Introduction
If silent film preservation as a whole, in taking the duplication process at its epicentre, can arguably be seen as a necessary mistake, a belated attempt to make amends for past negligence, it does not give preserving institutions complete licence over the methods of preservation and especially restoration chosen. This parcours will call into question the “integrative” approach that film archives have historically favoured – since well before digital technology entered the debate – over a more “conservative” stance, a phenomenon which might be apprehended as an organic process inherent to cinema, rather than as a mere victory of the marketplace over culture. Yet, film conservation should be the heart and soul of film preservation: copying film on film remains the most effective and the least expensive option for long-term preservation, in addition to conserving the original prints, and it is also the least inaccurate rendition of film history. In this sense, the most passive approach to film preservation – not as paradoxical as it seems – is the best guarantee of its longevity.
But at a time when the moving image is increasingly treated as a docile commodity to be altered and manipulated at will, the act of allowing film to live on its own terms – protected from the hubris of those who pretend to rewrite its material history, or ignore it altogether – may in fact become a culturally subversive gesture. Projection prints are made for exhibition in a live cinema performance; their physical existence as part of a technology, with its specific historical framework, is a requisite of the motion picture show. Deprived of this context, prints are mute objects: not silent films, but inert visual content wrapped in plastic rolls. They might just as well be pixels.
We will begin our journey into the methods and ethics of film preservation by unravelling the typical material history of a silent film, from its exhibition and discarding to its – rather exceptional – salvaging and acquisition by an institution. As we follow the successive generations of prints struck from a film, we will see the losses involved in this multiple duplication process, but also its complexity and prohibitive cost at the preservation stage. This will lead us to tackle the ethical dilemmas facing institutions in their quest to restore “incomplete” films, a quest which can, when pursued without restraint, lead archives to take liberties with film preservation’s principles. Close scrutiny of a very common restoration method – cleaning scratches – will follow, showing that any intervention comes with technical, curatorial, and conceptual consequences, and questioning the reluctance of audiences to stand scratches and gaps in a silent film. The final part of this parcours will address more directly the equivocal nature of film preservation, whose actual meaning, goals and ethics appear to be heavily influenced by industrial concerns. Developing instead an ethics of spectatorship might thus be one of the keys to safeguarding silent cinema’s existence and criticism around it over time.
