By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 30, 2008

Our cultural treasury, preserved by the Library of Congress, is vast and unpredictable. It includes "Casablanca" with Bogie and the only live concert recording of jazzmen Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. But there's also Bea Arthur as an alien cantina chanteuse in a legendarily awful "Star Wars" TV special from 1978. And in recent years, Islamic recordings via the al-Jazeera channel.

Gregory Lukow, chief of the library's Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, has overseen the centralization of 5.7 million such audio and visual artifacts at a repurposed Cold War-era government bunker in Culpeper.

This new National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, in addition to its temperature-controlled vaults, features a specially developed robotic preservation system that will make items available faster to scholars and the public.

Is this move urgent, or even necessary?

It's especially urgent for magnetic media such as videotape, where the center's new visual technologies will allow for the first time for significant increases in the preservation of hundreds of thousands of deteriorating videotapes in the library's collection. Videotape is a slow rot -- it's just not a long-term medium. It ranges from CNN's 24/7 coverage from 20 years ago to "The 'Star Wars' Holiday Special," which is one of the first things we're going to digitize. It's incredibly, wonderfully campy, a must-be-seen-to-be-believed artifact of its time. We've selected it as the first tape to be preserved in our new robotic digital videotape preservation system [called SAMMA].

What's the coolest technology you'll have at your disposal, and why is it important?

Besides SAMMA, there's another machine invented for [the Culpeper campus] as well called IRENE, a sound preservation technology. The name was chosen to honor [blues guitarist] Leadbelly's "Goodnight, Irene," which was one of the first things they worked on in the prototype of the machine. It's a system that uses digital imaging technologies to be able to capture the sounds of grooved media. . . . It can even do it with broken disks. It's a laser that takes millions of photographs of grooves and reconstructs sounds from the digital imaging.

No offense to your cataloguing skills, but in this big move that began three years ago, have you found or discovered items that have surprised you?

It's not that we found items. We knew we had X number of films, video or sound recordings, but when you get into them you discover little jewels of content. . . . About two years ago, we were giving a final inspection to all the nitrate film holdings at our Dayton, Ohio, office, and we discovered two different-length copies of "Baby Face" [a 1933 Barbara Stanwyck drama about a woman who uses sex to advance her social status]. We discovered one copy was indeed a pre-censored, original version.

What was too racy in 1933?

Even the censored version made it abundantly clear Stanwyck's character was sleeping her way to the top through a succession of ever more powerful men. But the original version was more blatant in showing how she was prostituted by her father, how she uses Nietzsche's "will to power" [philosophy] as her inspiration to "use men" and "crush all sentiment," and in the leering depiction of the seduction of her lovers, including one inside a ladies restroom. Perhaps the biggest broken taboo, however, was that she got away with everything at the end, with no moral retribution or movie comeuppance.

How bizarrely specialized does your preservation staff get?

We have experts in amateur movies and home films, a major area of film study in academia in the last 10 years because it documents a region or town at a particular time. There's a [1930] film called "From Stump to Ship," filmed in Maine during the silent era, and that's an incredible record of an incredibly important industry, the logging business.

How much comes to you on any given day?

We acquire every year 100,000 to 120,000 items; most of that is 90,000 to 100,000 sound recordings and 20,000 to 30,000 films and TV programs. There's sometimes more because of legacy acquisitions from estates of creators who've died.

Will you use your power as division chief to make a film you like a priority in preservation or screening?

I look forward to being able to show early nitrate films by Ernst Lubitsch or Josef von Sternberg or King Vidor or John Ford that'll be eye-opening. The new theater has a new organ that can be brought up on a riser from underneath the stage, so we'll replicate the process as close as possible as the original audience 70 or 80 years ago could experience.

What's it like to be responsible for so many items that form the backbone of our cultural heritage?

The biggest thrill is in the acquisitions area. One of the highlights was the Rick Prelinger archives, the largest film collection we've acquired in the history of the library, about 150,000 reels of film. Prelinger began collecting decades ago what he referred to as "ephemeral" film -- educational, industrial, training, high school driver's ed films, a film of the conversion of a Chrysler factory from making cars to making tanks in World War II. It's all the filmmaking that's other than Hollywood.

Do you ever have to get rid of things because of limited space or changes in priorities?

No.