Murder on the Screen

Here's a short film produced by Eastman Kodak showing the care and handling of a film, from printing in the laboratory to distributor to film stations to projector. It's offered as a DRAGNET-style story, with a murder victim (a tattered reel of film) and witnesses, each explaining what they are supposed to do to maintain the perfection of the print -- with views of them in operation -- and their denials that they did anything wrong.

In this post-film world, where even theaters mostly use disks or even internet-connected data to produce images, it's good to take a look backwards and see how film, the medium for movies for almost a century, needed to be handled.

I work in film preservation and this little educational film from 1958 still has lots of good information about film handling. Remember if a picture is worth a thousand words and film runs 24 frames per second then movies are running at 24,000 words per second! Don't damage film, it is one of our richest cultural heritages (that is only if it survives.) Taking the form of a comedic detective story, Murder on the Screen features a hard-headed sleuth investigating the alarming discovery of a horribly mangled and sullied reel of film. Four individuals who were previously involved with the film's handling undergo intense interrogation, highlighting dozens of essential film care procedures while they recall exactly how they dealt with the reel before she met her sudden, mysterious demise. There are several good shots of the various period instruments used to maintain the film, making the production of interest to archivists working with this medium. Extremely informative, though not particularly helpful to the film projectionists of the digital age. A 1958 Calvin Films production for Eastman Kodak. (This description is from a review by GE Pretzel on the Internet Archive where the film can also be seen)