Paper Print - Second Effort at Reformatting

Second Effort At Reformatting

The Academy did take up Walls' cause, but only with his departure in 1953. The real work began with Kemp R. Niver. For roughly a decade, the former filmmaker migrated over two million feet of films from paper. He established the Renovare Company and process (“to restore” in Latin) and with initial funding from the Academy (later funding would be private and then by congressional appropriation), Niver unwound film history. He also wrote a good amount about this program.

As mentioned, the filmmaking process hadn’t been standardized. In fact, many manufacturers purposely avoided the exact workings of Edison’s well-regarded Kinetograph, thereby avoiding infringement, while copying the essential functions with a few tweaks to the format. Niver also supposed that amateur engineers and filmmakers were designing their own cameras for a time, each one producing a different image size, with variation in sprocket hole number, size and pattern. He ranted about “some little man with a movie picture camera of his very own, constructed from a cigar box, some spare parts from a plow, and pieces of his grandmother’s sewing machine.”

With adjustments, issues of frame lines and sprocket holes were resolved with each incoming print, but hand cranked film speed was also a nagging issue. Renovare would capture each frame, but a film could have been undercranked and exposed only for twelve frames per second. Playback on today’s film projectors might require 18 or 24 frame/s. Everything would appear comically fast. The solution was to expose a frame or every other frame twice, thereby making the action appear realistic. The reverse was true as well, with overcranked exposures, and frames would have to be removed to avoid slow motion films.

Another problem encountered by Niver and not discovered in any details of Gregory’s efforts at LC, is just what happens to photographs that have been tightly rolled up for four decades or more. Niver explained it by way of this example:

Look at the palm of your hand when it is in a relaxed position. Notice the soft wrinkles. Then open your hand—there are no wrinkles on the palm. Now you know what happens to the emulsion of a photograph that is laid out flat after having been in a curved position for half a century.

Niver reached out to a preservation expert who told him to soak the paper and dry it by heated drum. Both of these are standard last steps in photo development. Niver saw the prints gain some of their original flat disposition and found an added benefit of a soft surface glaze which made for a more definitive image for capture back to film.

Renovare worked through the variety of problems inherent in a collection without uniformity and developed the machinery that would adapt to those problems. By the end of the program, the Mark VIII, an optical printer, could capture about 16,000 frames every six hours. The resulting films were produced on 16 mm acetate safety film stock. Niver’s rationale for this is three-fold: the end users would likely be students and the format was simple to use, storage space was not in abundance, and costs were kept low.

Kemp Niver was lauded at first (an Honorary Academy Award in 1954). He also publicized his efforts, which led to “a great number of requests for copies of early films.” The Mark VIII is now with the UCLA film archive while an original restoration printer went into use at Ohio State. Still he did have at least one critic at the time, a film historian who found the guide to his work “full of curious categorization and arbitrary cross-indexing, as well as a great deal of needless duplication.”