In the town of Culpeper Virginia, you will find a gorgeous 45-acre campus, complete with beautiful architectural structures and immaculate landscaping. What isn’t apparent is that under the surface lies a fortified nuclear bunker that maintains a vast amount of the United States’ cinematic history.
The Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center is based in an underground fortified structure built during the Cold War. In the case of a nuclear attack, it was to be used as an evacuation location for the president and other dignitaries. It also kept safe US$4 billion in gold currency.
“I think my purpose, is to make sure that we remember. "
Nowadays however, fears of imminent nuclear destruction have faded away and the location has since been repurposed to provide a globally unprecedented storage facility for the preservation and reformatting of all audiovisual media formats. From film negatives to video tapes and digital copies, the scope this endeavour covers is absolutely huge. Some of these (now obsolete) formats date back 100 years and their long-term safekeeping is both incredibly difficult and delicate.
In a recent video by the Great Big Story YouTube channel, their team managed to meet Archivist George Willeman who escorted them around the vaults and showed them just a small taste of the material being conserved. They include relics from Hollywood’s golden age such as Casablanca and Frankenstein, fantastical wonders from more modern times like Conan The Barbarian and Princess Mononoke, and musical masterpieces like. . . Justin Bieber: Never Say Never.
Okay – we’re pretty sure they’re storing that last one in there just to keep us safe from it.
Never forget. Never forgive. /Great Big Story /YouTube
Bieber aside, the underground area is gigantic, totalling 415,000 square feet. There is with more than an astonishing 90 miles of shelving for storage, and 35 climate controlled vaults for audio recordings, safety films, and videotapes. Due to newly discovered material often being found in poor condition, the campus has dedicated suites to repairing films that were damaged over time. There are also many printing and processing labs, along with the equipment to transfer materials on to digital formats. Digital material is stored in a petabyte-level digital storage archive.
Most importantly, there are 124 special vaults for the oldest films in the campus’ possession, made of nitrate film. As anyone who has seen the end of Inglourious Basterds will know, nitrate film stock is extraordinarily flammable, with a chemical makeup similar to gunpowder. Thick walls keep the film locked away from the elements and people out of danger from them going kablooey.
/Great Big Story /YouTube
Willeman is proud of what the Packard Campus does for the world, saying to GBS, “I think my purpose, is to make sure that we remember. To know what we had and what we looked like and what we did. And film is one of the absolute best ways of doing that. ”
So, when the nuclear bombs fall and the world is blasted into an endless wasteland in which the survivors are forced to battle daily in a nightmarish post-apocalypse, we will be secure in the knowledge that our most priceless cultural belongings are safe.
Even if that does sadly include the Adam Sandler collection.
. digitalrev.com2016-10-12 03:00
