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By 1901, however, the large format film, which was more expensive for exhibitors, was no longer viewed as a unique draw and 35 mm was rapidly becoming the industry standard.^[10] In the following years, the different Biograph branches outside of America either shut down or tried to adapt to the realities of the maturing industry, and the use of 68 mm was discontinued beginning in 1903.^[11] These 68 mm films consequently became rare technological artifacts and, upon entering the film archive, constituted what archivist Mark van den Tempel called “a preservation challenge of the first rank”^[12]  due to their large size and lack of sprocket holes as well as the loss of original projection equipment and specialized technical knowledge. Thus, the challenging nature of the 68 mm materials “ensured that the [collection] remained set to one side”^[13] for many years.

It was not until the 1990s that the first major restoration project took place. Carried out by Eye with funding from the European Union’s LUMIERE Project (1991-1995), around 200 Biograph titles from the archive’s collection and 100 titles from the National Film and Television Archive in England (NFTVA, now the BFI National Archive) were copied onto 35 mm. While this analog restoration reduced the size of the image and resulted in a loss in visual sharpness and quality, it enabled the films to finally be projected in a standard format.

Following this restoration, the Biograph films from both Eye and the BFI were organized into “The Wonders of the Biograph,” a 35 mm film series that was first screened in October 2000 as part of the 19th edition of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto. Curated by Nico de Klerk, then a collections researcher at Eye, “The Wonders of the Biograph” was comprised of eleven thematic compilations that were organized around different filmmaking techniques and practical, aesthetic, and thematic considerations. Bearing names like “Addressing the Audience,” “Making Up a Programme,” “How Shots Hang Together,” “Where to Place the Camera?” and “I Love a Parade,” de Klerk’s programs, and the accompanying informative intertitles interspersed throughout, were intended to introduce audiences to how both the non-fiction and more fictionalized Biograph films were made and shown and what constituted common subject matter at the time.^[14] With this instructive cinematographical focus, de Klerk’s curation primarily engaged with the collection at a conceptual level. In other words, the central focus of this series was not the visual and material capabilities of the 68 mm technology but the breadth and variety of the Biograph holdings, especially the less familiar output of the various European branches. In other words, it was by changing in the material artifact, to the reduced 35 mm prints, that the archive was finally able to showcase these historicized artifacts and make visible their specific thematic concerns and production and exhibition contexts.

Twenty years later, on the other side of the “digital turn,” Eye curators returned to the obsolescent 68 mm materials. With funding from the European Commission, Eye carried out a digital restoration project in 2019-2020 in which fifty Biograph titles were scanned at 8K resolution. This restoration produced high-definition versions of the selected films, reconstituting the original large image size, visual sharpness, and clarity that defined the Biograph films approximately 120 years earlier.