Preserving Film -- and Duke University's Football History

Crack open the gray metal film canister and a whiff of sour gas escapes. The vinegary smell -- a byproduct of the disintegration of the film inside -- is strong enough to make your eyes sting.

The crumbling, curling 16mm film, brittle as dry leaves, fills 30 shelves at Duke University's Perkins Library. It represents decades of Duke football -- 2,000 films shot by Duke coaches that date to the 1930s.

Across the country, many university libraries, archives and athletic departments are filled with such decaying films, shot on acetate-based stock. The result? Thousands and thousands of hours of film are rapidly becoming lost forever.

Duke is launching an ambitious effort to save a representative sampling of this historical record. The university has received a $5,000 donation from the Raleigh-based A.E. Finley Foundation to begin preserving some of the films in the worst shape. The foundation has a long history of philanthropy in the region, including gifts to Duke of $1 million toward the Yoh Football Center and $1 million to Duke Children's Hospital.

"The Finley Foundation's gift helps us start something that is really important, because it recognizes the value that Duke's football history holds both for athletes today and in the future," said Duke Athletic Director Joe Alleva. "It's not an overstatement to say that part of the tangible history of football at Duke will fade away without immediate attention."

Last summer, Duke's athletics staff selected the most significant and memorable games from each season. One of these games -- Duke's 1949 win over Georgia Tech -- has already been lost as the film has fused and turned to powder.

The Athletic Department and the Duke University Libraries are working together to raise $60,000 to save 104 games from 1936 to 1990, when coaches began using videotape. A digital copy of the disintegrating film would be made, from which viewing copies could be produced as needed.

The plan is to eventually create an interactive display of highlights from great Duke games in special kiosks in the Trophy Room of the Yoh Football Center, which opened in fall 2002. The total cost of the video display project is $110,000, which includes the kiosks.

Susan Ross, associate director of athletics, said one of the early planning meetings for the fund-raising campaign was held in the library archives, where committee members saw -- and smelled -- the deteriorating film. They were impressed with the breadth of the Duke football collection, and anxious to help the preservation effort.

"Our new football building has an impressive Trophy Room, which has become a popular place for alumni and friends to visit," she said. "The preservation of these historical films, and their display in the not-too-distant future, will help us complete this part of the Yoh Center as we had envisioned it all along."

Fund raising continues for the rest of the cost of the project. One hope, Ross said, is that former football players might underwrite the cost of preserving their playing years.

"This is probably the Athletic Department's last chance to do something with these films," said University Archivist Tim Pyatt.

Pyatt said Duke's collection is one of the most complete holdings anywhere, but he estimates that about half the films made from the 1930s to the 1950s have significant "vinegar syndrome." The wartime films are in especially bad shape, he said.

The collection documents Duke's football dominance in the middle of the 20th century, including years in which the team went to the Rose, Cotton and Orange bowls. (The 1942 Rose Bowl game was moved to Duke's Wallace Wade Stadium as a precautionary measure; a few weeks earlier Pearl Harbor had been attacked.) The bowl game films are in better shape, and new digital copies of those games have already been made.

The original film was made of cellulose acetate, which decays over time. The disintegration increases rapidly after it starts, and the affected films can "infect" good film nearby if it's stored together, Pyatt said.

Librarians are now boxing up the films and sending them to a special storage facility with a cooler, drier atmosphere that will slow down the vinegar syndrome. Deteriorating films are isolated and stored with special equipment that absorbs the gases. Fifty-two boxes containing more than 200 films already have been transferred, along with all the Duke basketball films. All the film should be moved by the end of the semester, which will slow the deterioration process but not permanently protect the films.

Most were not intended to be a permanent record, but were made for training. But since film can't be reused as videotape can, often the coaches or athletic departments simply hung onto them. Sometimes, as at Duke, they would up in the university archives.

"They weren't thinking that, 50 years later, an archivist would want to preserve them," Pyatt said.

And it's not just sports fans who are interested in these films. They are important historical records. A shot of the stands could show fashions and habits of the day, and sociologists might be interested in the study of masculinity or popular culture.

All acetate film decays over time, and efforts by the Library of Congress to preserve film history have been well publicized by directors such as Martin Scorsese.

But most of the attention has been focused on feature films, not on what film historians call "orphan films" -- those made outside the major studios. Orphan films include home movies and university archive film such as commencements, as well as these sports films. (Duke recently received a grant to preserve the films of H. Lee Waters, a filmmaker who traveled around North Carolina during the Depression recording small-town life.)

Dan Streible, a film professor who organizes an Orphan Film Symposium every year at the University of South Carolina, notes that the majority of all film is the "orphan" type.

"Collectively, this research is just being done for the first time," he said. "The fact that Duke has a long-term plan for coaching films -- that's pretty advanced."

 

Susan Ross can be reached for further comment at (919) 613 7553 or by e-mail at susan.ross@duaa.duke.edu. Tim Pyatt can be reached at (919) 684 5637 or by e-mail at tim.pyatt@duke.edu

 

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