A Light Affliction: a History of Film Preservation and Restoration

From the earliest attempts at film preservation to the modern days of digital techniques, A LIGHT AFFLICTION is the story of a few people who cared enough to devote their working lives to preserving for present and future generations the cinematic treasures of the past.

Film historian Professor Jeffrey Richards called A LIGHT AFFLICTION "an outstanding achievement. It is an absolutely enthralling read and I learned much from it."

Biographer Robert Sitton wrote, "It is a necessary and thorough review of the past and present of film restoration and preservation, arriving just in time ... a splendid book."

The cinema was invented in the Victorian era, but for the first four decades of its existence almost no effort was made to preserve the millions of feet of celluloid that rolled through the cameras and projectors of the world. Instead, through a combination of accident, neglect and deliberate destruction, thousands of movies were lost forever.

Then, in the 1930s, the first concerted attempts at film preservation were begun by pioneering individuals such as Iris Barry at New York’s Museum of Modern Art; Ernest Lindgren at the British Film Institute and the indomitable Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque française. Langlois performed heroics in occupied France to save the world’s cinematic heritage from destruction by the Nazis, and became so popular with French filmmakers and cineastes that his ejection in 1968 from his own archive led to fighting on the streets of Paris.

Other heroes in the story of film preservation include Kevin Brownlow, who painstakingly pieced Abel Gance’s NAPOLÉON back together. Robert A. Harris worked miracles with LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and Martin Scorsese led a campaign to compel Kodak to produce a film stock less prone to deterioration. METROPOLIS was saved by an Argentinian collector, and missing sequences from KING KONG and A STAR IS BORN were preserved in private hands long after their makers had discarded the footage.

The 1980s video boom encouraged the studios finally to instigate asset protection programmes and in the digital age new methods of producing, exhibiting and preserving motion pictures emerged - which led in turn to controversial restorations of movies such as STAR WARS and DR STRANGELOVE.

Michael Binder is also the author of HALLIWELL'S HORIZON: Leslie Halliwell and his Film Guides. Available now on Amazon.