Balegari (Petar Lalovic, 1982).
Jon Whitehead keeps a low profile. He barely has any hits on Google, and his avatar on Twitter is a man in silhouette. He's not a fugitive, though there are days when he can feel the law closing in. He describes himself as a “man on a mission to find and preserve the rarest and most obscure films ever made." In 2014, Whitehead started the website Rarefilmm. With a team of volunteers, he has since digitized, subtitled, and uploaded nearly 3,000 “forgotten” films for the benefit of an enthusiastic community of users, on whose voluntary donations the site subsists. These are orphan films—films for which the copyright has expired or which the rights holders have neglected, and which have little potential of being professionally restored—many of which cannot be found anywhere else on the internet. They come from around the world: Kazakhstan, Yugoslavia, Ghana, Albania, and other underappreciated national cinemas.
On December 1, 2023, almost all of those films went offline. In 2022, the European Union passed the Digital Services Act (DSA), which went into effect in August of last year. This sweeping piece of legislation includes many reforms to how online platforms and websites service users, but most relevant to Rarefilmm is that websites can now be held responsible for all of the content they host. And so, on December 1, 2023, Ulož, the Czech-based platform on which Rarefilmm relied for hosting, ended public file-sharing in order to ensure compliance with the new law. Overnight, Rarefilmm’s entire library was deleted.
Whitehead has spent the months since beginning to rebuild. He and a small team of volunteers plan to re-upload every single film that has been posted over the last decade onto alternative file-hosting platforms. Users can ask for specific films to be prioritized; their requests are usually fulfilled within a day. It hasn’t been easy work. In his statement on the future of the site, Whitehead wrote, “Now, Uloz going down also means that I’ll have to re-upload every single file and also change every single dl [download] link on the site (again!)… this will take a few months at least. As you can imagine I’m very tired of this, and this also makes me question if it’s even worth it.”
The ethos of Rarefilmm recalls that of the Internet Archive, which, since its founding in 1996, has been archiving films, websites, print media, music, and books and making them available for free. Unlike Rarefilmm, the Internet Archive also solicits user uploads, and hosts a wide variety of user-made and user-obtained content. In 2020, several publishers, including Hachette Book Group, Wiley, and Penguin Random House, filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive in the district court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that their book-lending program, initiated at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, represented copyright infringement. In August 2023, the court ruled against the Internet Archive. On December 15, the Internet Archive appealed. The case is ongoing.
This is not the only challenge the Internet Archive faces: in August 2023, several record labels filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive for its preservation of 78 rpm records, an obsolescent medium which mostly ceased production 70 years ago. This case, too, is ongoing. It's not hard to imagine that film studios and distributors might also turn on the Internet Archive. These cases may become landmarks that will shape the landscape of media preservation for years to come.
Fast Film (Virgil Widrich, 2003).
In the digital era, the library and the archive are difficult to disentangle. In the eyes of the law, however, the two are afforded different privileges. Under United States copyright law, archives are allowed to create reproductions with the provision that they not be “used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research.” But should the distinction of scholarship belong only to academia when the internet might otherwise put all human knowledge at our fingertips? Since their inception, websites like the Internet Archive and Rarefilmm—vastly different in size, but similar in mission—have dedicated themselves to making media accessible. Traditionally, though, facilitating access is not the primary responsibility of an archive. As John Klacsmann, the archivist at Anthology Film Archives in New York, told me over the phone in February, “An archive is really about safeguarding original or unique objects, primarily, and a library is about providing access.… I think with the Internet Archive, it’s a little bit blurry. They’re doing both things, in a sense.” These lines are blurred because for digital archives, dissemination is a form of preservation; they preserve material by sharing and spreading the files widely. If a file is downloaded by users all over the world, the risk of it disappearing is mitigated.
The Library of Congress estimates that 75 percent of silent films and almost 50 percent of early American sound films are now lost. Last year marked the centennial of 16mm film, a medium in which many artists continue to work. As enduringly beautiful as celluloid is, it is notoriously susceptible to damage, degradation, and loss. Before 1952, almost all 35mm prints were made with cellulose nitrate, which is highly flammable. Storage fires throughout the 20th century destroyed thousands of films, and those that have survived have lost fidelity. Over time, cellulose nitrate emits acid gas, causing the color of prints to fade, eventually leaving only red, and the film can even degrade entirely into toxic powder. In the 1940s, the industry transitioned to acetate film, which is not flammable but still susceptible to decay, as the film base decomposes into acetic acid—vinegar. In the 1990s, the industry settled on using polyester film for archival purposes, a film base that is finally safe and resistant to degradation.
Before the rise of home media, a film ceased to be financially useful to studios after its theatrical run. Many films were intentionally destroyed by the studios that made them; there was no reason to keep them around after they were screened, since they would rarely be shown again. Little by little, studios realized the need to restore and preserve their film collections. In 1990, Martin Scorsese and other filmmakers established The Film Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the restoration and preservation of film prints. Restoration involves meticulously cleaning the dirt and dust from a film, splicing torn film, and restoring damaged or missing frames using adjacent ones. Depending on the condition of a print, the process can cost anywhere from $50,000 to $450,000, and it can take years. Once a film is restored, new prints and digital copies are made in order to ensure redundancy. Studios now have a vested interest in guaranteeing the safety of their film prints, but the results of their efforts are rarely made accessible to the public. “You don't hear about it,” Klacsmann tells me, “because they make these [film] elements, and then they just go to some salt mine in Kansas, where they sit in the cold.”
Cairo Station (Youssef Chahine, 1958).
The goal of Rarefilmm and the Internet Archive is to provide access, not to preserve master copies or produce high-fidelity transfers. As they accumulate more and more material, these digital libraries are coming into possession of films whose physical media are lost or extremely difficult to find. Many of the films on both platforms are in 1080p resolution, or lower. Sometimes, however, these low-resolution copies inadvertently became the only way to view a film, or even the only extant copy of a film. Mohammed Shebl's queer Egyptian remake of the The Rocky Picture Horror Show (1975), titled Fangs (1981), has experienced a surge of interest among film programmers in recent years and developed its own cult following, but it only exists as a low-resolution (416 x 312 pixels) copy on the Internet Archive. By all accounts, the original print is lost, and this is the only way to watch the film.
For Whitehead, access is integral to preservation. “There's a lot of very selfish collectors who don't care at all about film preservation,” he tells me in an online exchange. “All they care about is making their collections bigger and bigger, and they will go to great lengths to try to hoard as many rare things as possible.”
Once Rarefilmm secures a physical copy of a movie (either a film print or a home-media release), it is scanned or transferred to a digital video file and, sometimes, manually subtitled. Whitehead and other volunteers also adjust the film's audio if the quality is particularly poor. Even if the archive and digital library share similar goals and principles, the nature of the work of the digital library draws critique. When I spoke to Kyle Westphal, a projectionist and co-programmer for the Chicago Film Society, he emphasized their focus on digital restoration processes: “Generationally and ideologically, I don't have the same regard and affection for these services.… Fundamentally, I don't think it's a system that sets up the feedback loop that allows high-quality work to be done.”
Even as film archives and preservationists are increasingly using digital technology to restore and copy prints, the rise of digital threatens the future of film-on-film. “Every time someone says, ‘We don't have to shoot on film,’ or ‘We're going to do this preservation digitally and not make a backup film negative’... well, that's kind of an existential threat to the ecosystem,” Westphal says. Even as the future of cinematic exhibition on film remains uncertain, the physical medium itself is here to stay. Polyester film is more stable than digital storage or analog tape. Hard drives must constantly be powered on, but polyester film is passive; once a print is made and stored, it can last for centuries. It’s so stable that Microsoft, owner of Github, an online code repository, recently archived a majority of that website by printing it to 186 film reels that are now being kept in an Arctic vault, the “Arctic World Archive.” It’s clear that the future of cinema will rely on both digital and physical media—not just one or the other.
Madagascar (Fernando Pérez, 1995).
The question, then, is whether the archival work of amateur digital preservationists serves a more specific purpose, pointing to the structural importance of access. Both Rarefilmm and the Internet Archive aim to host movies for which the copyright has expired, or which were never copyrighted in the first place, and they both allow users to submit Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests. The DMCA, passed by the US Congress in 1998, allows content owners and creators to request copyrighted content be taken down from platforms. Sites that fail to abide by DMCA takedown notices face stiff penalties, and litigating erroneous takedown requests can be an expensive exercise in futility.
Streaming services have made millions of films accessible to film lovers around the world at the click of a button, but titles come and go from these platforms regularly. Distributors can revoke access to films on a whim, or even censor them. Last June, viewers of The French Connection (1971) on the Criterion Channel, Apple TV, and Amazon Prime realized that a scene featuring a racial slur had been edited by the rights holder, Disney, without any notice. The DMCA imposes digital rights management (DRM) regulations: section 1201(a) makes it illegal for consumers to circumvent DRM (for example, encryption, screen-capture restrictions, and watermarking) on copyrighted material, even if the media was obtained in a legal manner, and even if it is to be used in accordance with the fair-use doctrine. So, if a film is still under copyright, there is no legal way to preserve it via distributing copies. In 2023, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a brief in a US Court of Appeals, arguing that section 1201(a) violates the First Amendment by barring fair use of copyrighted works. The case is ongoing.
Despite the complications arising from the Digital Services Act, Rarefilmm has no plans to cease operations. "I’m not going to give up,” Whitehead wrote on the site, “especially when we’re so close to that beautiful 10 year anniversary." He’s not alone, either. When the news broke about Rarefilmm’s library going down, supporters of the site came out in droves to show their support. Whitehead and other volunteers scoured Ulož in the wake of the legal decision to see if there were any movies uploaded by other users that they could salvage before the file sharing was restricted. Together, they managed to find, save, and re-upload an additional 140 films. Slowly but surely, Whitehead is rebuilding, though the future of Rarefilmm, the Internet Archive, and similar projects is unclear. For Whitehead, this work is personal and important. In a tweet from February 10, he writes, “The whole situation… going down hit me harder than I thought it would.… [H]opefully I'll start feeling like a normal person again soon.”