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Teaching silent film courses on a regular basis, I'm one of the first to admit that the advent of DVDs has made my job easier. Trying to convince students that the film they are watching is not only a cinema classic, but also as sophisticated and modern as any film made in the sound era, is a particularly hard sell when the print in question is a "dupey," fifth-generation 16mm reduction from the 35mm nitrate original, and dead silent to boot. When shown DVDs produced from restored master materials, and including a full orchestral score or at least piano accompaniment, students are much more willing to give silent films a chance. Having said that, it is also true that far fewer silent film titles are now available on DVD than were once accessible on 16mm, so students are now being exposed to a much more limited canon. Since I have discussed this issue in print in reference to film archives,1 what I would like to do here is address the viability of 16mm as an archival preservation medium, and as a distribution and production medium.
While it may come as a big suqirise to bean-counting university administrators hell-bent on divesting themselves of their 16mm film collections, the 16mm format is alive and well in other quadrants of the media universe. Indeed, improbable as it may seem given all the hype about the death of 16mm, Richard Utley of Kodaks Protek subsidiary reports "substantial" sales increases of 16mm negative film stock over the past several years-as much as S percent last year-due in part to the 2002 introduction of their 7218 film stock. According to the Kodak Sales Department, the resurgence in 16mm sales can be attributed to several factors, including the production of a small, inexpensive Super 16mm camera by Aaton, the A-Minima. Arriflex, Canon, and Cooke have also introduced new Super 16 cameras or lenses in response to the resurgence of 16mm film stock sales. Furthermore, improved scanner/telecine transfer techniques have meant that 2k digital masters (with a resolution of 2048 by 1080 pixels) can now be generated from 16mm negatives,2 giving producers and distributors an added incentive to use the cheaper 16mm, rather than 35mm, as their production medium. In other words, the...