Preserving the Photochemical Laboratory: the Laboratory as Part of a Strategy for Preserving the Techno-Aesthetic Character of Analogue Cinema
University of Amsterdam
(Graduate School of Humanities)
MA Heritage Studies: Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image
Thesis Supervisor: Mark-Paul Meyer Second Reader: Giovanna Fossati Retake/ Submitted: 5th May 2020
Katia Rossini (ID : 11315415)
email: katiarossini@edpnet.be
1 Table of Content
Introduction 2
Some introductory historical notes 2
The contemporary context and the material turn 3
Clarification of terminology 5
Research questions 6
Theoretical framework and key concepts 7
1. The relation between aesthetics and technology 11
1.1. Cinema and its technology made invisible 11 1.2. Analogue cinema: a techno-aesthetic art 16
1.3. Prompting an epistemological turn 20
2.The material turn: the film apparatus as a means to investigate
the past of cinema 24
2.1. The analogue apparatus: transmitting a mindset 26 2.2. Performing the apparatus as part of a methodology of 30 historical research
2.3. Restoration as a process for preserving technical skills and know-how 32 2.4. Preserving the performative features of the apparatus 35
3.The photochemical laboratory: a strategic crossroads 39
3.1. The photochemical laboratory from the perspective of media 39 archaeology: a historical insight
3.1.1. The laboratory as an archive 42
3.2. The laboratory as an interdisciplinary and corporative site 44 3.3. The specific case of photochemical restoration laboratories 49 3.4.Case study – ANIM Laboratory/ Portuguese Cinematheque 53
3.4.1. History 53
3.4.2. Implementing an agenda for the laboratory 55
3.4.3. Dreaming about the future 62
4. Conclusion 64
2 Introduction
“In truth the invention of the cinema was a ‘long march’ which lasted for several centuries. It was a story filled with crowds of highly ingenious pieces of equipment, infinitely varied images ranging from the popular to the poetic, and researchers who, although occasionally charlatans, were often scientists with a rigorous and very modern approach.”1
Some introductory historical notes
“Cinematheques strive to preserve what the film industry strives to destroy”.2 It is with this statement that the film critic and essayist Raymond Borde started his book Les Cinémathèques on the foundation of cinematheques and filmmuseums, one of the first comprehensive publications to deal with this issue. More specifically, filmmuseums were originally created with the aim to save film prints that the industry would withdraw from the market, and then shred and destroy, once their commercial lifespan had ended. Since their first inception in the thirties, filmmuseums have been torn between the task of preserving film prints, and negatives, and the mission to exhibit these same prints to an audience. During a congress held in 1989 by the International Federation of Film Archives, an organisation created as early as 1938 and which is now more well-know by the acronym FIAF, Wolfgang Klaue, one of the first directors of the State Film Archive of the GDR, affirmed that the cultural role of film archives was equally influenced by social and political developments as well as by the level of scientific research.3
1 Mannoni, Laurent., and Richard. Crangle. The Great Art of Light and Shadow : Archaeology of the Cinema. University of Exeter Press, 2000. p xvi
2 Borde Raymond. Les cinémathèques. Ed. L’Age d’Homme, 1983. p15 (translation my own). 3FIAF.“Rediscovering the Role of Film Archives: to Preserve and to Show”. Proceedings of the Fiaf symposium held in Lisboa, 1989. p20-22
3 Hence he defined four historical periods, from the thirties to the sixties, which saw the implementation of the founding activities that will define the main policy guidelines set out by the film archives for many decades to come: ‘collecting’ materials, of any sort, from the silent era was the priority during the pre-war period; ‘safeguarding’ the nascent film collections became a necessity during the war; ‘programming’ and exchanges of film programmes marked the post-war decade; concerns about ‘preservation’ started emerging in the sixties. Nonetheless, over the years debates have mainly focused on the specific issues of ‘exhibition’ and ‘preservation’, reaching a peak of intensity in the sixties and early seventies, as well exemplified by the Ernest Lindgren and Henri Langlois debate, respectively founding curators of the UK National Film Library, successively renamed the British Film Institute, and the Cinémathèque Française. Eventually a majority of archives opted to privilege first and foremost a policy geared to conservation, as advocated by Lindgren, above a film screening activity with no limitation, as fiercely defended by Langlois. ‘Preserve then show’ would thus become the precept applied by a majority of filmmuseums, to such an extent that it became some kind of mantra. At the beginning of the 1990s it would ultimately become a recommendation included in the FIAF Code of Ethics.4
The contemporary context and the material turn
This succinct historical overview of the shifts in the policy guidelines of film archives highlights the fact that their role and function as cultural heritage institutions have not stayed fixed and immutable but have evolved, although they have always been focused on a set of defined priorities around the preservation and presentation of analogue prints. Assuredly, the advent of digital technologies has perturbed priorities on the agenda of filmmuseums and other institutions alike, putting pressure for a reassessment of their missions and action plans. If on the one hand digital is facilitating the access to film collections by diversifying the
4 means of circulation and exhibition, on the other hand the switch from one technology to another has also had for consequence that the spectrum of what is being saved from the dump yards has expanded to further include the film apparatus, while at the same time the range of cultural operators engaged in the recycling process of discarded equipment has grown to embrace not only cinematheques and filmmuseums but also artist-run associations, independent exhibitors, historians, galleries, universities, … Far from being a nostalgic trend, this commitment to collect what the industry wants to discard is often followed by a praxis of some kind, with a real reuse of the objects collected, whether for artistic, academic or preservation purposes. Interestingly, by being reappropriated by a relatively diverse range of non-commercial organisations, analogue film technology has gained a new visibility through an array of activities that put an emphasis on the physical ‘materiality’ of the apparatus and its related medium, the celluloid material. By contrast with the posture of the film industry that was inclined to occult technology, the tendency is now the opposite: the apparatus is shown, displayed, openly scrutinised, reactivated … Similarly, when films are screened on their original celluloid format it is with the intent to revive and make visible the materiality of the film artefact. The reevaluation of the role played by the apparatus in shaping the forms of cinema, which in turn is generating a change of perspective on the concept of materiality, is clearly a reaction to its increasing digitisation, and is what I will I here define as the ‘material turn’.
“What is just essential, is to consider how film ‘as such’ – as a cultural technique, as a techno-aesthetical system of producing meaning – will be preserved and remembered”5 . This statement by Alexander Horwath, former director of the Austrian Filmmuseum, suggests that - considering that not only the film medium but also the whole spectrum of the analogue film workflow is being replaced by new technologies - the question of ‘how’ and ‘what’ of the old scientific and technological apparatus and know-how will be preserved has become an issue of primary concern. As also argued by Ulrich Ruedel, we are witnessing a
5 Horwath, Alexander. “The Old Life.Reframing Film Restoration: Some Notes”. Journal of Film Preservation. No.96, April 2017, p 28.
5 discrepancy between the “visual characteristics that have shaped more than a century of moving image culture and film grammar” and the material chemistry and technology they were deeply rooted in.6 “Saving the works only will not suffice”.7
Clarification of terminology
In the first chapter of his book Inventer le Cinema (About the Invention of Cinema - translation my own), as well as on some other occasions, the historian and researcher Benoît Turquety has insisted on pointing out the subtle but still significant difference between the concepts of ‘technology’ and ‘technique’ (while also recognising a slight semantic difference between the English and French words). Although both concepts refer to the realm of machines and devices designed to accomplish a particular activity, Turquety acknowledges that ‘technology’ relates more specifically to an ensemble of machines and a
correspondent scientific knowledge operated in an industrial context, whereas ‘technique’ usually refers to the gestures and practices operated with these same machines.8 In this regard he cites a quote by Rick Altman, for whom the
distinction between the two concepts is also primordial, that states that “the important thing to remember is that a dialectical understanding of history is destroyed from the start by any theory which reduces to one those practices that interact as two”.9
Pointing out the difference in meaning between ‘technology’ and
‘technique’, two concepts which are also fundamentally complementary, is useful
6 Ruedel, Ulrich. “Toward a Science of Film and Moving Image Restoration.” Velvet Light Trap, No. 70, 2012. p. 63
7 ibid.
8 Turquety, Benoît. Inventer le Cinéma. Epistémologie: Problèmes, Machines. Ed. L’Age d’Homme, Lausanne, 2014.pp.27-30
9 Altman, Rick. “Toward a Theory of the History of Representational Technologies”, Iris, vol.2, no.2, 1984, p.115
6 for invoking the duality that resides in the term ‘apparatus’, which I will be using quite extensively in this thesis. Although the most literal sense of the term refers to a set of tools or instruments used to achieve a practical purpose, by extension ‘apparatus’ may also relate to the deployment of these tools and instruments in a specific context. In this sense, ‘apparatus’ may be seen as referring to both the hardware as well as the settings for its functioning. Eventually, it may also be used to refer to the entire reception and exhibition context, as in the case of the Apparatus Theory that I will expound in the first part of the thesis.
Research questions
Starting from the statements by Horwath and Ruedel that I mentioned just above, I intend to focus on one specific segment of the analogue film apparatus infrastructure, namely the film laboratory, and explore how it can be part of a strategy for preserving the material character of analogue film technology. Central to the thesis will be the question of whether we may envisage the film laboratory as a site for the transmission of a form of knowledge, both practical and empirical, around what is analogue technology, while also questioning if ultimately it can encourage new methods of historical research.
More specifically, I am interested in the case of film restoration laboratories that have recently recycled and reinstalled photochemical equipment as part of a preservation plan of action that integrates the usage of analogue tools. Although digital technology is being increasingly used in both film restoration and film preservation, it has not completely supplanted analogue formats. Archives are still in need to access traditional photochemical facilities and have become primary clients for commercial and non-commercial laboratories that can still offer an analogue workflow. Alternatively, some of them have set up or relaunched their own photochemical laboratory or are considering it as an option. By doing so, they are clearly supporting the possibility to strike new film prints and therefore to maintain opto-mechanical projection. Viewed from another perspective, they are
7 also preserving, at least temporarily, a very specific technological know-how that manuals and other written texts can document only in part, and that for more than a century has been transmitted from one generation of technicians to another through hands-on training.
Yet, the choice of setting up a photochemical laboratory is far from being a straightforward project, as not only technical but also administrative, financial and human resources issues need to be taken into account. I therefore here intend to explore the reasons and purposes that may induce a film archive to have its own photochemical laboratory, while also questioning how it does fit into a preservation policy agenda. I will look at the film restoration laboratory as a site which combines present and past technologies, but also as a repository for an immaterial heritage, that is to say the scientific and technical know-how which needs to be practised in order to be preserved.
Theoretical framework and key concepts
In his book Film history as Media Archaeology, Thomas Elsaesser suggests that the shift to digital does not only signify a change of technique in post-production work and in the delivery of films but that “the digital can [also] function as a time machine, a conceptual boundary as well as its threshold”.10This statement by Elsaesser is all the more interesting since it clearly suggests a hypothetical timeline, with the arrival of digital marking a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ in cinema, as well as a change of theoretical framework. It is precisely this change of perspective that prompts to reevaluate the specificities of analogue cinema, which I intend to investigate in the first part of the thesis.
The goal of the first chapter will be to define the conceptual framework within which I situate the research I have conducted. In the first part of the chapter, I
10 Elsaesser, Thomas. Film History as Media Archaeology : Tracking Digital Cinema. Amsterdam University Press, 2016. p.235
8 will attempt to briefly circumscribe the reasons for the original misunderstanding that has led to devise the history of cinema mainly outside the sphere of technology. In his introduction to the book Inventer le Cinéma, Benoît Turquety claims that until the mid-1920s film historiography had acknowledged the technical nature of cinema. But what has then followed was an effort to legitimise cinema as an artistic practice, along the same criteria as those applied mainly to fine arts, thus inducing that the technological dimension of cinema was overshadowed. In the first part of the chapter I will more specifically focus on the concepts of ‘uniqueness’ and ‘authenticity’, as these are the primary canons that have always conditioned the value placed on artworks, and that indirectly have biased the way cinema has been apprehended.
In the second part of the first chapter I will explore the notion of cinema as a techno-aesthetic art, as referred to by Alexander Horwath, in order to highlight the particular relationship between cinema and technology. I will refer to the Apparatus Theory that emerged in the late 1960s and influenced film theory throughout the 1970s, as it offered a corpus of texts that for the first time approached the issue of the technological character of cinema, although through an economic, psychoanalytical and ideological prism.
Interestingly enough, the Apparatus Theory has prefigured some of the debates regarding the material character of cinema that have now resurfaced through New Materialism, a stance that is increasingly permeating the field of cultural heritage and the arts, although the theoretical scopes are different. If in the 1970s debates on the apparatus were focused on disclosing ideological positions and patterns behind the use of technological tools, nowadays the issue of the materiality of analogue cinema is mainly discussed in relation to a cultural environment that is more and more dematerialised and that consequently raises the urgent question of the choices and methodologies to preserve its analogue past. The second chapter, focused on the present time, will therefore be devoted to exploring the reasons that may incite the use or reuse of the analogue apparatus in the field of film preservation. Borrowing some concepts from the area of New Materialism, I will identify four perspectives from which this issue may be approached and analysed,
9 and will propose to look at how the tangible presence of the apparatus, not only as an ensemble of devices but also as a technological infrastructure, can be a support to historical research. I will make some punctual references to the specific case of film restoration laboratories in order to illustrate some concepts. In addition, I will refer to some sources chosen in the field of anthropology to introduce the notion of ‘performance’ of the apparatus that I will also reiterate in the following chapter.
The third chapter will be fully dedicated to analysing the case of photochemical film laboratories. The choice to focus on this specific type of service and technical infrastructures, and more specifically on those specialised in restoration, is not casual but has been determined by the awareness that for more than a century laboratories have epitomised the essence of what analogue film technology has been, a unique mix of art, scientific erudition and industrial know-how. In this sense, laboratories have been cardinal institutions within the context of the film industry, not only because they used to centralise a high level of technological knowledge, that had to meet strict requirements usually established by film manufacturers and production companies, but also because they have always been at the crossroads of a diversity of fast-evolving technologies, as well as of various creative sectors in cinema.
I will start the chapter with an introduction about film laboratories from the perspective of media-archaeology and will then suggest that laboratories active in the field of preservation have the potential to constitute an archive of some sort, as they embrace both material and immaterial assets from the past. I will then propose a brief historical overview of some key elements that have determined the configuration of film laboratories and their relationship to the film industry. In this regard, an essay by the science historian and sociologist Robert E. Kohler on the history of generic laboratories has been an unexpected and resourceful reference that has inspired me to look at the laboratory also from the perspective of the linkages that this kind of enterprise infrastructure has maintained with dominant institutions.
I will then dedicate a short sub-chapter to introduce the specific case of restoration film laboratories, before moving to focus on analysing the case of the
10 restoration laboratory of the Portuguese Cinematheque. I decided to focus on the laboratory of ANIM - Arquivo Nacional das Imagens em Movimento/ National Archive of Motion Pictures – as it has come to represent, as I will explain, a model of reference for forthcoming restoration film laboratories that might be set up in the near future in the context of film archives.
The thesis will therefore move from a general conceptual framework to a specific case study, from a questioning of what is the material specificity of film analogue technology to an examination of the film laboratory as a potential means to preserve its techno-aesthetic character.
11 1. The relation between aesthetics and technology
1.1. Cinema and its technology made invisible
Cinema is considered as probably the most important technical image medium of the 20th century, and yet its recognition as an art happened on other grounds than
on the one of technology. This is all the more paradoxical as the very nature of the film experience takes its origin in two scientific-technological inventions which date back to the end of the 19th century, and which have essentially stayed the
same throughout the whole history of analogue cinema: the transparent celluloid film strip coated with photosensitive gelatine (1887-1889), and the motion-picture camera-projector apparatus (1888). As claimed by Benoît Turquety in the preface of his book Inventer le Cinéma, the history of cinema has mainly been devised outside the sphere of technology.11 He observes that once cinema had been recognised as an art form, it was then mostly analysed and assessed in the light of aesthetic and humanistic cultural values and canons, while the role of technology was relegated to the background. Similarly, Leo Enticknap affirms that films have been treated “in more or less the same way that classicists and literary scholars have treated books and plays, historians have treated sources and evidence, theorists have treated cultural phenomena and art critics have treated paintings”.12 If the digital turn is contributing to raise awareness about the fact that the history of technology has for too long been left to specialists and has been all but absent from humanistic film studies, it is then relevant to
11Turquety, Benoît. Inventer le Cinéma. Epistémologie: Problèmes, Machines. Ed. L’Age d’Homme, Lausanne, 2014. p13
12Enticknap, Leo. Film Restoration: the Technology and Culture of Audiovisual Heritage. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2013. p6
12 examine what are the reasons, at least some of them, that are at the origin of this misunderstanding.
As reminded by Vinzenz Hediger, in its early days cinema was primarily a technology industry, dedicated to the development and patenting of its inventions.13 It was not immediately recognised as an artistic practice, its mechanised nature being at odds with traditional arts. In the notorious text The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, written in the 1930s exactly when the first attempts to establish the history of technology were taking place,14 Walter Benjamin describes how first photography, then cinematography were perceived as conflicting with the long-established canons of art, as for the first time the most important tasks in the process of pictorial reproduction were performed through a mechanised instrument and not directly by hand.15 Furthermore, the presence of a technical intermediate apparatus, a fundamental and indissociable element for technological duplication, precluded the notions of ‘uniqueness’ of the piece of art and consequently of its ‘authenticity’. Authentic was considered the artwork produced in a particular place and time, created by hand, as a single and unique piece, subject to the traces of time. Films cannot of course comply with these concepts of ‘uniqueness’ and ‘authenticity’, considered at the time fundamental in the process of valorisation of an artwork.
Walter Benjamin was probably the first theorist and cultural critic to point out the incongruity between the notion of authenticity, as acknowledged in the field of fine arts at the time, and the mechanic nature of cinema. By arguing that the
13Hediger, Vinzenz. “Can We Have the Cave and Leave It Too?: On the Meaning of Cinema as Technology”. Technology and Film Scholarship : Experience, Study, Theory. Amsterdam University Press, 2018., p 218 14Turquety, Benoît. “Toward an Archaeology of the Cinema/Technology Relation: From Mechanization to Digital Cinema”. Technē /Technology : Researching Cinema and Media Technologies : Their Development, Use, and Impact. Amsterdam University Press, 2014. p63
15Benjamin, Walter, et al. Selected Writings Vol. 4 1938-1940 / Transl. by Edmund Jephcott and Others ; Ed. by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. p253
13 advent of cinema, as well as of other technologically reproducible arts, had opened the way to integrate the process of technological reproduction as a possible intrinsic part of an artistic process, Benjamin was at the start of a reasoning process that will eventually subvert the principle of the uniqueness of the artwork as it had prevailed so far in the arts and humanities.
It may therefore be pertinent to look at what might be considered as an authentic film artefact. Interestingly, in cinema we do not find the concept of authenticity as used or referred to in fine arts, but instead we find the notion of ‘original’. Original though is only rarely employed on its own, and is most of the time an attribute to another word, as in: original format, original medium, original print, original negative, original soundtrack, original colour system, … This little lexical digression may suggest that any attempt to define what an original film artefact is can be a difficult task, as a film results from an assemblage of multiple elements which may exist with variations in their essential stylistic or constitutive components. Giovanna Fossati affirms that “the meaning of ‘original’ can change
depending on the theoretical frameworks one embraces”,16 and that the concept
can refer either to a conceptual or to a material artefact. However, it can also relate to “the film as text where its integrity is measured in terms of completeness and continuity […] or to the film as text and as technological artifact”.17
Yet I would contend that it is precisely in the way the concept of authenticity, as developed in the field of fine arts, has been transposed to cinema that lies part of the explanation of why film technology has been obscured. I will here once more refer to Turquety’s claim that the legitimation of cinema has occurred by focusing the attention on artistic movements and trends, on filmmakers and ‘auteurs’, and not on its apparatus18. By saying so, he not only highlights the preponderance of aesthetics above technical concerns, but he also confirms the persistence of a system of values that puts the author and the creative act at the centre of the legitimation of the artwork. This logic has sometimes been
16 Fossati, Giovanna. From Grain to Pixel : the Archival Life of Film in Transition. Amsterdam University Press, 2018.p161
17 ibid. 18 ibid.p13
14 pushed to an extreme, like with the ‘politique des auteurs’ - or the ‘auteur theory’ as it had been translated - initiated by the French Nouvelle Vague in the 1950s, that gave emphasis to the creative qualities of the film director to the extent that it obliterated any other technical or artistic contribution.
Browsing through film historiographies one can better discern to what extent technical and technological elements have been considered as merely accessory in the shaping of film histories. As highlighted in a conference organised by the AFRHC (Association Française de Recherche sur l'Histoire du Cinéma),19 throughout its period of deployment film technology has been deemed worthy of attention only when there have been significant changes or ruptures visible to the audience. Already in the 1980s, in its seminal article “Cinema and Technology: a Historical Overview”, Peter Wollen had pointed out that film history had generally been narrated privileging always the same four historical moments: the Lumière ‘cinematographe’ period, the arrival of sound, the invention of colour, and the introduction of the wide formats.20 He had also argued that although cinema revolves around three categories of activities, namely ‘recording’, ‘processing’, and ‘projecting or exhibiting’, it is the first one which has always drawn the most attention as a field of historical research, privileging issues about the processes of production and filming.
Another pertinent contribution to the subject can be found in the writings of Jean-Louis Comolli published in the Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1970s, as a series of articles entitled “Technique and Ideology”. In one of them Comolli examines the status attributed to the ‘camera’, noting that this is the element of the film apparatus that was usually “put forward as the visible part for the whole of technique”.
19 “L’histoire du cinéma à l’heure du numérique”, 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze. No 75, 2015. < http://1895.revues.org/4950>
20 Wollen, Peter. “Cinema and Technology: a Historical Overview”. The Cinematic Apparatus. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1980.pp14-15
15 [The camera] reproduces and confirms the cleavage that does not cease to mark itself out in the technical practice of the cinema […] between the visible part of film practice […] and the ‘invisible’ part: the black space between the frames, chemistry, developing baths, laboratory work, negative copies, the cuts and “matches” of the editing process, the soundtrack, the projector, etc….21
By revealing and analysing how film culture is subject to the hegemony of the ‘visible’, Comolli has wanted to draw attention to the fact that cinema is usually experienced and acknowledged from the circumscribed perspective of what the camera captures. This domination of the lens and its consequent eye-centrism not only induces the misleading conviction that what is visible is assuredly true, real and ‘authentic’, but it also obliterates all the other technical components that constitute the film apparatus. Furthermore, the notion of ‘visible’ undoubtedly invokes canons that emphasise the pictorial content of cinema, thus justifying, once more, aesthetic values that can be ascribed to the field of fine arts.
If the considerations exposed so far highlight the conflicting relationship that may exist between cinema and the normative dimension of artistic-aesthetic values, another explanation for the neglect of technological matters in film history may be sought in the very nature of cinema itself. It is a fact that the essential features of film technology constantly remind us that cinema is first of all the result of industrial practices, which are fundamentally contradictory with aesthetic values that have prevailed for a long time in the arts. Referring to Benjamin, the theorist Paul Mattick Jr. reminds us that
according to Benjamin the uniqueness of the ‘original’ artwork is a key both to its authority as an object worthy of respect and to its place in unfolding tradition, the mechanical multiplication of the print spells the end of these
21 Comolli, Jean-Louis, and Daniel Fairfax. Cinema against Spectacle Technique and Ideology Revisited. Amsterdam University Press, 2015.p151
16 essential constituents of ‘aura’. Multiplicity also brings manipulability: the photograph offers itself not for worship as a singular and rare object but for whatever uses the consumer wishes to put it to.22
The mechanical character of cinema was also an indisputable sign of the reproducibility of films on a large scale, a perception that contributed to reinforce the image of cinema as being a cultural product for the masses. In this regard, Mattick does not hesitate to affirm that
Given that modern society has been based like none other in history on commerce, it is a striking paradox that, in discussion of the arts from the eighteenth century to the present, ‘commercial’ has been a synonym for ‘low’. In the same way, ‘mass’ has been a derogatory term for culture in a globally integrated social order founded on mass production and consumption.23
This comment hints at the ideological stances that have crystallised creative practices into a dichotomy between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, the mechanic nature of the cinematic apparatus being associated with the latter concept of culture. It is not until an aesthetic activity specific to film emerged in its own right - as with experimental and artist films, or explicitly formal films - that cinema has distanced itself from a traditional and dogmatic conception of art.
1.2. Analogue cinema: a techno-aesthetic art.
The concept of ‘techno-aesthetical system’ mentioned in the quote by Alexander Horwath, which I report in the introduction of this thesis, deserves an analysis in its own right, as it is precisely in the manner in which the relation between
22 Mattick, Paul. Art in Its Time : Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics. Routledge, 2003.p88 23 ibid.p24
17 analogue technology and film aesthetics has been apprehended that resides another explanation for the biased appreciation of technology.
From the onset, the notion of ‘system’ invokes the idea of a plurality of elements, and therefore also reminds of the collective and multi-layered character of cinema. Cinema is indeed the result of the convergence of multiple creative, technical and scientific endeavours tied together by the adoption of a common technology. A technology which is not a unified whole, but a heterogeneous ensemble as “it covers developments in the fields of mechanics, optics, chemistry and electronics”. 24 And yet, the constitutive elements of film technology have very much stayed the same for over 120 years, although continuously refined and improved. Because of this continuous perfecting of technology, cinema should have been apprehended as a process, as ‘a multiply determined development’, as Stephen Heath observed in the opening chapter of The Cinematic Apparatus, a book published at the very beginning of the 1980s that had the merit to summarise the main debates that animated the materialist movement of the time.25 It is not a fixed and immutable invention, although we are constantly reminded of “the first moments of cinema, of the basis of the apparatus itself.”26 Yet, even though the basic apparatus set-up has always been undeniably present in the consciousness of the spectators and the technological transformations it has undergone over time have always been reflected in the evolutive language of cinema, discourses on film technology have nonetheless been relegated to a systematic form of isolation. In the book just mentioned, Heath also blamed the fact that issues about film technology had systematically been discussed adopting a scientific language that could only generate a technological determinism, an approach that omitted to enter into dialogue with other spheres of cinema.27 The film materialist movement of the 1970s certainly contributed to highlight the specific multiple nature of cinema, indissociable from its multiple technological features, and furthermore it also brought technology back to the centre of debates
24 Wollen.p20
25 Heath, Stephen. The Cinematic Apparatus. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1980.p6 26 ibid p4
18 in connection with other areas of study, while reassessing its historicity. By urging to analyse the developments in film technology jointly with an analysis of economic and social factors that had influenced the history of cinema, the primary concern of the historico-materialist theorists of the 1970s was to connect the two spheres of film theory and history with a reflection on the film apparatus. The concept of ‘apparatus’ was first introduced by the essayist Jean-Louis Baudry, and was intended to designate the ‘instrumental base’ of the cinematographic process, namely the very basic material components and the operations needed to produce the film experience. In an introduction to Baudry’s theory, Bertrand Augst suggested that the ‘apparatus’ was what lies between “the objective reality and the film perceived as the finished product”.28 Ultimately, Baudry soon joined by the theorist Christian Metz contributed to set off the Apparatus Theory, to which Comolli, Wollen, Heath among others will adhere and eventually further develop.
While the Apparatus Theory was originally aimed at explicating how cinema could interact with human psychology and produce an ideological effect on the audience, over the years its corpus of texts went through a series of shifting interpretations according to the field of studies that embraced it. As I will examine in the next chapter, the Apparatus Theory is now brought back into prominence by the New Materialism turn in cinema. In the context of a reassessment of the materiality of analogue cinema that is now underway, looking back at the Apparatus Theory can certainly provide some pertinent indications on how to find an articulation between historical sources and concepts grounded in various theoretical domains - as social sciences, economics, humanities - as well as between the material and immaterial elements of cinema.
“To understand the specificities of analogue cinema it is essential to reconnect with its ‘writing instruments’, ‘its material tools’, that have produced a very
28 Augst, Bertrand. “Jean-Louis Baudry/the Apparatus.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 1, 1976, p. 104., doi:10.1215/02705346-1-1_1-104.
19 ‘specific form of thought’ as well as distinct aesthetic processes”. 29 In this quote, Horwath refers to the technological tools of cinema describing them as ‘writing tools’. This comment brings me to make a brief digression into the field of fine arts as I believe that it may illustrate how, two centuries before cinema, also traditional arts underwent an internal division between skills and tools on one side and aesthetic preoccupations on the other or, in other words, between ‘labour’ and ‘intellectual concerns’. This divide is now understood as having resulted from the deployment of a precise system of concepts, practices and institutions, as asserted by Larry Shiner. In his book The Invention of Art, Shiner claims that the modern concept of art stems from a European vision that has set a separation between the poetic and the mechanical attributes of artistic practices. According to his account, it is in the 18th century – a period of intense economic and industrial
transformations - that a division between artists and craftsmen started occurring, thus pulling apart the qualities promoted by the old system of thinking, which pursued the idea of perfect fusion of craft skills and artistic sensitivity, as ultimately exemplified by the concept of ‘masterpiece’. The original meaning of masterpiece being an artwork which could prove the outstanding skills as well as the high originality of an artist or artisan in order to enter a guild or academy.30 As further argued by Shiner, eventually this conceptual approach which incited to have a split between the material and utilitarian features of the artwork and its intangible and metaphysical sources of inspiration, induced one more division in the perception and understanding of the experience of art. And this was the emergence of a separate concept of ‘aesthetics’ used to designate the sensorial pleasure experienced through an artistic creation, as opposed to ‘taste’, “the inferior bodily senses of tasting, touching and smelling” 31. Used in 1735 by the philosopher Alexander Baumgarten to introduce a critical approach to the idea of ‘beauty’, the word ‘aesthetics’ will eventually come to refer to the sense of sheer
29 Horwath, Alexander. “The Old Life. Reframing Film ‘Restoration’: Some Notes”. Journal of Film Preservation. FIAF. No96, April 2017.p28
30 Shiner, L. E. (Larry E.). The Invention of Art : a Cultural History. University of Chicago Press, 2001. See introduction pp 3-16
20 refinement and style, of sensible perfection, but also to the autonomous study of sensitive knowledge.
1.3. Prompting an epistemological turn
In the light of the considerations mentioned in the sub-chapters 1. and 1.1. I will attempt to suggest some initial tracks of reflection. I will first consider the context in which some of the divisions I have highlighted - between technology and aesthetics, between material and immaterial features, between practical skills and intellectual concerns – have developed. I will once more refer to Larry Shiner who contends that “the modern system of art resulted from the conjunction of many factors, some of general scope and gradual development, others more restricted and immediate, some primarily intellectual and cultural, others social, political, and economic”.32 As in the case of the historical-materialist theories that emerged in the 1970s, Shiner calls for a diversity of sources in order to understand the foundations of the modern concept of art. Nevertheless, it is significant how, from the 18th century onwards, economic factors have proved to be deeply
dominant in the codification of the arts, while at the same time they have induced their commodification. By establishing a cultural market, with merchant and production values applied to reproducible artworks, as well as to those arts intended for amusement, they have accentuated the distinction between technicity, materiality and intellectualised pleasures. In this sense, cinema is no exception. Although recent film theorists do not fully adhere with Jean-Louis Comolli’s analysis that the socio-economic context is at the origin of a compelling ideological framework that predetermines a certain use of technology, there is general acceptance that economic practices, internal to the film industry, have influenced the modes of production, in accordance with aesthetic norms, and consequently have also regulated the use of technical devices.
32 ibid.p14
21 In referring to the stylistic canons that major film studios established in the first decades of Hollywood, David Bordwell and Janet Staiger explain how these were in fact very precisely determined along a strategic control of technology.33 Researches and inventions were mainly the result of endeavours undertaken by large companies, more rarely by solitary inventors, as they aimed at controlling not only the development of the technological products but also their patenting. Bordwell and Staiger further argue that “business strategies can usually explain the causation and timing of stylistic change”,34 noting that the introduction of new film devices or processes was never left to chance, but that on the contrary it was always carefully planned. This brings them to conclude that technology development is “institutional to a very substantial degree”, therefore suggesting that technological changes and innovations are inscribed not only in an economic but also socio-cultural construct. 35 Although the two historians refer to the period 1910s - 1960s and to the American film industry, we can easily deduce, by looking at how new technological processes, technical tools and machines have been launched on the international market in the decades to follow, that this paradigmatic configuration has more or less stayed the same up to the present.
In the light of an economic history of cinema we then learn not only that the history of film style, whether or not canonical, and more generally of film aesthetics, is fully interconnected with the economic strategies adopted for developing and launching technological innovations, but also that the creative act of filmmaking is by all accounts circumscribed and dependent upon the plans of action deployed by the film industry. Alternative partnerships between individual inventors and filmmakers have also existed, but have often been either recuperated and assimilated into industrial practices or have then been doomed to quickly disappear.36 It is therefore not surprising that histories of film aesthetics have very often been patterned around the narration that the industry
33 Bordwell, David and Staiger Janet. The Classical Hollywood Cinema : Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985.pp474-476
34 ibid. p482 35 ibid. pp481-482
22 has accepted to divulgate. As mentioned before, the history of film technology has so far been schematic and reduced to a few fundamental and invariable moments and innovations: the emergence of the basic dispositif, the introduction of sound, then of colour, the expansion of wide-screen processes, and sometimes few other elements. Turquety therefore argues that the historical vision we get from this condensed narration is inevitably truncated, as it does not take into account any articulation which may exist between technological processes and the machines that perform them, or between the preliminary experiments and the practical work accomplished in order to bring some inventions into existence. 37 Yet, digging into the history of specific and specialised devices and processes, as well as their practical applications, can provide a more refined account of why and how some aesthetic or stylistic choices have emerged. This can go as far as trying to understand why a filmmaker has used a certain device, at a certain moment, in a certain way, and ultimately how and why it fits into a more global history of cinema.
In regard to the specificities of the technological tools, Benoît Turquety suggests the adoption of an epistemological approach that would contribute to decode the specific and contingent characteristics of past inventions, while also assessing the conditions that brought them forth. An epistemological, theoretical framework would necessarily have to weigh not only the materiality of the machine but also its ‘non-verbal’ components, in that some of its features belong to a specific gestural language more than to a discursive knowledge, as highly stressed by Turquety.38 This is also where we can situate an articulation between technology and aesthetics, as the formal choices made by a filmmaker reside precisely in this area of inquiry where the potential uses of a machine meet the choices materialised through a creative act. Apprehending the articulations between
37 Turquety.Inventer le Cinéma.pp 75-7 38 ibid.
23 analogue film technology and artistic specificities may allow to better understand what film is “in itself and in relation to other forms of expression”.39 As wrote by Nowell-Smith “other art forms may use technology, but the use of technology is not part of their definition”.40
39 Horwath, Alexander. Film Curatorship : Archives, Museums, and the Digital Marketplace. Österreichisches Filmmuseum, 2008.p84
40 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. The History of Cinema: a Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press UK. 2017.p51
24 2.The material turn: the film apparatus as a means to investigate the past of cinema
The Apparatus Theory of the 1970s could be viewed as having laid the foundation for the material turn that is currently influencing a broad range of issues in film history and cinema studies in general. But unlike the previous theories that had an ideological grounding, the current theoretical shift puts the emphasis on the apparatus and on the materiality of cinema as sources for experiencing, in a tangible and empirical way, specific aspects of the history of cinema. The present material turn should also be replaced in the larger context of the New Materialism, a multidisciplinary theoretical movement that emerged in the course of the 1990s and that, as the name suggests, seeks to investigate “new ways of thinking about matter and processes of materialization”,41 which also means looking at how material objects may influence an artistic discipline. In the specific case of cinema, the material turn is undeniably linked to the advent of digital technologies and can be regarded as having sparked an ontological quest into the origins of cinema and the specificities of its technological apparatus.
The return to materiality needs nonetheless to be analysed further than by simply acquiescing the physical presence of a technical object or machine or, as in our specific case, of an apparatus ensemble. In his book on this precise issue of materiality, David Miller advances the argument that it is the exterior environment that conditions and familiarises us with objects and things, and thus that determines a material culture.42 Miller draws an audacious and moreover pertinent parallel with an essay by E.H. Gombrich on the significance of ‘frames’ in the artistic context, to further explain how within a specific environment we have ‘frames’, here intended as cultural establishments, that formalise the value of objects and the vision we have of them.
41 Coole, Diana H., and Samantha. Frost. New Materialisms : Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press, 2010.p2
25 A more radical version of Gombrich's thesis could argue that art exists only inasmuch as frames such as art galleries or the category of ‘art’ itself ensure that we pay particular respect, or pay particular money, for that which is contained within such frames. It is the frame, rather than any quality independently manifested by the artwork, that elicits the special response we give it as art.43
This quote brings me to advance that the significance of the material turn, in regard to the past of cinema, should also be interpreted in terms of how frameworks, both physical and experiential, in which the analogue film apparatus is today redeployed, may influence the reading we have of film materiality and technology. Ultimately, this means reckoning and acknowledging both the historical context in which the apparatus has been used, in this case the film industry, and the new framework in which it is now being reemployed or simply exhibited, which is mainly the field of film heritage, and more specifically of filmmuseums, cinematheques, universities, and other institutions alike.
In this chapter, I will thereby examine some reasons that may lead to preserve, reuse, and eventually exhibit particular elements or parts of the film analogue apparatus. I will tackle the issue both from the perspective of the ‘objects’ and of the ‘framework’. The core question being: what is it that digital technology cannot convey of analogue cinema that justifies the maintaining of opto-mechanical tools and machines? And are there limits in the way digital technology can revisit the analogue past, and where are then the material and formal boundaries? I will here suggest that this issue should be approached from at least four perspectives that can be resumed as follows: 1) the apparatus may be needed for transmitting a mindset 2) the apparatus can be part of a process of historical research 3) a restoration process needs the preservation of technical skills and know-how 4)the intangible features of the apparatus may be preserved through a performative
26 process. In the course of this chapter, I will make some references to the specific case of photochemical film laboratories, when appropriate.
2.1. The analogue apparatus needed for transmitting a mindset
A first effect of the material turn is discernible in the raising effort to move beyond the boundaries of mere theorisation and to anchor the revisitation of the history of cinema in concrete and even pragmatic experiences supported, when possible, by the use of its tools and machines, as well as its moving image materials. Why is this? The most immediate reply would be that there is a growing acknowledgement that physical objects can teach and communicate something unique of the past of cinema, that words and discourses cannot convey. I would thus advance that it is in respect to the process or act of ‘knowing’ what cinema ‘is’ and ‘has been’ with reference to its materiality that we must search for a first explanation of why there is a determination to save its analogue technology before it will get definitively discarded. The process of ‘knowing’ should here be intended as being twofold. It certainly points to the understanding of the specific features of the analogue apparatus, but it also concerns the particular mindset that analogue engenders and the process of cognition that goes with it.
However, it seems that we need to exit the sphere of cinema in order to find some valuable contributions for understanding the process of cognition in relation to materiality. And more specifically, it is in the fields of social anthropology and cognitive studies that we can find some directions of research. “For too long we have lived with the notion that the material is receptive to concepts that are projected onto it”.44 By this statement the anthropologist Susanne Küchler points out the fact that discourses on materiality have generally been shaped in terms belonging to the domain of social studies and humanities, and not to scientific and technological research. She further argues that even within the ambit of material
44 Küchler, Susanne.“Materiality and Cognition: The Changing Face of Things”. Materiality. Duke University Press, 2005.p.209
27 culture, objects and the material world in general, including technology, have for too long been acknowledged on the basis of a correspondence with preexisting mental and cultural notions, and not for their being per se. To support her reasoning, Küchler quite evidently also refers to Bruno Latour and his studies on science and technology where he advances the theory that in order to overcome the opposition between social things and materiality we must accept to dissociate our knowledge of the physical world from ideological and humanistic discourses. Yet, the advent of digital technologies, and the gradual dematerialisation of cinema and of culture in general, is propelling us in an environment that, surprisingly enough, may incite to rediscover the materiality of objects and machines exactly because of their disappearance. It is a fact that the economic obsolescence and the consequent dismantling of the film material and apparatus in the context of the film industry is in turn having the effect of their reevaluation for historical and preservation purposes, which is also inducing a rematerialisation of the researches carried in the field of film studies.
The disappearance of analogue images and technology prompts questions not only about the nature of the experience we can still have of past cinema, but also about “the recognition of a passing ontology, or an ontology past” as asserted by D. N. Rodowick in his questioning on “What was cinema”.45 A search into this ontological past will inevitably lead us to investigate the materiality of cinema, as this is an unavoidable aspect of analogue technology, and thus the access to material artefacts as well as components of the old apparatus could ultimately prove highly useful.
Yet, at least two further reasons may explain why we need materiality in order to activate a process of knowledge of the past. The first reason can be explained by the assumption that it is ‘things that create cognition’, and here we must intend objects, artefacts, tools that are carriers of past and present experiences “from which we learn to think in particular cultural ways”.46 We live
45 Rodowick, D.N. (David Norman). The Virtual Life of Film. Harvard University Press,2007.pp 73-74 46 Miller. p208
28 in an environment where material artefacts are everywhere, we are influenced or conditioned by them on a daily basis, and it is through objects that children learn to discover the world. In the introduction to the Handbook on Material Culture, the anthropologist and archaeologist Christopher Tilley advances that “things are meaningful and significant not only because they are necessary to sustain life and society [ … ] but because they provide essential tools for thought [ … ] and they provide a fundamental non-discursive mode of communication”.47 In the light of this consideration, we can then deduce that the film apparatus together with its film medium, because of their very presence, tangible and physical, can teach us something about what analogue cinema has been.
The second reason lies in the different specificities of respectively the analogue and digital medium in the process of activating a psychological mechanism in the act of visual recognition. D. N. Rodowick explains this process as “the basic cognitive and perceptual mechanisms by which image and movement are conveyed and understood”.48 He further stresses how the power of indexicality of the analogue image is inscribed in a spatio-temporal relation that reinforces its link with the object represented, while with digital we are faced with a process of simulation that annihilates this temporal dimension. Although the digital image also works on the basis of analogy, its nature is inherently virtual as based on data and algorithms, and “has loosed its anchors from both substance and indexicality”.49
The immediate and even intimate triangular connection between (1)the objects, (2)the sense of materiality and (3)the analogue images is what may be seen as constituting the basis of the specific mindset of analogue cinema, congruent with an equally distinctive way of conceptualising the cinematographic experience that digital technologies can only simulate but not recreate.
47 Tilley, Christopher Y., et al. Handbook of Material Culture. Sage, 2013. P747 Rodowick. p74
48 Rodowick. p74 49 ibid..p10
29 If materiality is foundational to most people’s stance to the world, as asserted by Miller,50 analogue cinema may then be perceived as being allegorical of man’s desire to mediate reality through technology. Within this framework, materiality is not just a concept of sheer appearance but on the contrary is a source for a discernable interaction between the ‘real’ and the film apparatus that ultimately, as said above, defines the very identity of analogue cinema. It should not be forgiven that cinema emerged and developed in a century impregnated with a fascination for technology, this latter being considered as a sign of modernisation in the name of industrial capitalism. Benoît Turquety does not hesitate to assert that when cinema emerged, it was perceived as a cultural model that symbolised the concept of modern technology and embodied “some of its most characteristic features: mechanical, modern, involving speed and vision”. 51 Cinema was the ‘ultimate’ machine.
In light of these considerations, and from a historical perspective, the film laboratory can be seen as a site that epitomises the characteristics of the mindset associated with film analogue technology. All through the history of analogue cinema, it is in the laboratory that filmmakers have found the technological means and the know-how to materialise, in the true sense of the word, their creative ideas and visions. The starting point for all the different processes performed in a photochemical laboratory is the film raw stock, the medium that gave a material identity and a specific aura to analogue cinema. Peter Wollen had claimed that some main improvements in film technology had been accomplished because of developments in film stocks and optics. “The real breakthroughs have been in the technology of film stock, in chemistry rather than mechanics […]the history of film stock is one of steadily improving speed/grain ratios, faster and more sensitive emulsions without adverse graininess”.52 Referring once more to an earlier quote by Alexander Horwath, here we have, with the film laboratory, the typography of cinema, that turns the film writing into a real, ‘authentic’ artefact.
50 Miller. p. 2
51 Turquety. ”Toward an Archaeology of the Cinema”. p51 52 Wollen. “Cinema and Technology”. p15
30 2.2. Performing the apparatus as part of a methodology of historical research
The growing recognition that the difference between analogue and digital does not only reside in the apparent physical properties of the two technologies but also in the experience we have of them is encouraging new methods of historical research. In this regard, Giovanna Fossati and Annie van den Oever call for an approach where archived technological objects can be studied in context.53 This means abandoning the traditional configuration where objects and machines are examined from a distance and suggests instead that the specific conditions for their renewed use as a means to explore new theoretical perspectives should be created. Clearly, this also involves taking into consideration their tactile and performative characteristics, and therefore presupposes the maintaining and preservation of the know-how needed to do it.
In his studies on film technology, Benoît Turquety has regularly underlined the fact that some salient features of the film apparatus cannot be explained verbally, thus justifying that the analysis and history of technological tools and machines need to be anchored in a concrete praxis.54 Written manuals can only partially illustrate and explain how the interaction between the human and the machine works, as technical gestures are often the result of long traditions where choices may have been made based on individual experiences and discernment, and not on the ground of scientific evidence. This leads Turquety to affirm that the transmission of the ‘correct gestures’ that are needed in order to operate the apparatus may be refractory to excessive rational explanations and instead need to be physically and manually transmitted.
The case of photochemical laboratories provides a concrete example of what has just been described. In a conference on the future of photochemical laboratories Christian Lurin, technical engineer for Eclair and formerly for Kodak, highlighted the fact that the skills needed in a laboratory could not be taught solely through a theoretical training programme but had to be transmitted
53 Fossati, Giovanna, and Annie van den Oever. Exposing the Film Apparatus : the Film Archive as a Research Laboratory. Amsterdam University Press, 2016.p20
31 through practical apprenticeships, as it has always been the case in the past from one generation of technicians to another.55 He therefore warned that with the recent closure of a large number of laboratories there are skills that will not anymore be transmitted, and that a very specific technical know-how is therefore doomed to disappear. In saying so, Lurin highlighted the irreversibility of a process that is inclined to eliminate skills that might in fact be recycled and used in other sectors of activity as in film preservation, a domain where there is now a shortage of people with an in-depth expertise in analogue film techniques and more broadly in analogue technology. Laboratory technicians are also among the only professionals capable of reading the technical files still held in the databases of film laboratories. These files, that document all the technical procedures and processes a film has gone through while in the laboratory, may have eventually been transferred to a paper archive. As claimed by Lurin, it has become urgent to decode these files before the necessary know-how disappears completely. On another level, the raw data contained in these files have also the potential to be turned into useful historical information.
We may find a significant contribution to the subject in Gilbert Simondon’s seminal work On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Simondon recognises the essential role played by man, not only as an inventor but also as permanent ‘interpreter’ of the machines he works with, emphasising that although these latter have been devised along determinate schemes, they cannot be a source of information on their own.
The machine on the contrary has been built according to a certain number of schemas, and it functions in a determinate way; its technicity, its functional concretization at the level of the element are determinations of forms. The human individual thus appears as having to convert the forms deposited into machines into information; the operating of machines does
55<canalu.tv/video/cinematheque_francaise/le_futur_des_laboratoires_cinematographiques_intervention_de _christian_lurin.7760>
32 not give rise to information, but is simply an assemblage and a modification of forms; the functioning of a machine has no sense, and cannot give rise to true information signals for another machine; a living being is required as mediator in order to interpret a given functioning in terms of information, and in order to convert it into the forms for another machine.56
Thus, if we are to agree that the physical performance of the machines and tools, as well as the manipulation of the film materials, can provide a specific know-how through hands-on experience, we then also have to recognise that these actions still need to be transformed into information in order to become a source for historical knowledge. In other words, the contribution of film technicians can be of invaluable aid to historians, archivists and other researchers as by operating the film apparatus not only they transmit technical expertise but they may also help to reveal some unsuspected qualities of the machines. Yet, this firsthand information needs interpretation in order to be integrated into a historical narrative.
I would therefore suggest that the live performance of the film apparatus, together with the manipulation of the film materials, can be relevant to an epistemological framework of research at least in three manners:
• by substantiating other sources of information • by encouraging new themes of research
• by proposing a plausible alternative, anchored in the materiality of the objects, as opposed to the process of digital remediation, which is essentially virtual
2.3. Restoration as a process for preserving technical skills and know-how
“The story of the audiovisual media is told partly through its technology, and it is incumbent on archives to preserve enough of it - or to preserve
56 Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove. Univocal Publishing, Minneapolis. 2017.p150
33 sufficient documentation about it - to ensure that the story can be told to new generations. Allied to this is the practical need, which will vary from archive to archive, to maintain old technology and the associated skills in a workable state”. 57
This recommendation reported in the opening chapter of the Unesco Audiovisual Archiving book contains a simple and yet critical reference to the indissociable link that lies between film technology and the works it has generated. Maintaining or recreating this special bond between the technological tool and the artefact may prove to be important in some preservation actions, especially if it contributes to the understanding of a specific cinematographic experience. This means preserving specific elements or segments of the film apparatus infrastructure that might need to be restored in order to be operational. In turn this action might also require the competence of technicians with particular technical skills which then also need to be somehow ‘preserved’ or perpetuated. I will propose hereafter two examples where the preservation of a specific technical know-how may prove to be indispensable.
In the book Restoration of Motion Picture Film, Mark-Paul Meyer explains how there are cases where the preservation of a film must be preceded by its restoration. He points out the process of self-destruction of film materials that cannot be stopped, and sees in duplication the only way for guaranteeing their preservation. 58 But if operating the migration of a film to another medium may sometimes be a solution, in other cases it may be not. As argued by Ray Edmondson in the Unesco Audiovisual Archiving book, the increasing facility with which a content can now be migrated and repurposed generates a situation where we sometimes undervalue the importance of the links that exist between the original carrier and its content.59 Furthermore, in the process of migration from
57 Audiovisual Archiving: Philosophy and Principles . p6 <www.unesco.org/open-access/terms-use-ccbysa-en>
58 Meyer, Mark-Paul and Read Paul. Restoration of Motion Picture Film. Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000.p1 59 Edmondson, Ray. Audiovisual Archiving: Philosophy and Principles. Third Edition. UNESCO Bangkok. 2016.p56
