In this chapter I will describe and discuss the main changes that are taking place in film archival practices today, from preservation to exhibition and access, as a result of the introduction of digital technology. While doing so, I will introduce links with the changes in theoretical approaches within cur- rent film and new media theory, which, in turn, will be central in the following chapter.
The objective of the following pages is to provide a snapshot of the current practices in film archiving, focusing, in particular, on the changes brought about by the introduction of digital tools. A detailed snapshot of archival prac- tice in transition is necessary at this point since it is missing in the literature at the time of writing, and it is meant to serve as a reference for those who are not familiar with the techniques involved in preservation, restoration and exhibition of archival films as carried out today. Within this work it also serves as a technical reference for the case studies discussed.
Furthermore, a snapshot of the technology available and the practices adopted by film archives today is instrumental in placing this work within the very transition it discusses. Archival practice is in many ways connected to film production practice. The most evident connection between archives and the film industry is that they make use of the same service providers (e.g. the same film manufacturers and laboratories) and of the same equipment for exhibition (e.g. projectors and sound systems). As a consequence, archivists need to know the technology used to make films today in order to be able to best preserve and restore these films tomorrow. Being familiar with current changes in film production practices is also necessary for film archivists in order to understand where changes in archival practices originate from and where they might be headed. Understanding the transition in the film medi- um is, indeed, the very first step for rethinking film museums of the future.
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With the above in mind, in the first part of this chapter, I will discuss a number of areas of contemporary filmmaking where the use of digital tools can clearly be held responsible for significant changes in the film production workflow. I will mainly focus on the areas of audio, editing, special effects, film duplica- tion process, and shooting and projection. These are the areas that most sig- nificantly influence the changes in film archival work in general, and in film restoration practice in particular, as it will be discussed in the second part of this chapter.
Since in this chapter I will be looking at transition, in the first place, from the perspective of practice, I will make extensive use of current professional sources, like trade journals and hand books, both from the filmmaking and the film archival field. Since professionals are expected to comment on the actuality and to provide other professionals with suitable tools for everyday practice, these sources give voice to the practice in this transitional phase. In this perspective they can be considered an integral part of the snapshot I am drawing of this technological transition.
1.1
FILM PROducTION
Also, I had come to the conclusion in the last days of Apocalypse Now [1979] that the cinema was about to go through an extraordinary change in that it was able to become electronic. I was sure that movies were going to be shot and edited digitally, and were going to be able to make use of the many facilities of an electronic medium.26
Francis Ford Coppola was not the only one to foresee that cinema would become digital. From the late 1970s onwards there have been many enthusi- astic prophets of the new digital cinema, as well as prophets of the end of film caused by the arrival of the digital. Almost twenty years later, what Thomas Elsaesser noted in 1997, is still partially valid:
We know that the revolution announced by Francis Ford Coppola in the late 1970s, which he hoped to implement with his Zoetrope Studio all- digital filmmaking, has so far not materialized, while another guru of dig- ital cinema, the inventor and owner of ‘Industrial Light & Magic’ George Lucas has voiced, as recently as 1997, a certain skepticism, and this not after a commercial failure, as Coppola’s ONE FROM THE HEART proved to be, but flushed with success after the tremendously lucrative re-launch of the first part of his STAR WARS trilogy, and his digital empire, working to full capacity, evidently also having ‘the Force’ on its side. (Elsaesser, 1997: 204)
| 35 The climate of digital expectation has had its ups and downs in the past three decades while the actual technological transition is taking much longer than was expected by many. As pointed out earlier, in the following pages I will look at the changes from the perspective of the practice. I will point out first some of the most relevant changes in film production in the last thirty years with respect to the transition from the analog to the digital technology, and I will relate these changes to those taking place in the film archival practice. Later, I will discuss in detail how new digital media are transforming film archival practice.
The introduction of digital technology has had a major impact on various aspects of filmmaking, such as audio, editing and special effects. In the last ten years a new process, in particular, has been introduced in the post-pro- duction practice that has led to the full digitization of film during post-pro- duction, the so-called digital intermediate process. However, even though at one step the whole film is digitized, the rest of the workflow, from its very beginning (shooting) to the end (distribution and exhibition), is today still predominantly analog. Most commercial films are still shot using polyester photosensitive film, and projection prints are still shipped to cinemas all over the world to be screened using old-fashioned film projectors. This does not mean, however, that things are not changing. In the last few years more and more filmmakers, with different backgrounds, from the mainly Scandinavian Dogme 95 movement to mainstream Hollywood filmmakers, are turning to digital for shooting their films, and it is expected that in a few years digital distribution and projection will become the norm. At that point the whole film production chain could eventually become celluloid-free. And film will be changed, at least as a material artifact.
The technologies and practices related to these changes will be discussed in this chapter, focusing on how these are reshaping the practice of filmmak- ing on the one hand, and of film archiving on the other.