"Archiving, Preserving, Screening 16mm"

Teaching silent film courses on a regular basis, I'm one of the first to admit that the advent of DVDs has made my job easier. Trying to convince students that the film they are watching is not only a cinema classic, but also as sophisticated and modern as any film made in the sound era, is a particularly hard sell when the print in question is a "dupey," fifth-generation 16mm reduction from the 35mm nitrate original, and dead silent to boot. When shown DVDs produced from restored master materials, and including a full orchestral score or at least piano accompaniment, students are much more willing to give silent films a chance. Having said that, it is also true that far fewer silent film titles are now available on DVD than were once accessible on 16mm, so students are now being exposed to a much more limited canon. Since I have discussed this issue in print in reference to film archives,¹ what I would like to do here is address the viability of 16mm as an archival preservation medium, and as a distribution and production medium.

While it may come as a big surprise to bean-counting university administrators hell-bent on divesting themselves of their 16mm film collections, the 16mm format is alive and well in other quadrants of the media universe. Indeed, improbable as it may seem given all the hype about the death of 16mm, Richard Utley of Kodak's Protek subsidiary reports "substantial" sales increases of 16mm negative film stock over the past several years—as much as 8 percent last year—due in part to the 2002 introduction of their 7218 film stock. According to the Kodak Sales Department, the resurgence in 16mm sales can be attributed to several factors, including the production of a small, inexpensive Super 16mm camera by Aaton, the A-Minima. Arriflex, Canon, and Cooke have also introduced new Super 16 cameras or lenses in response to the resurgence of 16mm film stock sales. Furthermore, improved scanner/telecine transfer techniques have meant that 2k digital masters (with a resolution of 2048 by 1080 pixels) can now be generated from 16mm negatives,² giving producers and distributors an added incentive to use the cheaper 16mm, rather than 35mm, as their production medium. In other words, the high quality digital image needed for a DVD transfer can be struck from a 16mm negative, and this reduces the incentive to shoot on 35mm.³ Even a director like Michael Bay, known for blockbuster entertainment, recently shot much of The Island (2005) with 16mm Eyemo cameras and then transferred to a digital platform.⁴

In 1923 Kodak introduced 16mm film, cameras, and projectors. As early as 1916, John G. Capstaff of Eastman Kodak had been experimenting with various amateur sizes and had come to the conclusion that 10mm by 7.5mm was the minimum frame size for acceptable image quality. The frame had an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. Adding perforations on both sides would add another 6mm, making a total of 16mm. Kodak eschewed the middle perforations used with Pathe's 9.5mm, because they could cause stripes to appear over the image. Moreover, if the projector claw failed to hit the perforation accurately the images could easily be damaged. Sixteen millimeter had an additional advantage over 17.5mm: flammable 35mm nitrate stock could not be slit in half to create it. Less flammable 16mm would thus be aptly nicknamed "safety stock." In the 1930s, a sound track was added on one side of the film, sacrificing one row of perforations. It was accepted as an SMPE (Society of Motion Picture Engineers) standard in 1932. From that point on, 16mm negative was available in single or double "perf," depending on whether the filmmaker wanted to add a sound track or not. Sixteen millimeter film was also available with either an optical or a magnetic sound track.

At the same time as development proceeded on the 16mm gauge, Capstaff was experimenting with a reversal developing process which eliminated the need to have negative film copied onto positive stock, thus significantly reducing...