Extract from ABC News
When you think of Australian film, the names Blanchett, Hemsworth, Robbie and Lurhmann might spring to mind.
But they are newcomers to an industry that is more than a century old, with a rich but increasingly fragile history under threat from the slow but inevitable march of time.
Conservation expert Sophie Lewincamp is among those trying to protect that legacy.
She cannot stop herself from smiling as she details her love of early Australian film — not just the stories that they tell, but the medium they are recorded on.
"It is sort of romantic, the colours are beautiful, it does look different, and it takes you to a place where you wonder about that early creativity," Dr Lewincamp explained.
Dr Lewincamp and her colleagues are custodians of about 10,000 cans of nitrate cellulose film held by the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) in Canberra.
Some of the reels are more than 100 years old, although the collection is so vast that the NFSA has not actually had the chance to inspect all of it.
The nitrate film has always been prone to catching fire, and age is only adding to the concerns for the NFSA.
It is why a relatively small line item in this year's federal budget has been heralded as a boon for the archives.
$9.3 million has been tipped into the NFSA's coffers over the next four years to upgrade and expand storage and preservation facilities specifically for nitrate film.
From Bodyline to The Kelly Gang
The NFSA's nitrate film collection contains some absolute gems, from artistic endeavours to newsreels of moments etched into the Australian psyche.
"A real stand-out for me is the Bodyline series — a series of Cinesound newsreels that record the whole Bodyline series, the five Test matches," NFSA curator Jeff Wray said.
"Seeing [Harold] Larwood sending down his bouncers and [Don] Bradman playing, it's quite special.
"There's also things like the Story of the Kelly Gang, the first feature-length film worldwide.
"We've only got 20 minutes of the original 90-minute running time, but to see that and to see how creative people were in 1906 … it's within 15 years of film first becoming a thing, it's quite interesting to see how quickly it evolved."
Mr Wray said up until the early 1950s, nitrate film was the only film format widely in use.
"It was what was captured for theatrical releases, for documentary series, and it was known for its visual impact," he said.
"It was very bright and colourful, dazzling, and it was quite special.
"The only downside was, of course, that it's somewhat flammable if not stored in the best conditions — so it has quite a bit of a bad rap as a result of that."
Mr Wray said people were wrong to think the film was all black and white — some of the reels actually had a base colour and were spliced together to form a finished film.
"They would use certain colours for different moods or for situations, like a light blue for a night-time scene — because you couldn't film at night, you had to create the illusion of light."
Some of the film in the NFSA collection has not been properly inspected.
When the ABC is at the archives, a reel is pulled out of storage showing a young boy eating an apple, to the amusement of technicians in the film lab.
Cool and dry, but not too dry, the secret for fragile film
The key to protecting nitrate film is to keep it cold and dry. But not too dry, or risk it becoming brittle.
And it is important to try not to touch it too much — a difficult task for conservationists, who need to inspect the film to get a sense of whether it has deteriorated.
"It's a bit like going to the dentist," Dr Lewincamp said.
"You have a good understanding of how your teeth are aging and then maybe you might need one filling or two to take care of your teeth.
"We make sure we have copies of our films too — so digitisation and early copying processes are also part of that preservation strategy, so that we can limit the amount of time we need to see the original.
"But it's important to keep the original — it has a great amount of information, a colour story, a technology story."
Restoring the delicate film takes patience. A lot of it.
"It's painstaking, but it's very much a labour of love and people feel really connected to the story and the processes and feel pumped when it goes out into the big bad world for other people to get a kick out of seeing those early films like we do," Dr Lewincamp said.
One of the oldest surviving silent Australian films, the 1929 flick The Cheaters, was in a pretty bad way before the NFSA's staff got to restoring it.
Ghostly images were brought back to remarkable clarity after months and months of restoration.
Current stores packed to the rafters
The $9.3 million in funding in the budget will go towards expanding the existing film store, which is 40 years old and at capacity.
"We're really excited and thinking about how we can look to our colleagues internationally for ideas around this process," Dr Lewincamp said.
"We are at capacity and we would need to make some maybe harder decisions — I'm glad that we're not there, because every part of your collection is important but this one is particularly old."
"The pressure is certainly there to get it done before the aging process catches up with it and it decomposes into a gooey mess," Mr Wray added.
"But it's also exciting."
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