Long-lost film rediscovered in UMD library – WTOP News

A 1917 silent film, thought to have been lost forever, lay forgotten for decades in storage at the University of Maryland’s Hornbake Library.

The film, titled “An Unbeliever Convinced,” features real actors, but also real firefighters from the city of Chicago. Today it would best be described as a 20-minute long public service announcement.

The film was donated to the university in College Park in 1991, but was forgotten until was rediscovered by Mark Coulbourne, the head of preservation at University of Maryland Libraries, while he was looking for another film.

His goal was to digitize that film, made of a more flammable material, but the reel he got his hands on was in worse condition.

“The word I would use overall is crispy. So when we took it out of the can, you could hear it sort of crinkling,” Coulbourne said. “It had deteriorated to the point where the material was like almost touching a bag of potato chips.”

In fact, some of the film had broken off into small pieces.

It took a team of students and staff at the University of Southern California to put it back together and help digitize the film.

“It’s really the first commercially produced safety film, as you might call it,” Alan Akers said.

Akers is the head archivist at Underwriters Laboratories Research Institute, a safety science organization.

“There’s a lot of things that are significant about this film,” Akers said. “When we think of silent films, we think typically of theatrically released silent films, something like Charlie Chaplin. But this is a bit of a rare bird in that it’s a silent film that used theatrical silent film actors and actresses, but it was produced by an industrial company.”

The premise of this film was fire safety at a time when fire codes were far less stringent. But UL isn’t in the film production game. They focus on safety standards.

“You may not recognize that name, but I bet that you have recognized our symbol when you start to think about it,” Akers said.

His company is behind the UL mark.

“It’s the letters UL in a circle, and it’s one of the most recognizable and well-respected safety certification marks, certainly in North America,” he said.

That marking indicates that a product passed a safety test from the company.

“You’ll see this on a number of types of products. Typically electrical products, cables, adapters, home appliances, your microwave, washing machine, dishwasher — high likelihood you’re going to see a UL certification mark on those.”

UL also runs a fire safety research institute in Columbia, Maryland.

“An Unbeliever Convinced” focused on the safety of that era. It starts with what appears to be a wealthy industrialist being confronted by the Chicago Fire Department about the failure of his factory to meet certain fire safety guidelines.

“He utterly refuses to do so, and even kicks the fire department representative out of his office,” Coulbourne said. “Later on in the little film, someone is smoking in the basement and sets and starts a fire that rages out of control, and a bunch of his workers are trapped in the building, including his daughter.”

Spoiler alert: His daughter dies, and so he comes to realize his mistake at the very end after he is mourning the loss of his daughter.

“It really does tell a story of a particular point in time,” he said. “And 109 years ago, we were having industrial fires that while the fire may not have been easy to prevent, these the deaths were easier to prevent. And so it really does show us how important fire safety and fire safety standards are, and also, once again, it shows us this evolution of where firefighting was going.”

The film features Chicago firefighters, some of the first fire engines in service and horse-drawn equipment.

“Additionally, there is a scene where a firefighter puts on like one of the earliest versions of like a breathing apparatus that they would use to go into a burning building,” Coulbourne said.

It’s a film that UL knew existed at one point, but no one believed it would ever be seen again.

“At so many points in this film’s history, since it was made in 1917 till its rediscovery earlier this year and restoration,” Akers said. “At any point in the process, this film could have been lost forever. So many decisions influenced getting it to the next set of hands that could get it to a place that we can we can watch and learn from this film today.”

Once it was digitized, the film was screened in Chicago. It will be shown Friday at CineCon in Los Angeles.

“I think it’s huge in our story of being a public safety advocate in that it shows that we’ve been interested from a very, very early age,” Akers said. “We’ve come a long ways, and you’ll see things in the film that — we don’t necessarily have these problems today — but it’s not because these things happened automatically.”

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