomposition,
which has destroyed an estimated 75%
of American silent films.
But here is where they get saved:
the George Eastman Museum,
where archivists have rescued lost works
of filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles.
One of its current projects is this:
a Western over a century old
starring and directed by William S. Hart,
one of the biggest movie stars of the time.
And it's particularly tricky because it's made of nitrate.
The material is notorious for being highly flammable
and chemically unstable,
which makes it prone to decomposition.
I'm sure you can start to smell this.
It smells like nitrate that's starting to decompose.
My colleagues feel it smells like a wet dog.
When it gets very bad, it's more like
if you took a dirty gym sock
and put it in a glass of sour milk.
Narrator: While "Pinto Ben" hasn't gotten
to the point of sour milk,
the clear film base has started to discolor.
That's stage one.
Anthony: As you wind through it, you could see
how it's becoming more and more brownish-yellow.
This was stage two, where the image has started to melt.
Narrator: This is where the emulsion
in the film has broken down.
Anthony: The third stage, the film starts to ooze
and bubble like a honey-like substance.
Up to that point, parts of it can still be salvaged.
And then stage four, it crystallizes into a hockey puck.
After that, it becomes a very fine brown powder.
Narrator: That process is irreversible,
and it can happen surprisingly fast,
so archivists like Anthony
have to identify decomposing films
and restore them to new film stock before it's too late.
In silent films like this,
they may start looking around the title cards.
Titles usually were photographed
and processed more poorly than the images.
A lot of the decomp can start from the titles
and then work its way through the rest of the film.
Narrator: Then they'll start on physical repairs.
Each of these splices marks a tear in the film
that an archivist fused back together with liquid cement
or damaged frames that had to be replaced with blank film.
Some of these repairs were done
before the reel came into Eastman's possession.
Another area that needs mending: these perforated edges.
If those perforations get ripped off,
the tear can spread inwards and begin to affect the image.
Also, those perforations, when intact,
allow the film to move safely through the cleaner
and scanner in the next steps.
So in areas with extensive damage ...
Anthony: The edge and the perfs are missing completely.
Narrator: Anthony will use this special tape
to replace the missing perforations.
By the end of this process,
the film will look something like this,
with all those white stripes marking perforation repairs.
Once all those weakened areas have been reinforced,
the film goes through this ultrasonic cleaner
to remove any dust or dirt on the surface.
Then the film is finally digitized.
It goes through the scanner,
which captures each frame and turns it into a digital file.
This process can take up to 48 hours for a two-hour film,
and the team has to do this
for every version of the film
they're going to use for the reconstruction.
Eastman is reconstructing "Pinto Ben" from six sources,
with each providing different puzzle pieces of the film.
Two of the sources come from
the 1917 reissue of the film
under the title "Horns and Hoofs."
The Library of Congress preserved the nitrate
for reel one, the first half of the film,
and the negative for reel two,
the second half of the film.
These sources have the best image quality --
the shots look sharp and have good contrast --
but the Library of Congress nitrate
is the least complete element.
These frames have some yellow ooze on the side,
which marks the beginning of the decomposition,
while these frames show it in its later stages.
Graham: We cannot digitally restore this
because there is very little image information
for our software to look at,
so we're going to want to use that
for as many scenes as we can,
but if frames are missing or if the decomp
and the damage is so distracting and irreconcilable,
we'll switch to the other nitrate print that we have.
Narrator: This nitrate was sent over from France,
where "Pinto Ben" was released as "Le Poney de Rio Jim."
Bryan: Some pieces were actually excised
throughout the years,
maybe because of decomp or damage, we don't know.
Narrator: To fill in chunks that are still missing,
the team will defer to one of three
lower-res prints of the film from a 1924 re-release.
Altogether, these prints contain the most information,
since they have the highest number of frames intact.
But the image quality here is probably the roughest.
Graham: You can see the focus is a little bit fuzzier,
it's a little bit flatter, the contrast isn't as good.
Narrator: They can play with the contrast to help correct
for any obvious quality jumps between frames,
and color grading will help tie everything together.
Graham: And then from all those different elements
and all those different frames,
we assemble as complete a version as possible.
Narrator: Once a timeline of all the best shots
has been created, digital restoration begins.
The first thing to correct is this shaky movement
you see between frames.
Often it's the result of film shrinking over time.
Shrunken film doesn't go through the scanner as well,
so you can end up with an unstable image.
Chris: We know in analog film, there's a little bit
of a slight vibration in the film image,
but if it were to regularly distractingly move up and down,
we would try and eliminate that to a degree.
The thing that this element suffers from
is mostly scratching.
Narrator: Software helps detect these,
but it's not a perfect solution.
Chris: In this film, there's a lot of wallpaper
and a lot of vertical lines
that resemble these types of scratches,
so I put in a scratch that's very thick,
it's going to say,
hey, I'm this line on the wallpaper, right?
I should be removing that.
Narrator: He can use the same kind of programmed filters
to help detect dark dirt, light dust,
or other errant artifacts, like the stray eyelash
or hair that may have become embedded into the print.
Chris: So that's just a piece of errant dirt
that fell onto the film at some point.
Narrator: Other artifacts might be captured
in the image itself,
for example, if there was dirt
on the printer or a camera negative
when the film was printed however many years ago.
You tend to find the most dirt
and dust at the ends of the film.
Bryan: Those would be exposed to the elements more.
Just sitting in a can,
it would be either heads out or tails out,
so that would accumulate dust
when you're putting it in the can, taking it out.
Narrator: In general, the more popular a film was
and the more times it was shown in theaters,
the more likely it is to have suffered
extensive wear and tear, from scratches and thumbprints
to spots like this, where the emulsion's rubbed off,
a common effect of repeated projection.
The last step in the process: color grading.
Here, the team has the scanned frames
of "Pinto Ben" up on the screen
and the nitrate film out on the inspection table.
The goal is to make the colors on that screen
match those in the physical reference
as closely as possible.
This takes a lot of precision and teamwork.
Bryan: Warmer, colder?
Graham: I would say warmer,
but I feel like we've lost some of the saturation.
It's a very deep, vivid, almost radioactive yellow.
Narrator: They have to be very gentle
with a print like this
as they go through and inspect the color in each scene.
Graham: As you can see, the film is bending
in one direction, as well as these edges here
are buckling out a little bit.
Those are all signs of warpage
and physical deterioration of the film stock.
If that gets any worse,
this element might not be able to be scanned in the future.
And so when we inspect it, we move through it very slowly,
because the last thing we want to do
is to introduce more damage to the film print.
Narrator: At the end of the process,
the film looks like this --
pretty close to how it was originally seen
by audiences back in 1915.
And that's the goal.
We're trying to present the film as an artifact
and an art form the way it was originally presented.
Narrator: This whole process can take up to two years,
which means many movies are deteriorating faster
than archives can preserve them.
If we have a unique print where we know
that this is the last surviving element of a film
and we notice that it's starting to decompose,
that will go to the top of our preservation priority list.
Narrator: "Pinto Ben" is one of nine William S. Hart films
Eastman is restoring, and one of thousands of movies
the museum's helped rescue from being lost forever.