Forever on Film

There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a movie theater right before a very old film begins. Not the ordinary hush of an audience settling in. Something deeper. More anticipatory. A collective holding of breath, as though everyone in the room has quietly agreed to receive something fragile and irreplaceable.

I felt that silence at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles last year, during the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival. The occasion was a special 50th anniversary presentation of Jaws, but this was not simply a screening. What TCM had unearthed was a rare 1975 Technicolor dye-transfer British release print, a print that had reportedly sat untouched since the year of the film's original release. Ben Mankiewicz described how, during the COVID-19 lockdown, a group of interns had stumbled upon this print entirely by accident. Nobody had played it anywhere. Nobody had looked at it in decades. A team was assembled, the print was carefully inspected and restored, and it was brought to Los Angeles to be shared with an audience for what may have been the first time in half a century.

When the lights went down and that image materialized on screen, something happened in that theater that I find difficult to articulate fully even now. The colors had a warmth and tactile depth that no digital version of Jaws has ever possessed. The grain was alive in a way that felt genuinely organic, genuinely human. I did not simply feel like I was watching a great film. I felt like I was touching history.

I walked out that night thinking about all the prints that are not so lucky. The films sitting in archives in varying states of decay. The nitrate reels slowly turning to dust. The acetate prints quietly succumbing to vinegar syndrome in forgotten corners of studio vaults. And the small, passionate community of people working urgently, with limited resources and profound conviction, to make sure that as little as possible is lost on their watch.

This piece is my attempt to understand that world more deeply. And it begins, as all good film conversations should, with the people who love it most.

Film restoration is a phrase that can sound almost clinical from the outside, as though it refers to a technical process rather than an act of genuine cultural rescue. Spend any time around the people who do this work, and you quickly understand that restoration is closer to archaeology than it is to engineering. It is the painstaking, interpretive, deeply human project of recovering something that was slipping away.

Chris Robinson, film historian, curator, and the man responsible for overseeing TCM Classic Film Festival's physical film prints, has one of the most unusual and demanding jobs in the industry. He begins his work long before a single audience member walks through the festival doors, reaching out to archives around the world, negotiating over print conditions, arranging customs documentation, and ensuring that when a film arrives in Los Angeles, it arrives in the best possible state for presentation.

"Films need an audience," Robinson told me simply. "They don't mean anything unless someone is there to see them."

That statement carries real weight when you understand the scale of what has already been lost. Of the films made in Hollywood before 1929, roughly 70 percent no longer exist in any form. The heat, the chemical instability of early nitrate stock, the fires, the indifference of studios who once considered their back catalogues commercial dead weight: all of it conspired to eliminate a staggering proportion of cinema's earliest history. The films that survive do so largely because someone, somewhere, cared enough to act before it was too late.

Robinson and his team’s work during the festival is partly logistical and partly forensic. They read prints the way a doctor reads an X-ray, looking for splices that suggest misuse, for Kodak edge codes that can tell you almost to the year when a particular print was struck. He spoke candidly about the chaos that can unfold even at a festival as carefully organized as TCM: wrong versions sent by distributors, incorrect aspect ratios embedded in otherwise pristine materials. One particularly memorable close call involved a Barefoot in the Park restoration print sent by Deluxe, which Robinson identified as incorrect before it even reached the DCP inspection team. "We have film inspection for a reason," he said dryly.

On the tension between digital and analog, Robinson does not flinch. "Film looks better," he said, "but it has to be a good print." He cited Library of Congress archivist Gregory Lukow's description of a DCP digital cinema drive as being, for archival purposes, "as good as a doorstop." He noted that Pixar once accidentally deleted Toy Story 2, with the only surviving copy found on an employee's home desktop. He pointed out that Martin Scorsese once asked Columbia for a print of his own 1993 film The Age of Innocence, only to be told no prints remained. "If you drop a film, you pick it up," Robinson observed. "If you drop a hard drive, it could break."

Genevieve McGillicuddy, the Executive and Founding Director of the TCM Classic Film Festival, has been building and protecting this sanctuary for cinema lovers since the festival's inception in 2010, when it opened with the North American premiere of the restored Metropolis. Over the years, she has watched TCM become one of the most important annual platforms for world-premiere restorations anywhere in the world.

What strikes me most about McGillicuddy is the emotional vocabulary she uses to describe what the festival does. She calls the Egyptian Theatre "a veritable temple of film." She describes the audience experience as feeling like "time travel." And when she points to a screening that captures why this work matters, she reaches not for a famous title but for something most people will never have heard of.

"There was a special energy in the room for the hotly anticipated world premiere restoration of Letty Lynton this year," she told me, referring to a 1932 Joan Crawford film that had been legally shelved for over ninety years due to copyright complications. "This was a film that no one in the audience had seen, since being shelved due to legal complications ninety years earlier. Everyone applauded as the opening credits rolled and gave Joan Crawford a deserved ovation when she appeared on the screen."

Think about that for a moment. A room full of people applauding for an actress who died in 1977, for a film they were seeing for the first time in nine decades. That is the TCM Classic Film Festival at its most essential. That is what restoration, at its best, makes possible.

McGillicuddy is also clear-eyed about the economics. TCM often funds the creation of new prints and digital cinema packages that go into wider circulation. The festival draws press and critical attention to films that would otherwise remain invisible. And it serves, in her words, as an important part of "the larger landscape of repertory theatres and specialty classic film programs" fighting to keep cinema history alive in an era when streaming platforms pull titles without notice and studio libraries consolidate relentlessly.

If Robinson and McGillicuddy represent the institutional infrastructure of film preservation, then Edgar Wright represents something equally important: the passionate advocate working from within the creative community to amplify the conversation.

Wright attended this year's TCM Classic Film Festival to introduce a midnight screening of Vanishing Point, the 1971 road movie that feels, even now, like a dispatch from a specific and unrepeatable moment in American cinema history. He is a man who describes cinema as "a party you can never be late to," and who has spent significant portions of his career not just making films but programming them, curating them, and bringing his considerable platform to bear on behalf of titles that might otherwise be forgotten.

He is a member of the BFI Board of Governors, specifically focused on curating, preserving, producing, and educating. He has joined the Film Foundation, Martin Scorsese's organization dedicated to restoring and protecting motion picture history. He has programmed seasons at the BFI Southbank and the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, curated for Arrow Video and Empire Magazine, and in 2024 oversaw a 4K restoration of his own sophomore feature, Shaun of the Dead, to mark its twentieth anniversary.

"Letting any film disappear into obscurity or not be available in its best form is a crime," Wright told me with characteristic directness. "It's not just the loss of art, but it's history. Films are a time capsule of the time in which they were made, and beyond precious for the context of the industry and the techniques, but also sometimes as a record of the place they are shot. Cities, countries, actors, and artists live onscreen forever."

When I asked about his own formative experiences with restored cinema, Wright described a Time Out festival at the Empire in Leicester Square, shortly after he moved to London at twenty, where he sat in the front row and watched The Wild Bunch, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Searchers, L'Atalante, and La Dolce Vita back-to-back. "I was sitting so close, I wanted to be in the picture," he said.

That overwhelming, permanently formative encounter with great cinema in the right setting is exactly what restoration makes possible for future generations. Wright noted with barely concealed frustration that certain major streaming platforms carry "terrible SD copies" of classic films when far superior versions exist. "I think most cinema fans have realized that the mainstream streamers offer a pathetic range of older movies, and that to find the jewels of cinema you must look further afield," he said.

He also made a point often underappreciated in restoration discussions: curation is itself a form of preservation. When a filmmaker of Wright's standing puts his name behind a film and argues publicly for its significance, that act extends the film's cultural life in ways that matter. "I feel I have learnt about so many films through the advocacy of other filmmakers, notably Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino," he said. "Loving cinema is a lifetime pursuit and because there are thousands of films out there, more than one can possibly watch, it's good to shine a light on the ones you love."

Australian filmmaker Anthony Maras, whose directorial debut Hotel Mumbai brought international attention for its unflinching and intimately human portrayal of the 2008 terrorist attacks in India, found himself confronting the stakes of archival film directly while making his follow-up feature Pressure, which dramatizes events from World War II. To prepare, Maras immersed himself in hours of original wartime footage, material shot by cinematographers who carried 35mm cameras directly into history as it unfolded. The experience changed him profoundly.

He described watching Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old as a turning point. Jackson's team had colorized and restored old black-and-white material with startling immediacy. "Suddenly, it no longer looked like soldiers from history, but people you might have just passed in the street," Maras said. "There was an intimacy and immediacy to the imagery that I wanted to imbue in Pressure."

For Maras, preservation is ultimately an emotional question. "For over a hundred years, film has become central to how we collectively experience our world," he told me. "Film preservation is essential to holding on to who we are, by understanding who we were and where we came from." And he is candid about digital complacency. "If we just leave it all up in the cloud, we might be just a solar flare away from losing it all. Imagine that: the next generation asking what Goodfellas was, or what it was like to watch a Hitchcock film."

Some of the most personally invested voices in this conversation belong to filmmakers for whom the question of preservation carries a dimension that is both professional and deeply intimate. Gita Pullapilly and Aron Gaudet have spent nearly two decades building a body of work that moves fluidly between documentary and narrative cinema, from their early film The Way We Get By to their studio comedy Queenpins.

Their Emmy-nominated documentary The Way We Get By, an intimate portrait of the Maine Troop Greeters of Bangor, required them to sit with nearly 300 hours of footage capturing moments of grief, humor, vulnerability, and connection that exist nowhere else. "Right now, that material is sitting in boxes," Pullapilly told me. "If something happened to us, much of it could simply disappear. Only the two of us fully understand what those tapes contain and why they matter." As filmmakers of Indian-American and French-Acadian backgrounds respectively, they bring a perspective rarely centered in the restoration world: the perspective of filmmakers from underrepresented communities, for whom the question of whose stories survive is not abstract but existential.

"Cinema becomes distorted when only certain people are allowed to remain visible over time," Pullapilly told me. "The archive can begin to imply that only a narrow set of lives, aesthetics, languages, and experiences mattered enough to preserve, when in reality our cultural history has always been far more expansive, layered, and complicated."

Gaudet extended that concern. "A restored film can completely transform a younger filmmaker's understanding of what is creatively, politically, and personally possible for them," he said. "So many filmmakers from underrepresented communities are made to feel, implicitly or explicitly, that they are anomalies, that there is no history behind what they want to create. Preservation pushes back against that erasure."

They speak about the survival of their own work with a frankness that is both moving and sobering. Queenpins, their 2021 comedy starring Kristen Bell and Vince Vaughn, has never been released on physical media in the United States. Gaudet's only copy is a German Blu-ray given to him as a gift by their editor, Kayla Emter. "Once a film leaves your hands, you realize how little control filmmakers often have over where it lives, who can access it, or whether it will still be discoverable decades from now," Pullapilly reflected.

But rather than despair, both filmmakers arrive at purposeful urgency. "Preservation cannot only prioritize commercially successful films or work already validated by dominant cultural systems," Pullapilly said. "Very often, the work that later transforms cinema is the work that initially existed on the periphery. If those films disappear, entire creative genealogies disappear with them."

Gaudet put it in terms every cinephile will recognize: "One person's overlooked film is another filmmaker's entire creative foundation. It should all be preserved."

I think about that sentence often now. It describes exactly what that Jaws print at the Egyptian Theatre meant to me: not just a beloved film rendered more beautifully than I had ever experienced it, but a reminder of how much of cinema's history exists only as long as someone cares enough to protect it.

Gaudet put the stakes as plainly as anyone I spoke to for this piece. "In the same way that removing fifty years of music history would fundamentally alter the future of music, removing decades of cinema history would do the same to film," he said. "The artists of today are inspired and shaped by the art of yesterday. Even after decades of creating great films, auteurs like Scorsese, Spielberg, and Paul Thomas Anderson continue to speak about the cinema of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s as the foundation of everything they do."

What all of these conversations keep returning to is the same core truth: preservation is not nostalgia. It is a form of investment in the future, a recognition that the next generation of storytellers will need access to the full breadth of what cinema has been in order to understand what it can become. Strip away that history and you do not simply impoverish the archive. You impoverish the imagination of everyone who will follow.

Martin Scorsese has said that film restoration is an act of rescue. I think it is also an act of faith: the belief that what human beings have made and felt and imagined together is worth carrying forward, worth fighting for, worth the cost and the labor and the care.

Gita Pullapilly said something near the end of our conversation that has stayed with me since. "The films that shaped us existed because someone believed they were worth protecting long enough for another generation to discover them. That is an extraordinary act of cultural faith."

She is absolutely right. And sitting in that darkened theater at the Egyptian, watching a film print from 1975 fill a screen with colors I had never quite seen before, I understood that the act of preservation is ultimately an act of love. Love for the filmmakers, the writers, the cast and crew, who made these things at great personal cost. Love for the audiences who received them and were changed. Love for the people not yet born who deserve the chance to be changed in the same way.

That is the promise embedded in the phrase forever on film. Not a technical guarantee, but a human one. A promise made by every archivist who carefully transfers a fading print, every festival director who builds a space where old films can meet new audiences, every filmmaker who puts their name behind a title that might otherwise be forgotten. A promise that what we have loved and been shaped by will still be there, waiting, for whoever needs it next.

Cinema was always meant to outlast us. The people in this story are making sure it does.