Introduction: Film Heritage in Transition
The current shift to digital technology has highlighted the transitional nature of film and has reaffirmed the necessity of reconsidering some of the key concepts at the basis of film studies and of the preservation of film heritage.[1]
Film heritage comprises the theory and practice of collecting, archiving, preserving, and presenting films.[2] This field emerged in the 1930’s with the opening of film archives in Europe and North America. The first film archives to be established were the film department of the New York Museum of Modern Art, the British Film Institute, the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and the Reichs filmarchiv in Germany.[3] Some of the main goals of public non-profit archives were those of collecting, preserving and showing national film heritage. But they also had a strong focus on international avant-garde films.
Due to its relative young age as an academic discipline, film heritage studies form an unevenly charted territory that has historically grown out of film and media studies, but that is always in dialogue with other disciplines such as heritage and museum studies, art history, digital humanities and, more recently, computer science. One thing that has become evident in the first two decades of academic film heritage programs is the importance of keeping theory and practice in balance through a fertile collaboration and interplay between the scholars and the archivists leading education, research and practice in the field.
The replacement of parts has always been inherent of film and of film archival practice. As an art and a technology of reproduction, a new film (copy) is typically struck from a previous one: a positive from a negative, a restoration from an older print. In this process, technologies, formats, color and sound systems have always been translated by necessity into different ones throughout film history, and have happened to include also digital technologies in more recent decades. This will be readily recognized, especially by film archivists, who are confronted with the transitional nature of cinema every day, together with what is lost and gained in this continuous translation process. And by film historians as film, in Tom Gunning’s words, “has never been one thing”, but rather “a point of intersection, a braiding together of diverse strands [...] [A]nyone who sees the demise of the cinema as inevitable must be aware they are speaking only of one form of cinema (or more likely several successive forms whose differences they choose to overlook).”[4]
Film belongs to those things that change by necessity and are, therefore, inherently transitional. From this perspective, film’s transition from analog to digital is a significant transformation but one that ontologically does not affect its (conceptual) artifact. Film heritage has also known this form of transition. Also known as the “digital turn”, this technological and cultural transition is rather a long wave that started when digital sound, digital editing and digital effects entered film production in the early 1990s. From the joint perspective of theory and practice “transition” in reality is a constant in film history, a steady state of film if you wish. As such, transition can be pivotal for developing a theory of film archival practice.
This section of the encyclopedia will address these pivotal transitions through the lens of the archival life of film (the life of film once it has entered the archive, from selection to preservation and from restoration to exhibition and digitization) with a more specific focus on the “hands on” preservation. Moving away from the analog vs digital framework, it suggests thinking the nature of film in transition to engage with a renewed dialogue on archival practice. The importance of bridging theory and practice to apprehend these transitions will firstly be exposed through the presentation of different frameworks that have informed the archival practice in terms of film preservation. Then the changes in preservation with the advent of new digital resources will be mentioned through the question of object-driven preservation, the film apparatus and the “material turn”. Two case studies will finally embody these considerations in concrete example of the preservation of films in transition. The restorations of the film Beyond the Rocks (1922) and the Mutoscope and Biograph Collection at the Eye Filmmuseum will highlight two chosen frameworks: the film as dispositif and film as performance.
