There are untold thousands of unlabelled canisters in film archives all around the world. Some of them are undoubtedly very important, but until they're catalogued we won't even know.
Unfortunately, most film archives are enormously under-funded. Here in the UK, arts funding (which is where this normally comes from) has dropped dramatically since the financial crisis. When Jeremy Hunt axed the UK Film Council[1], most regional film archives totally lost their funding. When their money disappeared, so did any chance of employing cataloguers.
A proper archive will at least be storing their film in environments with the proper humidity and temperature to reduce decomposition as much as possible.
The other side of it is that the more decomposition that's happened, the more time you need to invest into restoration. See the 11 year restoration of the 18 minute Voyage dans la Lune for an extreme example[2]. That kind of effort is only possible for a film of enormous historical importance and at least some commercial value.
Source: My partner's a film archivist and moving image historian.
Exactly. There is, from the perspective of being able to digitally preserve it, an essentially infinite quantity of film, audio, and paper in all forms sitting in vaults, archives, libraries, etc. around the world in various states of deterioration. We collectively can (and should) make an effort to preserve significant properties but it's almost certainly unreasonable to think that even a small portion of existing physical artifacts can be digitized.
Unfortunately, most film archives are enormously under-funded. Here in the UK, arts funding (which is where this normally comes from) has dropped dramatically since the financial crisis. When Jeremy Hunt axed the UK Film Council[1], most regional film archives totally lost their funding. When their money disappeared, so did any chance of employing cataloguers.
A proper archive will at least be storing their film in environments with the proper humidity and temperature to reduce decomposition as much as possible.
The other side of it is that the more decomposition that's happened, the more time you need to invest into restoration. See the 11 year restoration of the 18 minute Voyage dans la Lune for an extreme example[2]. That kind of effort is only possible for a film of enormous historical importance and at least some commercial value.
Source: My partner's a film archivist and moving image historian.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/jul/26/uk-film-coun... [2]: http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/chromatic-fr...