Work|s in Progress. Digital Film Restoration within Archives

Work|s in Progress. Digital Film Restoration Within Archives KERSTIN PARTH, OLIVER HANLEY and THOMAS BALLHAUSEN (eds), 2013 Vienna, SYNEMA pp. 176, illus., €25.00 (paper) Film archives have faced several mutations over the last three decades since the digital revolution, which has not only profoundly transformed contemporary cinema production and exhibition, but has more recently brought about major challenges in film preservation due to the discontinuation of motion picture stock production by Eastman Kodak and Fujifilm. Meanwhile, film archives and cinémathèques as the guardians of cultural heritage have had to re-adjust to the market forces and increasingly think “digital”, especially in terms of film exhibition (refer to the FIAF Digital Projection Guide published in 2012), even though the majority of their film collections are still on celluloid. This publication emerges as a two-fold process: resulting from the partnership between the Austrian Film Gallery, the Austrian Film Museum and Filmarchiv Austria who have collaborated on digital restoration of their film collections since spring 2008, and the threeday symposium “Digital Film Restoration Within Archives” held in Krems in autumn of 2011. The symposium provided a platform in which experts from film archives and film institutions from across the globe debated both ethical and practical issues surrounding digital restoration and preservation. Bringing together contributions from several archivists, researchers and curators who were also present at the symposium, the book focuses on audiovisual archival challenges of the digital turn, and opens the dialogue on several facets of the contemporary digital discourse. Digital Film Restoration Within Archives is divided in four sections. First is “Opening Speeches” by Alexander Horwath, the director of the Austrian Film Museum and Thomas Ballhausen, researcher at Filmarchiv Austria. Then there is a theoretical frameworks section with contributions by well-known curators and archivists such as Paolo Cherchi Usai and David Walsh. This is then followed by the practical application of digital technologies, and finally the “Case Studies” with details on digital restoration of films such as Metropolis, Beyond the Rocks, The Living Corpse and Das Einküchenhaus. In a way, what emerges from the present volume is not a clear consensus amongst the archivists and curators but different viewpoints on the issue of digital restoration, a term which is still very much under discussion and experimentation, but which – thanks to this project and such as Giovanna Fossati’s book From Grain to Pixel. The Archival Life of Film in Transition (2009) – brings to light various issues. Alexander Horwath, apart from advocating to separate the two terms ‘film’ and ‘digital’ restoration, underlines how ‘the biggest risk for archives, when applying digital technology to photochemical film, is shortsightedness’, that is focusing on ‘its present, short-term usefulness; for instance, to achieve funding or gain visibility’ (p. 17). Indeed, several authors acknowledge that long-term film preservation is still more viable on celluloid while digital files need to migrate every several years, and that digital technology is under constant threat of obsolescence (see for example the text by Thomas C. Christensen). This means that the end product of any digital manipulation of photochemical film is still a celluloid print which serves preservation purposes, and so each digital restoration of a film creates a new version, another element to conserve in the archive. David Walsh of the Imperial War Museum discusses how the term “digital restoration” is often used for promotional and marketing purposes, whilst what is actually being done is more along the lines of ‘optimisation’; using digital technologies to enhance the quality of the image. He offers a quantitative analysis tool for film restorations, in which the reconstruction and the quality improvement can be measured on a scale, providing the discerning archivist with the answer to the question how much is a film restoration actually a ‘restoration’ (pp. 34 – 37)? Paolo Cherchi Usai warns against the false illusion of eternity and the ahistoricity of moving images inherent to digital restorations (p. 28). This resonates especially in the commercial and industrial sector, where digital is considered superior due to image quality. Furthermore, the digitisation of cinema has brought about the view that any film would be potentially available to everyone anywhere, and that spectators/users would have access to diverse titles, which in turn leads to a sort of decanonisation of cinema history. Unfortunately, digital access has not yet led to a wide distribution of heritage films, a need advocated by Thomas C. Christensen (p. 53). Indeed, in cases where more films are available online or on specialised DVD editions, the titles in question are still a select few from our global cultural heritage. The “In Practice” section, with examples ranging from silent films on 35mm and artist films on 16mm to home movies on small gauges, the authors draw conclusions that digital technologies should be used where necessary, and only in certain cases, often through a process of experimentation. Fumiko Tsuneishi of the Filmarchiv Austria argues that in the case in which several sources to reconstruct a single film are used; it is advisable to employ digital means due to demanding editing work (p. 59 - 60). Matteo Lepore and Raoul Schmidt highlight the Austrian Film Museum’s approach in digitising and screening the 9.5mm amateur films through a combination of analogue and digital technologies (pp. 83 – 88), whilst Reto Kromer underlines how digital copies of home movies should be created for easy access and that only ‘the cost-efficient solution exists in the real world’ (p. 82). Finally, in each of the case studies, hybrid restorations using optimal solutions from both analogue and digital technologies are employed, in order to produce a new version of the film for its subsequent screening and distribution for contemporary audiences. Highly informative and providing detailed documentation of each step of the film restoration process (scratch removal, colour grading, missing frame duplication etc) and the rationale behind decisions, the case studies are very useful for fellow archivists, scholars and ardent cinéphiles wishing to gain further insights of restoration methodologies. My main criticism is that all the contributors are affiliated to Western European archives and institutions only, thus giving a relatively limited view on the implications of digital technologies on archival practices in non Western archives. However this is not an exception, archival studies have tended to focus predominantly on the “West”, whilst for instance the FIAF members (The International Federation of Film Archives) are global in scope. A more comprehensive and wider study from international contributors present at the symposium could be useful in evaluating to which extent “digital film restoration” is dependent on considerable funding and as such relates to those “elite” film archives. Another avenue for research could be how the digital turn has affected the less privileged audio-visual archives and their collections. Whilst perhaps a more thorough discussion of the contentious concepts “film restoration” and “digital restoration” in the theoretical part would have rendered a more complete picture, the publication does achieve its aim – to create a dialogue between practitioners on the subject of digital technology as one of the key archival activities in contemporary times. ANA GRGIC University of St Andrews © 2014 Ana Grgic