Object of the week: Harold Brown’s handmade film printer, the Mark IV
Cobbled together out of wood, elastic, Meccano and old printer parts, this vintage 1950s device – invented by a preservationist at the BFI National Archive – enabled film archivists to safely make duplicate frames of damaged or fragile films.
Harold Brown was the BFI National Archive’s first Film Preservation Officer. Throughout his 49-year career with the archive, Brown’s scientific approach resulted in numerous trailblazing techniques and discoveries that continue to shape film preservation today.
At the 1967 FIAF Congress in Berlin, Brown presented his latest innovation – a handmade contact step printer. Such printers manually copy a film print one frame at a time. It can be laborious, but this intricate frame-by-frame process means that conservators can safely duplicate early and damaged film stock, too fragile for the archive’s more standard duplication processes.
Designed and built by Brown himself, the printer was constructed with no budget, using materials that were readily available to him. Look closely and you’ll see Meccano, old film printer parts, wood, nails, screws, springs and elastic. A workable model (the Mark I) was first constructed in 1957, and, over the next decade, the design was finessed with the support of professional engineers. After much trial and error, its fourth iteration – the Mark IV – produced the results Brown was looking for.
While the Mark IV may look rudimentary, it is in fact an extremely versatile piece of equipment. It ingeniously caters to a wide range of film materials in various states of decomposition while allowing the operator to monitor and closely control the printing process.
The original film is wound on to spools at either end of the machine and meets new, raw film stock via a horizontal wooden gate. The operator shoots a frame by pulling a handle on the side of the gate, which controls the vertical movement of the lamphouse above it and, consequently, the exposure. The film moves through the machine courtesy of a pair of transport pins, which can be adjusted to compensate for shrinkage or non-standard perforations. Velvet pads prior to the gate, along with additional customisable guides on each side of the film, hold it in place and prevent movement in laterally-shrunken films. At the end of the process, the raw film stock falls loosely into a light-proof bag.
Brown continued to make improvements to the Mark IV in the years following its Berlin presentation. He increased the speed of the machine (it originally took five seconds to print each frame) with the help of a mechanical shutter and a more powerful lamp, and added a small motor, which meant the machine could run both manually and automatically. Finally, as a real testimony to the printer’s versatility, Brown successfully enlarged a 9.5mm film to 16mm, and a 28mm film to 35mm.
When Harold Brown retired in 1984, so did the Mark IV, but the printer lives on as a valuable demonstration of archive innovation. It has been used for training purposes and is, today, displayed at the BFI National Archive’s J. Paul Getty Jr Conservation Centre, where it is being preserved as a source of inspiration for future generations of film archivists.
Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.