Giving the Obsessive Film Collectors of the World Their Due

Near the end of Peter Flynn’s documentary Film Is Dead. Long Live Film!, archivist Stan Taffel tells a story about attending the Los Angeles premiere of the 1922 Rudolph Valentino silent Beyond the Rocks. Long believed to be lost to history, the film was rediscovered in the Netherlands in 2003.

Taffel congratulated the Nederlands Filmmuseum staff on their restoration work, and asked, “Who was the collector that had this film for those seven, eight decades?” They turned to each other, searching. “The one guy that actually saved the film, they didn’t know,” Taffel recounts. “Someone said, ‘Oh, he was some eccentric collector.’”

Repeating this last phrase, Taffel rolls his eyes at the camera. By this point in the 102-minute documentary, we have visited the storage units, kitchens, sheds and cozy screening rooms of over a dozen eccentric collectors. We’ve watched them crack open rusty film canisters, lovingly oil up old projectors and call out obscure titles from the middle of chaotic organizational systems.

We know, as Taffel does, that if not for these collectors, much of the grain of everyday life, as captured on film, would have long ago disappeared. Film collectors have rescued not only major motion pictures, but home movies, snipes (anything that’s not a movie or a trailer, like a snack bar promo), kinescopes (films made from live TV broadcasts), educational films and more.

Some of the most interesting scenes in Film Is Dead come from joining collectors on the hunt, their flashlights peeking into sealed up drive-in theaters for anything that survived. Especially since the odds are stacked against them.

Stu Fink, often smoking a fat cigar, details all the things that can degrade or destroy film if it’s not taken care of properly. “That’s … a lot,” he says before launching into a delightful crash course in various film gauges, nitrate versus safety film, and the acidic gasses that cause all of the above to decompose. (Collectors are caught sniffing for dreaded vinegar syndrome throughout.)

“Ultimately we’re just temporary custodians of all this stuff,” Fink says philosophically. “We have a responsibility, I think, to pass it on in as good a shape as we can, so down the line someone else can make good use of it.” Sometimes, the documentary notes, this has put film collectors on the wrong side of the law, leading to FBI raids, tapped phones and even convictions.

Local film archivist Rick Prelinger makes a brief appearance arguing for a loosening of these proprietary ideas. “Exclusivity and scarcity doesn’t get you anywhere,” Prelinger says between clips from a Lost Landscapes of San Francisco screening at the Castro. “It isn’t just about showing and preserving, it’s about actively thinking of new ways to work with this material.”

The film collectors at the center of Flynn’s documentary do an excellent job of not only sharing their enthusiasm but convincing audiences that this strange, obsessive impulse to sometimes hoard antiquated media is an important and worthwhile thing. While nearly all the collectors are white men, there are several examples of rescued films that capture pivotal moments in the Black American experience, and have reached new audiences through public screenings and online distribution.

Throughout the documentary, we visit historian Eric Grayson at work on The King of the Kongo (1929), the first sound serial, which he compiled from 71 reels of film, 17 sound discs, three collectors and two film archives. At one point Grayson lets out the documentary’s largest sigh, well earned.

Flynn leaves the question hanging: are future generations are up to tasks like these, especially without a childhood connection to film? Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! is instead a eulogy to a certain type of person, an AV guy (“film collecting is primarily a male disorder,” Fink says) gone rogue, who collects to preserve, but also, on some level, to have what others do not. And every so often, thanks to that monomaniacal impulse, we, the audience, gain immensely.

‘Film Is Dead. Long Live Film!’ screens May 31, 6 p.m. at the Roxie Theater as part of SF DocFest. It is also available to stream online May 30–June 9, 2024.