Film Restoration

This article explores the impact of A-class film festivals' retrospective programming on the canons of global art cinema, wanting to contribute to a current trend in film scholarship exploring the relationship between film festivals and film histories. The argument proposed here is that, by recircling and mediating the latest film restorations and even taking ownership of specific restoration initiatives, film festivals have become key platforms for the rediscovery of so-called 'film classics', contributing to shape the articulations and understanding of film histories. To this aim, the article gauges with the dynamics of cinematic rediscoveries through the theoretical prism of cultural memory studies, exploring how film festivals developed, between the early 1980s and the 1990s, a retrospective interest in the material body of the film historical past, and its preservation and restoration,acting as both arbiters and harbingers of what body of films become available once again and, eventually, studied by scholars, critics and students. By considering several institutional cases and the emergence of retrospective strands in some of the major A-list festivals, this article contends that these festivals have become essential 'sites of passage' to the contemporary ways of accessing and historicizing of the histories of global art cinema.

This paper reflects on the reasons that have led researchers to support the possible influence of the Soviet cinema of the twenties in the Spanish film “La aldea maldita” (The Cursed Village, Florian Rey, 1930). It looks at the circumstances of production of both cinemas, Spanish and Russian, understood in their cultural context.

Since the advent of the Digital Intermediate (DI) and the Cineon system, motion picture film preservation and restoration practices overcame an enormous change derived from the possibility of digitizing and digitally restoring film materials. Today, film materials are scanned using mostly commercial film scanners, which process the frames into the Academy Color Encoding Specification (ACES) and present proprietary LUTs of negative-to-positive conversions, image enhancement, and color correction. The processing operated by scanner systems is not always openly available. The various digitization hardware and software can lead to different approaches and workflows in motion picture film preservation and restoration, resulting in inconsistency among archives and laboratories. This work presents an overview of the main approaches and systems used to digitize and encode motion picture film frames to explain these systems' potentials and limits.

Digitizing motion picture films is a crucial aspect of archival practices. Nevertheless, the primary purpose of this process is to convert analog film into a digital signal suitable for recording back onto film. Thus, the most popular color film system encoding, such as Cineon or Academy Density Exchange (ADX), may present some limits for the preservation and restoration practices. In this paper, Cineon and ADX systems are summarized and analyzed, and an experimental application conducted on modern cinematographic film scanners has been made to evaluate the integration of these encoding systems into these devices. Results have been examined and discussed to underline the constraints and possibilities of these color encoding systems for archival purposes.

In 2020 the Albanian Cinema Project's restoration of Tomka Dhe Shoket e Tij (Tomka and His Friends, 1977) premiered on Turner Classic Movies in their "Women Make Film" series. This event marked the culmination of my work to bring the films of Albania's first female film director, Xhanfise Keko, into global distribution. A key aim for these projects was to begin to open up a space for Albanians at home and in the diaspora to address the silences that persisted around their years under an extreme, isolationist dictatorship. This article maps the project of re-education that I embarked on as an archivist, curator, and media historian. Now, with ACP shuttered and the benefit of hindsight, I reflect on the work of restoring and re-releasing Albanian films as a project of reprogramming (double entendre intended) Albanian socialist-realist cinema for contemporary, global publics.

Canon, cánones y canonización. La crítica, el análisis y la historia del cine español como problemas JORGE NIETO FERRANDO Y TERESA SOROLLA ROMERO Este monográfico está dedicado al canon cinematográfico español. El tema se aborda desde diferentes perspectivas, como la crítica y la prensa cinematográfica, la cinefilia, la revisión historiográfica de determinados periodos del cine, los diferentes agentes de canonización o las bases teóricas y metodológicas que han permitido la entrada de ciertas películas en las historias del cine español. Entre las numerosas acepciones del término "canon" que recogen buena parte de los diccionarios, destacan "regla o precepto"-normas sustentadas en la costumbre que rigen una actividad-y "catálogo o lista"-de obras artísticas consideradas modélicas, de hechos relevantes, de textos sagrados frente a los apócrifos, etcétera-. En esta segunda definición, y en el ámbito cinematográfico, el canon sería un elenco de películas importantes para una comunidad, dado que protagonizan las historias o concentran sobre sí comentarios, críticas y análisis. En este sentido, el canon tiene además unas implicaciones que afectan a las políticas culturales, a los archivos cinematográficos, 1 a los programas docentes universitarios, a las instituciones académicas y críticas o a la memoria y a la identidad colectiva. 2 Estamos hablando de comunidades, como la de los historiadores, los críticos y los analistas, que tienen una fuerte capacidad para acotar un determinado tipo de canon. Pero, como señala José María Galindo Pérez en "El canon cinematográfico y el mundo del cine. Variaciones de una tradición conceptual", lo que el autor denomina "filmólogos" no son los únicos agentes canonizadores. Entre estos también debemos incluir ese tipo de espectadores y críticos particulares que son los fans y los cinéfilos y también los propios profesionales.

Entrevista al restaurador cinematográfico Ferrán Alberich, Premio Nacional del Patrimonio Fílmico 2022: "Nosotros, los restauradores, trabajamos sobre la idea de volver a poner sobre una pantalla, a disposición de la gente, películas que, por una u otra razón, habían dejado de estarlo. A veces porque están enfermas, pero otras porque habían sido apartadas o han tenido algún otro tipo de problema [...] Ha habido una evolución muy grande. Sobre todo, a partir de la digitalización. Yo creo que no esto, sino el mundo en general se divide entre antes y después de la digitalización, porque la vida ha cambiado en todos los sentidos. A mí me gusta decir que las filmotecas son las primeras instituciones relacionadas con el cine que están regidas por los espectadores. Originalmente, ellos fueron los que se preocuparon de intentar recuperar las películas cuando la industria las tiraba a la basura, en el paso del mudo al sonoro, porque se pensaba que ya no tenían ningún valor comercial. Y entonces, aparecieron los espectadores, por ejemplo, Henri Langlois y Georje Franju, con la creación de la Cinémathèque Française, y también en otros países, que empezaron a recoger esas películas".

This article describes the rise of MA programmes in audio-visual archiving, preservation and presentation. It distinguishes between two key developments that are transforming the contemporary graduation education in AV heritage: digital developments that significantly impact the professional field, and new governance structures that comprise a (forced) move away from film studies as disciplinary home. It is the latter, this article argues, that poses the real threat for the future of professional education in preservation and presentation of moving images.

The article draws upon the practical experience of the authors with researching,
developing, and curating the digital historical content for the online
exhibition Frames of Reconstruction. In its first part, it reflects upon
three main theoretical issues related to the realm of contemporary public
history. Firstly, it investigates the open borders between the disciplines of
academic and public history to position them in a dialogical relationship.
Secondly, it pays attention to the importance and roles of visuals and the
possibilities which the study of visual sources brings into public history
projects. The iconosphere is discussed not only from a theoretical point of
view, but also serves as the methodological grounding of the article. Lastly,
the theoretical section opens up some basal theoretical and methodological
questions brought to the area of public history by the extensive process
of digitization. In relation to the online exhibition Frames of Reconstruction
it mostly responds to the conceptualization of digital public history as offered
by Serge Noiret (2018) and Andreas Fickers (2022) through his concept
of digital hermeneutics. The analytical part then revolves around the critical
examination of the authors’ own practical experience in the field of digital
public history. Particularly, the collapse of the roles of researcher and curator
is discussed along with the request for sustainability, transnationality, and
democratic educational potential which can be seen as specific in the case
of the medium of online exhibition.

The IOC began the process of recovery of Olympic films in the mid 1990s as the scale, diversity and general dispersion of this heritage began to take shape through research and archival rediscovery. What this on-going project has uncovered is not only the depth and breadth of the materials that survived, in the hands of studios, producers, collectors and archives, but how the films reflected not only the development in sport technology but also that of the cinematographic industry itself. The films broke technical barriers almost as rapidly as athletes broke sporting records. In the two decades since the project’s inception, the needs of preservation, restoration and access obliged ever shifting approaches to ensure not only the survival of the collection but just as importantly, its accessibility.
With modest beginnings the IOC embarked on this project by acquiring high quality film copies of the Olympic Films; a process that began over 60 years since the films had been mandated as part of the responsibility of hosting the Olympic Games or Winter Games. Until the arrival of wide-scale broadcast
coverage with affordable video recording and tape retention, these films, alongside the newsreel coverage, were the only moving image records of Olympic history. Growing awareness of the value of the films, and the realization that high quality film copies were simply not sufficient for contemporary dissemination of the visual heritage of the Games, IOC policy changed to that of full photochemical restoration. Within five years this mandate had become full digital restoration with polyester-based digitally generated photo-chemical support.
But what to preserve and what to restore remains a central issue. Eight years ago the policy was adopted to preserve all original film elements of all language versions, including off-cuts, in an appropriate archival environment. These were to be stored either in the host countries or in Switzerland. Intermediates were to be stored in a mirror location as not only ‘insurance’ but also to reflect the cultural importance of the films to host cities and nations as well as the IOC.
Finally, a policy was implemented to support digital migration of all materials required for all versions of each film. Full restoration on film of the original release in the original language version of the host country remains a part of the mandate. Determining these versions was only achieved through meticulous analysis of all extant film elements and textual records before the cycle of restoration for each film began.

This paper summarizes the preliminary findings of the second phase of a research project entitled Digital Challenges and Alternatives for the Safeguarding and Dissemination of Public Audiovisual Archival Heritage (2013–2016). The final phase, lasting three years, is currently in progress and will finish in 2019. The project has collected data on audiovisual archives across Brazil, inquiring about collections scopes, environments, planning and more. One aspect of the project has been developing a beta version of Legatum, an innovative and collaborative digital platform of international scope based on open protocols. Legatum focuses on collections in Romance language institutions and is intended to preserve audiovisual heritage as well as to provide long-term, wider access to users.

The vast majority of original negatives of Swedish silent and early sound films are lost, meaning that what remains of the early Swedish fiction film heritage has survived primarily in the form of relatively worn nitrate prints. The article discusses differences in past and present duplication policies in terms of aspect ratio alterations and the preservation of original elements and how these factors affect the possibility of new restoration efforts from existing elements. Brief mention of early sound formats is followed by an account of how the visuals and the audio of early sound films can be restored, with particular focus on Gunnar Skoglund's Finurliga Fridolf/'Clever Fridolf' and Gustaf Edgren's Konstgjorda Svensson/'Artificial Svensson', both Keywords duplication and restoration aspect ratio early sound formats lab facilities film stock manufacturing future access short subject Jon wengström Swedish Film Institute

Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives (1922) has been widely seen and written about since its first major reconstruction in the 1970s by the American Film Institute. But before this time there had been little in-depth scholarship on the film, and no one noticed that the circulating copies were not accurate representations of the original release. Historians Richard Koszarski and Arthur Lennig did much to revive interest and understanding about the film and its subsequent survival in the 1970s, but still many mysteries remained.

This essay documents decades of tireless work to bring Erich von Stroheim’s masterpiece back to modern audiences and how these discoveries informed the 2021 4K digital restoration conducted by The Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

This paper examines what metadata schemes are needed for radio material using the example of the LARM project. Based on several user studies in 2011, a metadata scheme has been implemented, which consists of three layers: archival metadata, LARM metadata and project-specific metadata. In late 2013 follow-up online interviews assessed the adoption of the metadata schemes and users' understanding of the underlying philosophy. The interviews showed two things: first, despite being involved in building the scheme up, participants used the current metadata scheme on a trial and error basis and did rarely understand the underlying philosophy. Secondly, participants showed a surprisingly high accountability working with metadata meaning that archive providers should worry less about misuse of metadata and instead embrace user participation.

An increasing number of large digitized audiovisual collections within digital humanities have recently been made available for users. Often access to digitized audiovisual collections is hampered by little and inconsistent metadata. This paper presents the preliminary findings from a study of the search log in a radio broadcast archive. Firstly, results in relation to the identified types of search terms show that the Programme listing category was the most frequently identified category followed by categories of Person and Subject. Secondly, users rarely apply advanced search operators but instead apply phrase or single word queries.

This paper examines what metadata schemes are needed for radio material using the example of the LARM project. Based on several user studies in 2011, a metadata scheme has been implemented, which consists of three layers: archival metadata, LARM metadata and project-specific metadata. In late 2013 follow-up online interviews assessed the adoption of the metadata schemes and users' understanding of the underlying philosophy. The interviews showed two things: first, despite being involved in building the scheme up, participants used the current metadata scheme on a trial and error basis and did rarely understand the underlying philosophy. Secondly, participants showed a surprisingly high accountability working with metadata meaning that archive providers should worry less about misuse of metadata and instead embrace user participation.

In the era of digital cinema, there is a tendency to bring back the film grain by adding synthetic grain to the digital image. As we all know, film grain has been an integral part of film celluloidsome film historians believe its existence gives richness to the image tonality of the film itself. Its rough character could increase the sense of 'film look' which isn't found in digital images that are associated with its sharpness and cleanliness. Regarding the commercial digital film restoration project, it has been found the practice of adding more grain if the film ain't "grain" enough or cleaning the natural grain and reapplying the synthetic grain toward the film. In the Digital Statement Part III: Image Restoration, Manipulation, Treatment, and Ethics-the Federation of International Film Archive (FIAF) put this practice under the redline-it is forbidden for any archivist or restorer to remove or add a synthetic grain toward the film. How do we see the practice which contradicts the restoration ethics? What are best approach to understand the grain management issue nowadays? This essay will be questioning the ethics and practice of adding synthetic film grain in digital film restoration projects. Reading references, analyzing the case study of a film that applied this technique, and interviewing a film archivist and scholar will be the methods that I will use.

The paper analyses the conflicting issues that arise when dealing with Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) held in audio digital archives, when the demand for open access conflicts with ownership rights and ethical issues. It describes two case studies in order to evaluate the procedures used for doing research on oral materials while respecting the rights of others. The first refers to the activities carried on at the Phonothèque de la Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l'homme, a French sound archive; the second refers to the solutions envisaged by an Italian research project, Grammo-foni. Le soffitte della voce (Gra.fo), jointly carried out by Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and the University of Siena.

The Ina-GRM i is one of the oldest and most important Groups in electroacoustic music. As a research group concerned with creation, technological research and aesthetic problems, it has accumulated through its long history an important amount of works and documents, which have been brought together in a library called the "Acousmathèque". This conservation centre has been concerned with preservation and restoration problems since its first years, mainly due to the technology changes through time. A brief overview of the problems encountered and its future developments are studied here.

Anna Briggs, Michele Manzolini and Mirco Santi discuss, two months within its year-long international theatrical tour, the production of the montage film they curated, 9½, produced by INEDITS Amateur Films / Memory of Europe and executive produced by Home Movies-Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia. The initiative was developed to celebrate the centenary of Pathé Baby, the first film dispositif designed specifically for amateur use, and to showcase 9.5mm amateur film collections from around the world. As they look back on the various stages of the project, the contributions from a global network of colleagues and the choices they made, they highlight some of the challenges and lessons learned from this volunteer project.

C. de. S. Kulatillake (1926-2005) was a groundbreaking ethnomusicologist, researcher, and pioneer of Sri Lankan traditional music. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he began utilizing reelto-reel audio tapes to capture Sri Lankan traditional music making by traveling to various villages. He used a Tandberg (mono) tape recorder in his early field recordings in 1970, and from 1974, he used an Uher 1400 machine with primarily 5" spool tapes at 3.75 speed and a few at 7.5 speed to capture the sound of performances. His goal was to record the songs of the peasants before they become irretrievable and lost as a result of modernization. Historic audiovisual content is at risk of being lost since it is preserved in deteriorated forms, and its access equipment is no longer made. The authors found 41 spool recordings recorded by Kulatillake and digitized to soundtracks. Kulatillake has noted (in English and Sinhala) the recording date, place, and information about the performers on most of the cassettes. After digitizing, the recordings will be described, processed, and cataloged for safekeeping, before being donated to the University of the Visual and Performing Arts, Sri Lanka. The objective of this paper is to journal the process of locating those recordings, restoring, and preserving them in digital archives for stakeholders to use in the future. The story of preserving will take the format of an oral narrative presentation.

Over the course of the last decade, radio scholars have increasingly demonstrated that radio has long been entwined in networks and relationships beyond those framed by nations-and that even the national structures of radio were formed in transnational processes (

Film curatorship, according to a recent definition is "[t]he art of interpreting the aesthetics, history, and technology of cinema through the selective collection, preservation, and documentation of films and their exhibition in archival presentations." (Cherchi Usai, Francis, Horwath, Loebenstein 2008, 231). Although comprehensive and welladvised, two comments can be made about this definition. One is that its domain is delimited to considerations directly related to cinema. At one point in the reproduced discussions between its authors that led up to the definition's final formulation the term "historical traditions" was advanced. Yet it was left unaddressed and then tacitly dropped. 2 Yet that single occurrence is a reminder that the history of cinema is inseparable from other histories. Therefore, the definition, although adequate for practical purposes, remains loose. I use the word "loose" in the sense intended by logician Olaf Helmer and philosopher Nicholas Rescher in their paper on explanatory statements in the "inexact sciences", their umbrella term for applied physical sciences, the social sciences, and history. In these disciplines specifically, they wrote, lawlike fmulations are "not unrestricted or universal", but "conditional in their logical form". That is to say, the looseness of their definitions, predictions, etc. is a function of time, place, and circumstances "which may only be iicated in a general way and are not necessarily (indeed in most cases cannot expected to be) exhaustively articulated" (Helmer and Rescher 1958, 8-13); sociologist Harold Garfinkel referred to and rephrased these conditions as the et cetera rule, by which he meant to cover (and in his experiments, to uncover) "unstated understandings" (Garfinkel 1984 [1967], 3). 3 (To make this notion more concrete, take

Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) is a term invented to represent living practices, representations, expressions, skills and knowledge that communities, groups and individuals recognize as distinct but important aspects of identity. The safeguarding of ICH has become a topic of international concern primarily through the work of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) (UNESCO, 2018). Digital technologies and the internet bring unprecedented opportunities to present and preserve cultural assets globally and from a long-term perspective. The use of new technologies in the preservation and transmission of intangible heritage imposes urgent and significant changes in the museum specialists' competency matrix. The paper presents the main results from research conducted within the scope of the international project DigiCult in four European countries, aiming to identify the main gaps and constraints regarding the active inclusion of museum profession...

This paper analyzes the politics of cultural heritage by focussing on the initiatives that were geared towards saving the original camera negatives of the films made by Satyajit Ray. In this endeavor, I study the documents within the institutional collections of Aurora Film Corporation (AFC), Kolkata. The letters, sent by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to AFC, reflect anxieties pertaining to the material loss of Ray's films. Underlining the cultural crisis that would be engendered if the films were not immediately restored, the documents position the significant intervention that the Academy could make within the context.

El tema del presente trabajo es la restauración fílmica, una aproximación centrada más en los aspectos teóricos que metodológicos o técnicos. Por ello no se trata aquí de elaborar una sistematización de los criterios mas idóneos, sino de una reflexión sobre los presupuestos ontológicos que conforman la restauración de obras de carácter reproductible. Un bien meritorio de tutela en tanto que patrimonio cultural, lo es también de una profunda reflexión acerca no sólo de cuáles son esos cuidados que tan necesarios se requieren, sino también de lo que los propios conceptos de conservación y restauración implican en la garantía de su perpetuación y transmisión a las generaciones futuras. Dicha tarea es la que aquí se propone

This paper summarizes the preliminary findings of the second phase of a research project entitled Digital Challenges and Alternatives for the Safeguarding and Dissemination of Public Audiovisual Archival Heritage
(2013–2016). The final phase, lasting three years, is currently in
progress and will finish in 2019. The project has collected data on
audiovisual archives across Brazil, inquiring about collections scopes, environments, planning and more. One aspect of the project has been developing a beta version of Legatum, an innovative and collaborative
digital platform of international scope based on open protocols.
Legatum focuses on collections in Romance language institutions
and is intended to preserve audiovisual heritage as well as to provide long-term, wider access to users.

The paper will comment on the question of the borders of a film text, focusing on their flexibility and on the difficulties encountered in defining them. Openings and endings play a specific role when integrating films into marketing, screening, and viewing contexts, and endings in particular often undergo modifications for a variety of reasons. All sorts of narrative strategies are displayed and brought to decisive points at the beginnings and ends of films, and comparison of the different strategies constitutes the easiest way to understand their function, nature, and degree of success (after all, that’s why a Neanderthal is so inter-esting to us: is represents an unsuccessful strategy). And what better way to compare, un-derstand, and evaluate alternative strategies, than in the same movie when it exists in dif-ferent versions with different endings and openings? (

This paper intends to deal with some specific theoretical and technical problems in restoring sound for film, problems which-in my opinion-help focusing a range of issues having a wider impact on some basic methodological questions in film restoration praxis and theory.

As we all know, a "theory of film restoration" does not yet exist. We do not even have a secure, common lexis. And it is hardly surprising: as restoration is not defined, then neither are the terms that support it, nor the activities in which it consists.
And so here is what we will try to do in this publication: nominate some concepts and some objects that are in some way “on the side of restoration”, convinced as we are that a good starting point for a discussion on method (and which will therefore take us onto a theory) consists in patiently seeking a definition of “restoration”, or at least understanding what we mean when we use that term.

A very early discussion of Archival perspective on the advent of Digital Cinema, when this was still a possibility; not yet a reality. An attempt to shape EU policy on the matter. "One thing which the industry and the community of Archives have in common is the understanding that the issue of archiving Digital Cinema products for long term preservation is a core one. Similarly, both groups recognize that the exploitation of, and access to archival materials is a key issue in a successful deployment of D-Cinema, and thus it is to have a beneficial effect to both the European market and the European culture."

The area of the Transnational Radio Encounters (TRE) project that was concerned with minorities found its natural focus in community radio, an area in which the co-authors and editors of this section, both specialists in the field, collaborated. Although some minority programming can be found in the schedules of national broadcasters, community radio is the sector where the voices and opinions, for the most part ignored or misrepresented in the mainstream, can be expressed. (Mitchell 2011) Community radio, non-profit in aim, controlled by and representative of a community, can provide the space for the social, cultural and political discourses which are often echoed in, sometime deliberately linked to, places beyond national borders. Among minority ethnic groups-whether historically settled communities, or more recent refugee and migrant communities-radio encounters include connections with a homeland or with a diaspora in Europe and beyond. Our research had to deal with a large, complex and varied field. A mapping exercise in 2012 by the Community Media Forum for Europe (CMFE) found 2237 community radio stations in Europe. 1 To explore the kinds of transnational connections likely to be found in a community radio station, we felt that, rather than quantitative surveys, depth research would more effectively provide a picture of experience in the sector. The plan was to focus on one or two case studies in contrasting regions of the UK, using Participatory Action Research (PAR) to explore what TRE's three cross-cutting themes (described below) meant at this level, and thereafter to sample experience in mainland Europe. There, time and resources were not available to go into such depth. Instead conferences, in consultation with the host organizations, were used as a vehicle to reach a wider

Thinking of music only as a sound element means ignoring many aspects of the cultural dimension of human life. The evolution of music as a phenomenon in terms of a human communication form reached a tipping point in the 20th and 21st centuries. As a result of new outcomes emerging from its interaction with society, music, which is gradually becoming a form independent of time and space, can present new practices to the history of humanity that we cannot anticipate in the next century. The music phenomenon with all of its humane and artificial aspects which evolved from the hybrid use of analog and digital sound combinations is moving to the future way of musical expressions. Thinking of this phenomenon regarding its commodification through mass and now digital media offers new question marks for researchers and enthusiasts from different backgrounds. In this chapter, the breaking points of the Turkish music ecosystem within changing musical cultures shaped by different technological eras are examined. By following a discourse analysis, arising music trends are examined in relation to changing practices offered by digital technologies.

Throughout history, thousands of different kinds of film formats, emulsions and colour systems have been used, to reproduce natural colours and as mean of expression for specific characters and scenes. In recent years, the advent of digital mediums has improved post-production technology and the film restoration process. Moreover, the support migration exposed different issues, such as colour reproducibility in digital systems that present the same problems as those posed by analogue. Furthermore, the lack of physical information on film dyes, emulsions and sensitivity renders the reconstruction of different film process colours impossible, and so too their comparison with the analogue or digital copies. In this contribution we aim to increase film experts' and restorers' awareness of colour reproduction problems that always affect the practice of digitization and digital restoration, and we propose the contribution of Fire2, an open access database of cinematographic and ph...

Au terme de la rétrospective Une ville suspendue qui s'est tenue à la Cinémathèque québécoise (18-25 mai 2022), notre collaboratrice Anne Lardeux s'est entretenue avec Mathilde Rouxel. Au Caffe italia à Montréal, il a été question d'un faire-collectif, de transmission, du besoin d'images autres et du contact avec leur matière, des réseaux de cultures et d'identités qu'elles constituent, mais aussi des dimensions coloniales et post-coloniales que ce travail sur l'image, opéré par strates entre la France et le Liban, déplie.

Itinéraire en pointillés d'un processus de restauration collectif par Mathilde Rouxel Mai / juin 2022 Dans l'aventure qui nous a rassemblés, beaucoup d'entre nous connaissions Jocelyne Saab avant de rencontrer ses films. Nous savions son engagement, avons côtoyé sa personnalité intrépide, et avons été touchés par son refus de l'injustice, touchés à tel point que nous l'avons presque tous suivie dans ses projets gigantesques, à un moment ou à un autre de sa carrière. C'est sans doute pour cette raison que nous avons naturellement souhaité nous emparer nousmêmes des films pour les restaurer, les analyser dans leur matérialité, avec nos yeux, nos mains, notre ouïe. Nous voulions préserver la mémoire de l'énergie militante de Jocelyne Saab, la comprendre au plus près pour pouvoir mieux la transmettre. La cinéaste au travail resté longtemps trop peu visible n'était pas, dans le milieu cinéphile, au panthéon des auteurs dont on vénère l'oeuvre complète et les inédits. Pour défendre ces quarante ans de carrière, il fallait d'abord se donner les moyens d'en montrer la teneur.

This publication has its origin in the autumn of 2016. We, the three editors of this volume, are, at the time of completing this work in autumn of 2018, all of us MA students at Goethe-University Frankfurt's Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies. Over coffee, two of the three editors, Adriane Meusch and Michelle Rafaela Kamolz, introduced Bianka-Isabell Scharmann to a project called ThinkFilM. This was an ongoing Erasmus+ funded project to which Kamolz and Meusch were contributing research on the current state of film education in Germany. Yet, as all of us had, more or less, been involved in and were thinking about the current state of film culture, especially in Germany but also in Europe, the objective for the culmination of the research trajectory shifted. It soon became clear that we wanted to organize a symposium to discuss the pressing questions of film culture with a broader audience. So, the idea for a symposium held in July 2017 was born. As a project, ThinkFilM was headed by the NaFilM-Group in the Czech Republic. This project's aim was to research film institutions' existing procedures for handling, communicating, and presenting cinematographic heritage. Stu dent groups from four countries-the Czech Republic, Poland, Great Britain and Germany-participated in the project. All four groups were to conceive of and conduct an individual project. While our partners in Poland published work on film education, our partners in England and the Czech Republic worked on exhibiting film by founding their own film museum in Prague. The goal of the symposium was to discuss problems in current film culture with a focus on filmic heritage and innovative projects in the field of film education. In the preparatory phase we made the decision to address only junior scientists, students, and recent graduates from the field of film and media studies across Germany and abroad, as the symposium was supposed to be a platform for young scholars in various stages of their studies. We asked them to submit their work, be it in progress or finished, from a wide range of genres and contexts: exam or seminar papers, workshop experiences, accounts of the active practice of film communication, as well as drafts of experiments. In the end were held eleven presentations on a diverse range of topics at our conference. 10 Introductory Remarks 12 Introductory Remarks us and let the material come to light once again. We are also grateful to PD Marc Siegel, who helped us secure additional funding for the symposium. Last but not least, we would like to thank Prof. Vinzenz Hediger for making our Institute part of the Erasmus project in the first place. Immense gratitude to Stefanie Schlüter, Beate Völker, Christine Kopf and Hannah Schreier, who gave their precious time to us, supported us in our research questions, and made us familiar with the current state of film education in Germany. The project could not have happened the way it did, if it would not have been for our generous supporters of the Vereinigung von Freunden und Förderern der Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität. We are deeply grateful for their support. Many thanks go out too to the people who made our symposium not just a place of theory but of experience: We would like to thank the Deutsche Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, namely Andreas Beilharz and Ines Bayer, for collaborating with us and for sharing their evening program with our guests. Thank you to all of our participants, interested scholars and students and guest, who created such a great atmosphere throughout the three days. Furthermore, we would like to thank our chairs, Kerim Dogruel and Jan Peschel, who helped through their highly engaging moderations to foster fruitful discussions. A special thanks goes to all our speakers.