In part, this is because all five films up for tonight's top honour received money from Telefilm Canada, and starting in 2001, the federal agency mandated that all features receiving Telefilm assistance have to submit two archival-quality prints of each finished movie to Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, plus a Digital Betacam version for mastering purposes.
Without that requirement, the fate of tonight's winner could have been that of the 1985 best picture, The Bay Boy, starring Kiefer Sutherland and Liv Ullmann and directed by the late Daniel Petrie Sr.
The Austin Willis Moving Images Centre at St. Mary's University in Halifax wants to restore Bay Boy and get approval for a non-profit tour of it, including a showing later this year at the 25th-anniversary celebration of the Atlantic Film Festival, which featured Bay Boy as its inaugural presentation. However, the centre can't find a 35-mm print of the film -- former distributors such as Orion and Spectra have folded and their inventory scattered -- or any of its constituent parts (the negative original, master positive, soundtrack), or the person or company who owns its rights.
Library and Archives has one 35-mm print in its vault -- but as Halifax film programmer Ron Foley Macdonald notes, without knowing who the rights-holder is, "we can't get clearance to make a copy." Moreover, making a copy would cost as much as $20,000, Macdonald says, and even if that money were available, it's uncertain if Library and Archives would let its sole, fragile celluloid print be used for duplication purposes. "It's frustrating, needless to say."
When you visit a well-stocked video store these days, it seems the full history of commercial cinema awaits your perusal, either on DVD or VHS. But this plenitude is illusory, a kind of cinematic Potemkin village. Indeed, in the United States, which has churned out the most movies of any nation over the past 100 years, it's estimated that 50 per cent of the features produced there before 1950 have disappeared, a result of the effects of technological obsolescence, neglect, financial hardship and inadequate archiving. For films produced before 1920, the figure is 80 per cent.
Canada's audio-visual heritage has experienced a similar fate, albeit on a considerably more modest scale. There are, for instance, no longer any known copies of our first talkie, The Crimson Paradise, a melodrama shot in a Victoria studio in 1933, or of Evangeline, a 1913 silent that, at 75-minutes, is regarded as the country's first feature-length movie.
In fact, of the 30 or so silent features known to have been made in the Great White North between the early 1900s and 1928, only five are in the collection of Library and Archives Canada. Even usable prints of films of more recent vintage, such as The Bay Boy and the Genie-winning 1983 adaptation of Timothy Findley's The Wars, are scarce to non-existent. And ofthe 3,000 titles estimated to have been completed in Canada in the past 100 years, less than half -- around 1,200 -- are housed at Library and Archives.
In part, this is because there's no requirement for filmmakers, as there is for book publishers, to make what's called "a legal deposit" of their wares there. True, Telefilm-funded productions are now required to do so, but this does not extend to "indie" filmmakers, whose work is often made without state assistance. Furthermore, almost eight years have passed since any update was made to Film and Video Canadiana, the authoritative database of production activity established by the NFB in 1981.
Laurie Jones, director of communications and outreach development for the National Film Board, notes that "film can last for 200 years" but for that to happen, "it needs to be properly conserved," preferably in a darkened, humidity-controlled vault kept at between minus-15 and plus-15 degrees Celsius. Which is what the NFB has had for its 10,000 titles at its Montreal headquarters since 1996.
Ours is a digital age, of course, and eventually the movies you'll be seeing in your local multiplex will be 100-per-cent digital -- shot on digital, edited digitally, released in a digital format. But until that occurs, what's happening in commercial theatres is essentially the same as what's been going on since the late 1890s -- reels of film stock, 35-mm or 16-mm wide and thousands of metres long, are hurried through a mechanical projector with an illuminated lens that throws the picture onto a chemically treated screen. As any filmgoer knows, this process is a cruel one: By the third or fourth time a film is circulated through a projector, all sorts of nicks, tears and streaks are evident on the emulsion.
Then there are longer-range problems such as colour-fading, nitrate deterioration and perhaps most famously, the "vinegar syndrome" -- the term used to describe the production of acetic acid after moisture finds its way into film stored in a sealed canister. Celluloid, like humans, it seems, needs to breathe and "exercise." Without such ministrations, a 300-metre stretch of film (about 10 minutes of viewing time) can generate as much as 250 teaspoonfuls of household vinegar!
Chemical and mechanical issues aside, a film's existence or non-existence often has a lot to do with historical circumstance. As D. J. Turner, senior archivist at Library and Archives, notes, prior to the invention of television, the creation of repertory houses and film societies, and the rise of home video, a movie's only life was its play dates in commercial theatres. "So if MGM made, say, 1,000 prints of Gone with the Wind, they'd ask to get them back and when they did, they'd destroy most of them. . . . Old films were about as much use as a paper handkerchief."
Of course, there never was 100-per-cent compliance with the return policy. Enterprising individuals or companies would filch a print or three, sometimes creating substantial archives in the process. It's this taint of illegality, Turner says, that explains why "some archives are so secretive. They may have a print of something, but they're reluctant to say so because don't want to be sued upside and down by rights-holders."
Even when an institution such as Library and Archives has money to buy old films, "when you work backward, you discover that the negatives have disappeared, or the negative is there but the soundtrack is in a different country." Then there are the sorts of problems associated with The Bay Boy. "That's why, from an archival standpoint, you have to make your acquisition of a film as close to its creation as possible."
Turner says he has spent 30 years looking for a print of A Cool Sound from Hell, a low-budget feature directed in 1958 by Toronto's Sidney J. Furie that received virtually no distribution before Furie left for Britain and the U.S. and fame with The Ipcress File and Lady Sings the Blues. So far he's come up empty-handed.
It's vagaries like these that led to the creation, in 1996, of the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust (AVPT), a non-profit organization financed by government departments, companies such as Astral Media and Universal Studios, and institutions such as the Toronto International Film Festival.
While the AVPT has some money to disburse -- last year it gave the Willis Centre $10,000 toward its Bay Boy restoration effort -- its powers, so to speak, tend to be more persuasive than compulsory: "We would like to see every organization that makes films have a plan internally for reliable preservation," explains Sandra Macdonald, president of the AVPT as well as a former chairwoman of the NFB and current CEO of the Canadian Television Fund. "Our second level of ambition is for there to be a representative sampling of archival material. It doesn't all have to be in one place. It also doesn't make sense, we know, to keep everything. Basically, we'd like to see things saved that are important."
To this end, the trust announced in 1999 the creation of its Masterworks Program. Each year a total of 12 artifacts -- three each from the disciplines of film, TV, radio and sound recording, and all at least 15 years old -- are granted masterpiece status on the basis of their "contribution to our collective sense of self."
This year, the three film choices were J. A. Martin, photographe (Jean Beaudin, director, 1976); The Row dyman (Peter Carter, dir., 1979) and B egone Dull Care (Norman McLaren, Evelyn Lambart, dirs., 1949).