Picture your favorite film of all time. You may have your favorite moments, but don’t remember everything about the film. One day, you decide you want to refresh your memory, only to discover the film no longer exists. There is no way to possibly watch it ever again. In this digital age, it is hard to imagine content no longer being available, but this scenario has made thousands of films from the beginning of cinema through the end of the 20th century inaccessible and continues to threaten existing films today. Film is a great cultural artifact, and the loss of its history is an irrecoverable travesty. If there was no intervention, very few films from cinema’s history would be available today, but thankfully the issue of preservation became a pressing matter throughout the 20th century, and although not every film was able to be preserved, a great many of them were saved from oblivion. Film preservation, simply put, is the effort of storing and rescuing decaying film stock for the benefit of future generations. It …