Digital Film Restoration

 

During the course of the ‘digital revolution,’ the concept of film preservation and restoration has gained a significantly higher profile in public discourse than it ever had. But the various claims and ideologies surrounding digital restoration activities have tended to obscure rather than clarify the exact nature of this discipline. As the easily marketable formulas (“Digitally Remastered”) and the complex reality of film restoration seem to grow ever more divergent, archives and museums need to strive for more transparency in educating their audiences and other stakeholders about the ethics, aesthetics and economics of film restoration.

 

Over the past two years, the Film Museum has cooperated with the Austrian Film Gallery in Krems and with La Camera Ottica in Gorizia on several restoration projects which have employed digital methods. This undertaking has also been a work of research, in which the basic questions of film restoration can be posed anew. On the eve of a major symposium in Krems (on digital restoration in film archives), the Film Museum now presents numerous examples from its work in this field, contextualized by a conversation with Museum staff members about the different facets of their restoration activities.

 

Among the ten films being presented are some incunabula of early cinema (e.g. Max Linder in Chaussure trop étroite from 1907 and the artistry of Les Equilibristes Godavou) and several cases of color restoration (such as the postwar Italian film, Desulo, in FerraniaColor, or makeup tests with Elizabeth Taylor, dating from the mid-1970s). The program also includes various types of “ephemeral” film such as trailers (Lubitsch, Pudovkin) and home movies from the period between the world wars. And it will highlight two feature film restoration projects that are currently underway: James Benning’s American Dreams (1984) and, in cooperation with the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, Fedor Ocep’s Der lebende Leicham / The Living Corpse (1929, from a drama by Lev Tolstoy).