Cleaning and Preservation
CLEANING AND PRESERVATION TOPICS
Film Cleaning and Preservation
We are talking here strictly for the amateur and for narrow gauge films. Major conservation and long term storage of 35mm film is something quite different. The objective here is to conserve films so as to maximize their life and minimise damage. So we want to avoid mechanical damage, avoid scratching, prevent drying out, colour fade and sound loss and present the best possible image on the screen.
First, keep your films in a proper container. The minimum requirement is a proper box that will not allow the film to fall out or the end to trail out to get damaged. Better is a close fitting metal box that will help to prevent drying out or accidental damage. In all cases, label the bloody thing clearly and in a position that enables it to be easily read when it is stacked away. Delete old markings that could confuse. You can have pretty and neat and uniform etc if you want, but you must have CLEAR! You can use those clips to hold the end of the film on the reel tidily, but if you are storing with only a modicum of care, you don't really need them.
Conditions of storage are about what you can common-sensibly do in the average home. Avoid dust (proper boxes). Avoid damp better to keep inside even a centrally heated house than a damp shed. Do not transfer from cold to hot temperatures condensation may form, leading to damage. I suppose it will all get more difficult as films get older, but Ive had no problems just keeping them in the house.
Cleaning films is mainly needful for the dirty gauges, ie 9.5 and the really filthy 17.5. I suspect 17.5 projectionists were actually told to put oil on films I cant see how they got that much on accidentally. Cleaning is also good for eg mag stripe films, as they do tend to shed some mag particles over time and maybe muddy the sound. There is also the preservation issue you may even delay colour fade.
There has been a range of products over time. Carbon Tetrachloride (now banned as too poisonous now you tell me!), Perklone and other such stuff are simply solvents you can use as cleaners. Not too keen on Perklone I think it may get at the important sticky stuff on splicing tape. Then there are various proprietary products-: 2.22 (now reported to cause colour fade over a long period), Renofilm, Cresclean, Thermofilm, Permafilm, Permanew, Vitafilm and maybe others. These all claim to a greater or lesser extent that they preserve, lubricate, improve sound or reduce scratches or all of the above.
SAFETY NOTICE
All the above products must be used with good ventilation, not for long periods and not drunk.
(Sorry, you have to do this sort of thing nowadays.)
They are of two main types. The first three proprietaries at least are what I would call the persistent type, that is, you get a wetting of the film and a residual film of stuff on the film. If you use a lot the film can get quite wet. I have tended, not terribly logically, to prefer these as at least you can see youve done something. I also find them better at removing eg sellotape residues. Excess applications may however be visible on screen, and they wont be everyones cup of tea. The others (cant speak for Permanew never used it) seem to be more volatile and evaporate off the film more rapidly, hopefully leaving good stuff behind. Actually, Ive used nearly all of them fairly indiscriminately. Ive never done controlled double-blind tests on a sample of films over thirty years, but I just feel these things do help to keep film in better condition. Mind you, I also believe that the elephant powder I put by the back door is what has kept my house free of elephants. What they will all do successfully without doubt is help to remove dirt from your films. This is a good thing it can show up on the screen and build up in the gate and cause scratching.
My cleaning method is simple. I take an ordinary cheap tissue The more expensive ones may be more linty) and fold it in half four times. This gives a square about 1.5 inches on a side. This is enough clean surface for two passes with 8 and 9.5, one with 16 and 17.5. Wet it with your chosen fluid, fold it round the film and wind. When it gets dry or dirty, stop, refold as necessary to expose a clean surface and repeat. By folding and refolding, I reckon to get at least 8 clean surfaces per tissue. Yes, I am mean enough to save tissues but I also save time and expensive cleaning stuff.
Care is needed to get the correct pressure. If you find damage you missed at the repair stage, you may find the tissue snags and this could do damage. How soon you need to stop and recharge depends rarely on 8, but on 17.5 I may get a maximum of four turns of the rewind at the start and as little as one at the end before there is so much filth I have to stop. I have repeated this as many as four times without getting all the dirt off.
It may seem somewhat surprising, but this doesnt seem to scratch the film. I suppose it might if you just use the same surface or the same piece of dirty cloth all the time. One thing it does do is to wind the film up very tight. I make a point of finishing with a normal rewind before putting the film away.
With narrow gauge film, we dont get the problems of deterioration that afflicts 35 nitrate, but we can get vinegar syndrome. I recently acquired my first ever 9.5 films with this problem and believe me you cant miss it. The current received wisdom is that some form of absorption thingy may help. I got some from Classic Home Cinema, put them in with the films and sealed them up tight in cans. I didn't really feel it made a lot of difference, but I must admit my experiment was very limited.
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The above was a fairly early entry on my website. Here is a more recent exchange I had with an American friend.
Let me share my dilemma with you. I have a lot of 17.5 film. Much of it is damaged at least in part. The only way many of them can ever be projected as more than a disjointed mess is to use tape for repair. The films are also absolutely filthy - no film I have ever met on any other gauge is anything like it (except sometimes 9.5!). But I have no way of cleaning them other than using some form of solvent and a standard facial/nasal tissue. But if I try to clean the film before repairing it, I will do even more damage. If I repair it first, the cleaner tends to loosen the tape and undermine the repairs. There is anyway the whole question of what to treat the film with in an attempt to preserve it as well as possible whilst making it projectable (I have no illusions about "lost" films - I just can't not try to repair the films and make them viewable).
If I use camphor (see Camphor etc page), it can only be at the very first stage, which rules it out for any film I have already worked on, which will have tape and/or stuff like Vitafilm, Thermofilm etc. Some films I have never touched will have this problem, too. Similarly, I can't dunk film in Vitafilm or similar (too expensive anyway); tape would never adhere after and if applied before would come off.
One guy I got some film from had come up with an alternative repair method which he claimed was suitable for films with all elongated perfs, which even I cannot fix with tape (only short stretches). He used a mix of acetone, glacial acetic acid, New Skin (a proprietary sort of "liquid plaster" for applying to minor wounds) and dissolved scraps of film to create a gunk to fill sprocket holes completely and then re-perforate. I actually have a perforator, made by a sadly now-deceased engineer, which if I can ever get round to slitting film effectively and testing it may give me both double- and single-perf 17.5 leader and maybe re-perforate films either thru the afore-mentioned gunk or just in a different place so as to make the film runnable thru changing the position of the picture gate.
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Okay hopefully I will hit all the points but here would be my "professional" opinion in terms of moving forwards with the different 17.5 dilemmas.
1 - The rule of thumb for never putting a cleaned film in the camphor is a good one but not a crippling one.... There are slow-dry cleaner like Vitafilm and fast dry cleaners like Perklone (now outlawed here in the US), Urbanski makes one called Solvon, there is a professional one called Hexane, and others...... The best plan would be to take the film that has been treated previously and clean it with a fast drying cleaner to try and get as much of the residue off so as to hopefully not corrupt the camphor when you seal things up...... As long as there is not active cleaner on the film (as the fast drying ones evaporate) the camphor should not be compromised...... Hopefully that will serve as at least one possible option....
The case of tape is a tricky one since cleaners / camphor / basically everything will tend to undermine the tape that has already been applied. The best plan would be to test in small doses such as putting a film in the camphor for a couple of days....Hopefully enough to allow it to absorb into the film but not long enough for all existing plastics to melt.
As far as dunking films....Keep in mind that most of the cleaners that you can dunk in are also reusable.....I keep a couple of jugs of film renew and have some sealed cans where I will dunk films for a period of time and then when the cleaner in the can looks like it is filled with dirt, etc I strain the cleaner through a coffee filter and it usually removes most of the dirt leaving the cleaner ready to dunk another film into it.
Or if you'd rather do the thumb and forefinger clean then I would just say that having the option of using either a quick drying cleaner or a slow drying cleaner is almost crucial, especially in a case where you need to clean off the slow drying cleaner. As for using the standard facial/nasal tissue I would maybe steer you away from those and try to use something like the following: http://www.lithcoproducts.com/prods/bba-webril.htm
As for the gunk method, that was actually very popular back in the nitrate days as you'll find these nicely made film repairs where they have filled in a section and it looks like film plastic surgery. The obvious problem is it is going to me a much slower method waiting for the gunk to harden completely before it could be rolled back up.
As for 17.5 leader I actually have a few rolls of the stuff as it was once a very common magnetic sound format for Hollywood, and they just slit 35mm down the middle...I have split reels, rolls of the leader, and it all matches up perfectly it just has twice as many sprocket holes.
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Surely the holes in the 17.5 mag are too big? Can it actually run thru a projector?
Fascinating to hear of gunk being used. What was it? A particular concern is films of 8 reels, the first 6 of which are fine but the last two have chads waiting to drop out at the next showing. A tiny speck of gunk might be the answer to films that could never otherwise be shown. I also have some very badly damaged film, most notably Betty's Good Fortune (5r 17.5 silent) where the sprockets on both sides are often gone at the same time so that the (vertically-speaking) single-pin claw of the silent projector won't work.
When it comes to use of tissues, it may really be a case of cost. Helpfully, the site you sent a link to has no prices, but anyway my consumption is enormous. I was cleaning just the last 6-10' of a film the other day; a single wipe with a tissue soaked in Perk left that part of the tissue black. I have known films take up to 5 passes to get anything approaching clean. I have often worried about the risk of scratching, tho' more because of the particles of dirt than the tissue - which is why I change surfaces very frequently. However, I have to say I have never seen anything serious; indeed, my 17.5 copy of Comme J'ai Tumon Enfant (5r silent, boast, boast) has been heavily cleaned and has come out positively luminous - just ask Tony Saffrey, who watched a bit with me. (Pity the film itself is crap.) And the format must be close to 16:9 it's so wide.
Incidentally, I am using dry-cleaning fluid - Perklone gotten in bulk from my local dry-cleaner - I hope this is not too horribly evil? I can't find or afford anything else in the sorts of quantities I need - I only add the good stuff AFTER cleaning. In fact, very little is available in the UK. I can buy Vitafilm in tiny and hugely costly quantities from Europe - the American supplier won't ship direct as the regulatory requirements at both end are so labyrinthine -and Paul Foster here imports a lubricant stuff whose name I cannot at the moment recall but it too is very expensive and makes no claim to be a preservative anyway. I like the idea of recycling fluid by straining, but if one is using fast-drying ie evaporating stuff losses must be high. Classic Home Cinema are about the only ones left doing anything, but their stuff is slow-drying.
I have just tried leaving some 17.5 in a sealed can with camphor as you prescribed. Trouble is, it's hard to tell what difference it makes without some sort of way of measuring flexibility.
I have got a 9.5 sound feature marinating in Vitafilm which is probably due for opening to see if the Vinegar has been cured as per advertising copy. I will let you know.