Universiteit van Amsterdam Faculty of Humanities, Department of Media Studies MA Heritage Studies: Preservation & Presentation of the Moving Image
Restoring Fantasies / (Re-)Creating Realities - Towards a New Dispositif of the Digital Restoration of Reversal Films
Master’s Thesis Manuel Goetz, 11104732 Supervisor: Mark-Paul Meyer June 23, 2017
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank Mark-Paul Meyer for his inexhaustible help and support throughout the entire research process. I further thank Eef Masson and Giovanna
Fossati for making possible the study film archiving in the first place, and their continuous academic support throughout the course. I owe gratitude to Gerard de Haan, Frank Bruinsma,
Alan Marcus, Albert Edgar and Brian Pritchard for their advice on technical issues. Thank you Tulta, Nadja, Jasper and Nick for the community, your comradeship and spiritual guidance.
Bill Brand has been a great mentor, beyond film archiving. Will Sweeney, Elena Rossi-
Snook, Steve Cossman and Ron Magliozzi contributed substantially to the coming into being of this work, with their willingness to share knowledge and expertise. Thank you, Monica,
Dessane and Ted for conversations about immensity (and political correctness). Thanks to
Janneke, for invigorating lunch breaks, and to Raoul for his trust. Thank you, Max, for the late-night scanning session.
Above all, my deepest gratitude belongs to my family and friends, for putting everything in the right place. Thank you, Steffi, for my idea book and its completion. You will see it filled with blood, sweat, tears and Käferbohnensalat.
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Table of Contents
List of Figures 4
1 Introduction 5 1.1 Reversal Film 5 1.2 Film Restoration after the ‘Digital Rollout’ 6 1.3 The Restoration Dispositif 9
2 Methodology 16 2.1 Why Color? 17
3 Current Reversal Film Restoration Practice 21 3.1 Analog Restoration 22 3.2 Digital Restoration – Scanning in the Rift between Analog and Digital 24 3.3 Further Issues 32 3.4 Customization 34 3.5 Ethics in Digitization 35
4 Towards a New Dispositif 40 4.1 Digital Hyperreality 40 4.2 Indexicality and Reversal Film 42 4.3 Preserving Historicity 44 4.4 A Second Layer of Relevance 47 4.5 A New Dispositif 49
5 Application in Practice 54 5.1 Illustrating Practice – The Restoration of American Dreams (lost and found) 54 5.2 A Hypothetical Experiment 62 5.3 The (Preliminary) Experimental Implementation 67 5.4 A Survey of Archaeometric Projects 77
6 Conclusion 84
Bibliography 88
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List of Figures
Figure 1. Scan of a negative color image and the same image with the luminosity inverted. 5
Figure 2. Scan of a reversal slide. 5
Figure 3. The characteristic curves of a color negative film (Eastman EXR 50D), and color reversal film (Kodak Kodachrome 64), as retrieved from Kodak data sheets. 23 Figure 4. Illustration of Sharma’s concept of a profile connection space. 27
Figure 5: Illustration of digital restoration workflow with the overlooked field of excessive metadata. 51
Figure 6. The workflow of the restoration of American Dreams (lost and found). 57
Figure 7. An E-6-processed reversal image and a cross-processed (C-41) reversal image. 57
Figure 8. Original American Dreams frame of faded reversal element and graded scan after color correction. 58
Figure 9. Setup of conducted experiment. 68 Figure 10. Sensitivity of Kodachrome. From left to right: blue layer, green layer,
red layer 69
Figure 11. The slide used for the experiment. 69
Figure 12. The red and green scans, before any correction applied. 70
Figure 13. The black-and-white color topography image of the green and red layers. 71
Figure 14. The black-and-white records of green tinted magenta and red tinted cyan. 71
Figure 15. Comparison of experimental outcome image and original starting slide. 72
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1 Introduction
“Projecting a color reversal original induces a superb high or, if you’re lucky,
hallucinations. [...] There are other mediums better suited to graphic imagery, but
the sensual qualities of color reversal are what free my imagination."1
Figure 1. Scan of a negative color image and the same image with the luminosity inverted
Figure 2. Scan of a reversal slide. Consider the different color patterns in comparison to the
inverted negative.
1.1 Reversal Film
With the emergence of photographic film, mechanical reproducibility became not only a potential but in essence a necessity for the technology to fall into place. Throughout much of its history, photochemical photography and motion picture film were negative/positive
1 Wilkins, Timoleon. "At This Moment." The Moving Image 12.1 (2012). p. 95f.
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systems: the chemicals coated on the surface of the piece of film exposed to light reversed the luminosity and color spectrum of the imprinted object and in order to gain a positive image, these recordings needed to be printed (the act of transferring images on negative film onto positive stock) or otherwise shone onto a new, second material. Besides this method, a different process emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, one that was about to allow photographers (and film makers) to easily and cheaply produce direct positive photographic images. 2 This technology, referred to as slide film, positive film, or reversal film produces a positive, projectable image on the same photosensitive layer of the film that was previously exposed to the light of the captured scene in exposure. Further printing or enlargement on positive photosensitive surfaces (such as photographic paper) was no longer necessary for viewing. As motion picture film, reversal stocks have almost exclusively been assembled into
8mm, Super-8 and 16mm configurations; formats generally referred to as 'small gauge', with
16mm being located somewhere between small and large gauge film. This thesis intends to contribute to the field of the restoration of these materials.
1.2 Film Restoration after the ‘Digital Rollout’
The institutions involved in the film heritage sector have a shared interest: to preserve and carry on the film artifacts of their holdings and their associated viewing experiences, of the past and the present, into the future. This is done either passively, in that the medium’s carriers are stored under certain conditions that are thought to be ideal for a maximum longevity, or actively, in interfering with processes of deterioration and decay, in order to restore a certain previous state of the object.3 The term 'restoration', a procedure within active preservation, encompasses the creation and juxtaposition of two different materials, at the
2 The first practical and fairly successful process was Autochrome, developed by the brothers Lumière in 1907. See: Coe, Brian. Color Photography. The First Hundred Years. Vol. 1. Sussex: Ash&Grant, 1978. p. 52f. 3 UNESCO. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Audiovisual Archiving. Philosophy and Principles. By Ray Edmondson. Third ed. Bangkok: UNESCO, 2016. Web. 20 Dec. 2016. p. 66f.
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beginning of the investigation, the so called 'original' and at the end, when the new version of this original is released.4 In archive practice, the artifact created in the restoration is understood in reference to the original, which functions as both the starting point and final benchmark for any restoration project.5 It is aimed in this thesis to bring forward an understanding of the ways in which the two products are compared, with the specific case of reversal motion picture films. Ultimately, it intends the formulation of a critique of these current modes, accompanied by suggestions for possible revisions.
Film and its associated industries have been facing the medium’s biggest change in history, with film production and distribution turning almost in its entirety towards digital technologies, within only a few years.6 For film production, this process firstly brought about the development of what is coined the 'Digital Intermediate' workflow, which found its peak use before the transition to all-digital workflows started, about one decade ago.7 In this process, the film is shot on analog film, the original camera negatives digitized, the digital files then edited, corrected, retouched, etc., and ultimately recorded back to film for cinema distribution, or output to a different distribution format if no cinematic release is intended.8 It is this processes that film archives appropriated heavily for their use in the recent past, because the overall majority of their holdings is photochemical film, while most of the restoration work today is taking place digitally. The implementation of these practices took place in institutions with long histories of analog film preservation and was to considerable
4 Read, Paul, and Mark-Paul Meyer. Restoration of motion picture film. 1st ed. Vol. 1. London: Butterworth- Heinemann, 2000. p. 1. 5 Edmondson, Audiovisual Archiving. p. vi. 6 The experimental and partial use of digital cinema technology, in particular for big-budgeted Hollywood production started in the 1980s, or even a bit earlier, with Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now in 1979, which, while shot entirely on analog film, reveals a leaning towards what was about to come; Coppola had the digital turn manifested in his revised Apocalypse Now Redux. However, essentially it was the late 1990s and 2000s, which saw the profound changes happen. It is argued, that the process was finished roughly in 2010. See: Fossati, Giovanna. From Grain to Pixel The Archival Life of Film in Transition. N.p.: Amsterdam U Press, 2011. p. 34ff. 7 Belton, John. "Painting by the Numbers: The Digital Intermediate." Film Quarterly 61.3 (2008). p. 58. 8 Fossati, From Grain to Pixel. p. 35.
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extent a result of the powers of outside forces, such as the Digital Cinema Initiatives.9 This employment met existing practices that have been developed at the institutions over long periods of time, resulting in specialized, concentrated expertise. The so-called 'digital rollout' brought with it the sudden availability of post-production tools for film restoration means, scrutinizing extant positions, practices and theories of archival institutions. These mechanisms required a sudden production of new knowledge and skills.
Among the archivists, the new archival techniques stifled hope to more effectively and efficiently being able to tackle preservation and, in particular, restoration issues that before the digital turn entailed very labor and time intensive procedures. While this proposition has certainly seen the promises of this technological change implemented in some aspects of archival work, in particular in new medium access models, due to the speed and far-reaching extent of the recent repositioning, archivists could not yet develop an expertise comparable to the analog era. This is particularly applicable when it comes to its influence on proceedings in restoration, where a specialized niche application of digital means has not yet been developed, as will be illustrated with the case studies presented in this paper. The practitioners saw themselves exposed to a variety of unique difficulties generated by (and inherent to) this new technology.
I am writing this paper to contribute to the understanding of this specification and help delineate the requirements and potentials of the new situation, in order to overcome prevalent problems in restoration practice. I will do so in pursuing alternative potentials of digital technologies and developing strategies for the archives to utilize these. I aim to outline reasons for why it is precarious to employ these new and ever accelerating technologies
9 The DCI is a union of the "big six" Hollywood studios (Disney, Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal and Warner Brothers), formed in 2005. In 2007 they released a revised version of their initial first statement, codifying the guidelines of the conversion to digital cinema production and distribution. This included a list of the favored presentation codecs and carriers. The initiative is considered to stand emblematically, as the final momentary turnover, for the Hollywood industry abolishing their film production on photochemical film. See: Fossati, From Grain to Pixel. p. 58.
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uncritically and solely in their indented uses. I suggest employing comparable methods to those that have a long-lasting tradition, including practices of appropriation, experimentation and adaption. Considering the current position after the digital-rollout, the field has come to a point in time when it is fruitful to explore such situations, as the most hectic moments of this upheaval seem to have been surpassed, allowing for contemplation and reconsideration of what has happened. I believe there is enormous potential to be found in the tracing back and comparison of the habitus of digital technologies to practices of earlier analog experimentation.10
The advent of digital technologies in the film restoration field coincided with the production of a new kind of professionalism, rooted in academia.11 It is now after film as an industrial commodity has abolished its purpose to serve as a commercial mass product, when two generations meet in the archive: one that has known film as an entertainment device, technically based on analog photochemical processes, and one that is informed about this past, but is also accustomed to film's functions beyond and outside these logics. This paper explores the potentials for change that arise in this constellation, marrying existing knowledge about the analog medium with proposed potential of digital technologies, from the perspective of newly established archival theory.
1.3 The Restoration Dispositif
This paper seeks for insight about film restoration practices in utilizing a comparability and hermeneutics of the crafts of filmmaking and film restoration as disciplines of interpretation
10 The term habitus was shaped by French philosopher Pierre Bourdieau, who defined it as a total sum of a human’s social actions, preferences and manners. See: Lizardo, Omar . "The cognitive origins of Bourdieu's Habitus." Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34.4 (2004). Web. 19 May 2017. p. 375. The habitus of a technology is thus the entirety of its use, its application and intended relations to other machines and the human operator. 11 Several academic courses were created around that time, for instance the Selznick School of Film Preservation at the University of Rochester, N.Y. in 2005, or the Moving Image Archive Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2002.
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of an outer world.12 What is for the film maker the interpretation of a reality surrounding him/her is for the restorer the interpretation of a similar reality, the presence of an artifact, the film original.13 The conception of the restorer in this paper will therefore be understood as operating along similar trajectories, in that s/he too works with a given set of preconditions that have to be deciphered and translated into a new medium. Filmmaking is thus the first discipline extrinsic to film restoration that the author will appropriate for his discussion about film restoration.14
In a film lifecycle, at all stages processes of understanding as interpretation can be found: in the initial capturing of a scene onto a carrier, the interpretation of the incoming array of light by the film emulsion, in post-production, where certain elements of this capture are enhanced and others repelled, and finally in projection from a carrier, which is in return deciphered by an audience. Analogous, after the film's initial exploitation, in the archive the restorer is responsible for a film's translation into a new form. At the end of every archival process stands the human agency that interprets both the film original as well as the restored version and weights them up against each other. None of these processes is freed of individual judgment. Every result of a man/machine interaction, be that in the making or restoring of a
12 Hermeneutics means a practice that investigates the interpretation and understanding of texts through the use of symbols. It operates with and utilizes for a delineation of the understanding the elements the text at hand operates with. See: Mir, Raza A., Hugh Willmott, and Michelle Greenwood. The Routledge companion to philosophy in organization studies. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. p. 113. 13 It is an annotation worth alluding, that both these practices, filmmaking and film restoration, in the time of their onset have been mistaken for duplications of reality, presumably creating identical copies. Widely known is the example of the early documentarist, who scared his audience with the perceived reality manifesting on the film screen: the train approaching the station in the film narrative was perceived as a train breaking the boundaries of the silk canvas and actually approaching the audience in the presentation hall. Likewise, nowadays (in the early days of digital film restoration) the discussion if it is appropriate to display digital copies of historical films without mentioning that this is not the original, is omnipresent. See, e.g.: Horwath, Alexander. Film: Was bleibt? Sylvia Winkelmayer im Gespräch mit Alexander Horwath. Vienna: Austrian Film Museum, 2017. p. 4f. 14 It is, of course, slightly condemnatory, to consider filmmaking an occupation alien to film restoration, as the output product of the first becomes the starting product of the second. Also, quite simply, in the heydays of independent analog filmmaking, many film makers (even though that term did not exist back then) were also film restorers. Thus it is surprising that these two disciplines have hardly been thought of in the same realm. Therefore, and for matters of argument, my paper will strive for resemblance of filmmaking and film restoration. Further external disciplines shall be consulted in this paper and will be presented in subsequent sections.
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film calls for acts of intrusion that are highly affected by the standpoint of the practitioner in terms of knowledge, skills, background (institutional frame, aim of project) and more. This is why I believe it is fruitful to analyze the film restoration craft with the same set of principles that the field of film studies facilitates for analyses of film expressions. From there it follows that in line of this argument this paper will conceptualize the film restorer as an auteur.15
As flat interpretations of reality, photochemical films are both tangible (as materials) and intangible (as performance). Its tangible character means that film is translatable into descriptive, mechanical systems. As an art form, film, in the moment of projection becomes a perceived reality in its own right, transcending a descriptive language. These two figurative concepts operate intertwined within what might be framed as the dispositif of film restoration.16 The restoration of film takes place in a field of powers rooted in the basic principles of film technology; the medium has been imagined at all times with a dependency on external machines for the fulfillment of its indented function (its apparatus). Filmic capture, development, production, handling and display all rely on machined transcoding. At the same time, film encompasses a performative character and is an ephemeral expression that manifests in the brains of the viewers in a display enabled and performed by machines.
This relies on human interpretation, as only humans are able to experience and relate individual expression, and make sense of the performative act. This act, while elicited by machines, takes place outside of them in a second space (the physical space of the cinema and the abstract space of the mind). This is the very concept of projection. For Jean-Luis
15 In a filmmaking context, the term auteur, leading back to the French Nouvelle Vague and the film critics André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc, means a director who has the full control of all creative aspects of the making process. All decisions culminate in the single person of the film maker, who has full control and responsibility of the final film product. See: "Auteur theory." Encyclopaedia Britannica. 1998. 16 Dispositif, first appropriated as a sociological concept by French philosopher Michael Foucault describes the presupposed and unspoken conventions within a certain discourse, which result in corresponding social actions. The term puts in its center the power structures that are at play in the process of forming these discourses, and studies resulting from this term investigate the distribution of power and authority. In the broadest sense, dispositif describes the habitus of a society. See: Deleuze, Gilles. "What is a Dispositif?" Michel Foucault Philosopher. Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. 159-68.
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Baudry, the cinema apparatus, the appareil de base, the technology and actions needed to produce a film include the projection dispositif – according to him, the projection event is the final stage of the fulfillment of the appareil de base, and includes the human agency, the spectator.17
The dispositif of film restoration functions in an analogue setting: its quest is to create appropriate technical substitutes to its material originals and enable performative features comparable to them. As Fossati outlines, when preparing her discussion about the different conceptualizations of film archives: “[In the film as dispositif framework] film identity becomes a variable that realizes itself only within a dispositif, a situation if you wish, where the film meets its user. From the perspective of the archive this is certainly an interesting approach as it allows for a different way to look at films, namely, as dynamic objects where the material and conceptual artifacts are bound together.”18 This conception places the act of film exhibition in the foreground.19 For the case of this investigation, I will now look at the implications of this notion when applied on the work of the film restorer.
As machines cannot experience ephemeral expression (because it is felt rather than empirically understood, in the aforementioned second space),20 this process will always only be an endeavor of subjective approximation of the restorer. What is thus at hand is the interplay of technical algorithms and an individualized, situational appreciation. As outlined, the interplay between a technological apparatus and a human operator is crucial for the entire medium at all times. This paper seeks for modes of film restoration that do not aim for a translation of their filmic 'nature' for a second interpretation outside its allocated machine space, tailored to the person of the film restorer. Instead it looks for and aims to enable
17 Baudry, Jean-Luis. L'Effet cinéma. Paris: Éditions Albatros, 1978. 18 Fossati, From Grain to Pixel. p. 127. 19 Ibid. p. 126. 20 Referring back to an earlier explanation of hermeneutics, this means that a hermeneutical analysis of the data production of a machine would be an entirely different study, with different tools than an analysis of human grammatical understanding in a hermeneutical light.
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situations that do not entail a necessity for the decoding of immanent machine language. It raises the question whether the technological properties of the film restoration craft are not to be employed differently - without translating or decoding their being - for a second, human interpretation.
It is this area of conflict that both the film maker and film restorer have to navigate: Does our perception of film depend on any form of materiality and what happens to the subtleties of a specific expression if rendered into another medium? Film restoration as a theoretical concept is underpinning and resulting in the medium's technological manifestation. The restorer is arranging the various versions and elements into a revisited original, with the help of machines, and occupies the role of an intermediary between expression, the material this expression is captured with, and its decoding mechanisms. This is why the film restorer in this paper will be also conceptualized as a negotiator; as negotiator of an object's (imagined) previous lives, between its various elements and generations, between the film original(s), its machine interpretations and associated performative characters and the audiences in the present. The restorer as negotiator aims for the culmination of these arrangements, and for finding implication in an object's material and immaterial characters.21
For the restoration dispositif, the twofold positioning of the restorer as auteur and as negotiator of worlds means the following. Analog films enter a different medium in digitization, a new technological and cultural world. Recreating something in a different medium that is identical to the original is impossible.22 The human agency in person of the film restorer converges with the gap that resides in the translation phase of analog to digital, in obtaining a subjective position at every moment of interaction with the material. As I will show, in particular the case of color restoration can illustrate these ontological differences,
21 Pescetelli, Marco. The Art of Not Forgetting. Towards a Practical Hermeneutics of Film Restoration. Thesis. University College London, 2010. p. 301. 22 Dillon, Mike. "Shades of Gray: An Interview with Ross Lipman." Spectator 32.1 (Spring 2012). p. 46.
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which account for not only insufficient translatability but also reveal the need for a renewed appraisal of the relationship of these two mediums. I will argue that this inherent divergence calls for strategies in moving image presentation that communicate and educate about these distinctions, in order for an institution to contribute to a critical thinking in a visually pervaded society. While it can be claimed that the all-encompassing incompatibility of the two mediums inevitably accounts for a loss in translation, a different perspective, one that should find attention here enables a perspective that sees the frictions not in the light of any form of qualitative inferiority or superiority but as a convergence whose reception simply exceeds and transgresses beyond subtleties of the initial norm input. It is the intent of this paper to locate this access value.
The concept of the film restorer as an auteur is needed to attain an autonomous position, one that acknowledges subjectivity and a personal handwriting with which the materials are arranged, decoded and remediated, according to an idea derived from an original object. This then enables the restorer as a negotiator to acquire authority, to achieve a decisive position within the gap of analog-to-digital translation models, to navigate between presupposed notions of medium specificity and to acquire potentials from the different remediations of the object at hand. I want to extract and delineate new possibilities for both analog and digital technologies based on the belief in their intrinsic disparity. Going with Ross Lipman, whose writings this work owes great appreciation to, I believe there is the need to overcome the digital/analog dichotomy that seems to allow only strong passions or rejection.23 It is the aim to develop a stance where one can appreciate the forms themselves, as such, with their unique characters and qualities.24 The way I strive to achieve this position is through developing a research model that incorporates technical and aesthetical concerns, the physical and
23 Lipman, Ross. "In Search of Sight-Specific Cinema." The Moving Image 12.1 (Spring 2012). p. 100. 24 Ibid.
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conceptual side of film.25 The conjunction of the models of the restorer as auteur and negotiator thus allows for this renewed appraisal of digital technology within the film restoration dispositif, in that it repositions the practitioner outside the notions of an image provider, creator of content, which are capitalist conceptualizations that automatically subject the practice to industrial, commercial and consumerist dichotomies harmful to the responsibilities of film heritage institutions.
In summary, this thesis aims to find out how digital technologies transform an established film restoration dispositif and where to locate the potentials of this new situation - in order to expand upon a notion of authenticity, in particular with regard to the color reproduction of reversal films.
25 Lipman, Ross. "Technical Aesthetics in the Preservation of Film Art." Big As Life: An American History of 8mm Films. New York and San Francisco: Museum of Modern Art/San Francisco Cinematheque, 1998. p. 88. Lipman, Ross. "The Gray Zone: A Restorationist’s Travel Guide." The Moving Image 9.2 (Fall 2009). p. 19.
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2 Methodology
"I have described our current situation as a ‘bifurcated path’. […] [T]he first of
these two strands […] appears to be expanding, thus inviting substantial hope as
far as the future of the discipline is concerned. We could call it the scientific or
historical-materialist approach. It is in dialogue with theory and scholarly tradition
but also engages, on a very concrete level, with the material qualities of archival
and museum holdings."26
In this chapter, I will illuminate the system of investigation that this paper draws upon in order to investigate the subject of research as brought forward in the preceding chapter. At that point, I have already introduced the restorer as auteur and the restorer as negotiator concepts, which form an ideology driving the methodology.
In line with the quote at the fore of this chapter, this paper will make use of three major pillars in its methodology: the advent of a new archival scholarship and its adjacent discourses, tools from the digital humanities derived from the natural sciences, and film restoration theory. As my paper is aiming for a reconsideration of the application of digital tools within the film restoration craft, it in return intends to suggest a new methodology for the field. Chapters four and five will introduce and utilize this new methodology, which includes disciplines such as media archaeology27, imaging science28, hermeneutics, as well as classical arts restoration scholarship. The paper will draw from the restoration of colors
26 Horwath, Alexander. "The Old Life. Reframing Film "Restoration": Some Notes." Journal of Film Preservation 96 (April 2017, p. 28. 27 Media Archaeology is a relatively new academic practice (or rather a loose field than a defined academic methodology, leaving its mark also in arts practice and media production, for instance) that does refuse progress-oriented, straightforward narratives of the historical development of various forms of media and rather investigates this overlap, incorporation and incongruencies of media history, as well as forms that failed or were commercially unsuccessful. Important publications defining the field include: Hui Kyong Chun, Wendy, and Thomas Keenan, eds. New media, old media: a history and theory reader. New York: Routledge, 2015., Parikka, Jussi. What is media archaeology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012., Natale, Simone. "Understanding Media Archaeology." Canadian Journal of Communication 37.3 (2012): 523-27. 28 A definition of this discipline is to be found in chapter five, when its practical use will be discussed.
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reversal films its specific case studies because I believe this type of material highlights many difficulties of the restoration craft exemplified through its technological nature, while at the same time offering a fruitful point of entry into the following positioning, which I regard intrinsic to the film medium and film archival work.
I will consider film restoration as a craft operating for and within realms of the arts, industry and science. I think it is necessary to consciously investigate its practices from an interdisciplinary position, considering that the craft itself borrows its tools from various disciplines located in the three areas just identified. I anticipate from this position to be able to analyze current proceedings of film restoration, in achieving a vantage point to be able to criticize and formulate changes to these practices, from a respective position.
2.1 Why Color?
Color, functions as a gateway for such an investigation in that it precisely occupies the fields of art, industry and science. Color perception is highly subjective – it depends on a viewer's past experiences as well as biological preconditions.29 It is intangible (in observation) and measurable (in the laboratory). Color occupies the field of the empiric as well as the field of the speculative. Hence it inhabits the same discursive field as film technology, as brought forward in chapter one. This constellation allows the drawing of analogies from the discussion of color restoration to the power structures of a film industrial discourse, including the archive as a field of power.30 This is a trajectory the investigation here aims to follow.
The verbal cannot sufficiently describe the aesthetic. While this is the basis for the appreciation of the visual arts (and film) as artistic expressions, it reroutes a purely scientific approach towards these products. For me, and for the case of this paper, this calls for a hybrid
29 Flueckiger, Barbara. "Color and Subjectivity in Film." Subjectivity across Media. Interdisciplinary and Transmedial Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2016. p. 147. 30 Derrida, Jacques. "Archive Fever (transcribed seminar)." Ed. C. Hamilton, V. Harris, M. Pickover, G. Reid, R. Saleh, and J. Taylor. Refiguring the Archive. Berlin: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. 38-78. Print.
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model, of an entanglement of scientific and artistic means, following the notion that
"[s]cience is both the basis of a laboratory’s standards and the background for its experiments in art."31
The majority of problems related to the restoration (and storage) of reversal films is to be attributed to technical factors intrinsic to the material. Considering that both traditional photochemical workflows as well as newer digital restoration techniques have been designed intentionally for the negative/positive system, there needs to be a search for the potentials of these technologies when it comes to the archival treatment of reversal film. This situation, first of all, requires asking technical questions. Second, it calls for the search for potentials of technologies outside their proposed uses. Third, with the newly established tools of scholarship at hand, the digital predominance can now be interrogated from revived perspectives. And last but not least, the prevalent situation demands a look beyond the realms of film archiving theory, as its major players, the technologies employed, have been initially developed and first used elsewhere. Hence, it is needed to reframe what these discussions reveal, into a new, interdisciplinary structure that integrates questions and concerns from the fields of materiality perception, audience reception, philosophy, ontology and more.
In order to assess the practical feasibility of the proposed model for current film archival practice, the paper will bring forward examples of digital reversal film restoration It will do so in presenting both cases that employ digital technologies 'traditionally' (considering that it is difficult to speak of traditions in this rather recent development, traditionally here refers to a use that accustomed as best practice over these few years), and examples that aim to utilize an experimental approach towards its original source. In doing so the case studies should
31 Paletz, Gabriel M. "The Finesse of the Film Lab: A Report from a Week at Haghefilm." The Moving Image 6.1 (Spring 2006). p. 12. He refers in his paper to film laboratories. However, these formulations can also be applied to the laboratory as conceptual model, as an over-encompassing term for an institutionalized situation of research and investigation.
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exemplify some of the problems previously outlined as well as allow to be analyzed according to potentials for theoretical implementation of my proposed framework. It is sought to approach the case studies from a viewpoint as suggested here, and examine possible advantages and disadvantages with respect to the cases at hand. These observations should then fuel formulations about revisions and additions of the proposed model, in reference to and in dialogue with ongoing scholarly research.
Further, I will present an experiment of the author's own, employing the concept formulated along the progress of this paper. This will be enriched with the examples from actual practice, and evaluated according to its success and feasibility for professional use.
In summary, my paper will contribute the following:
● I will map the practices of reversal film restoration that are in place today, both
photochemical and digital, and sketch current problems that are encountered in these
processes. In particular, I will examine the conversion from analog to digital
restoration and the new conceptual notions this brought about. I will bring forward
how these problems have been tackled in traditional archival work and suggest points
of attack for comparable techniques of current and upcoming technological
developments.
● I will suggest changes to the digital film restoration dispositif, aiming for a more
appropriate and more exhaustive application of the utilized technologies. I will do so
in re-examining strong-held beliefs regarding digital technologies and their function
in restoration.
● These observations will provide a clearer understanding of the craft of restoration
through an evaluation of the argument from authenticity, which in a traditional
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discourse heavily depends on a restoration's qualities of aesthetical reproducibility. I
will examine if, facing the eventual disappearance of reversal film stocks, the central
role of the original 'look' is in fact crucial. In chapter five a hypothetical experiment
will be introduced that suggests a way to foil film industrial logics of discontinuation
of certain materials, with the particular example of the Kodachrome film stock.
● Finally, the restoration case studies will be examined through aspects suggested by
the proposed framework. This will evaluate the framework's feasibility under existing
preconditions, while pointing to existing conceptual differences in current practices
and my proposed model. I will analyze its advantages and disadvantages and, building
upon them, formulate possible further additions and recontextualizations for possible
future work.
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3 Current Reversal Film Restoration Practice
Making way for proposed solutions for the current problems of digital reversal film restoration, this chapter aims to provide an overview of problems arising in archival work with reversal films. This shall be no in depth analysis, but a contextualization of why this topic calls to be extended upon.
The author starts from a growing scholarly recognition of reversal films, as well as a more widespread public appraisal of these forms of film. One main reason for this is recent trends to scholarly discuss amateur films, which almost always, if shot on film, were made with reversal film.32 What seems to be missing is a link from theoretical insight to the new modus operandi digital technology brought about. This is essential because for these types of film, digitalization often means the ultimate and only preservation effort, as photochemical duplication is (hardly) no longer feasible, which is to be attested in the following. Reasons for why film heritage institutions continually struggle with the technical aspects of the preservation and restoration of reversal films shall be outlined subsequently. I am arguing that while there is a growing scholarly recognition of reversal materials in the archive, the appropriate means of their technical implementation, and in fact their practical realization, are often dragging behind, or missing. Thus, this paper will focus on the necessities for a wider ranging inclusion of reversal materials, taking into consideration and elaborating on new professional developments. In order to provide a possible solution to the issues at hand, one has to rethink current practices in both, their sheer technical condition and the underlying
32 Academic publications that illustrate this attention towards the study of amateur film are, among others: Zimmermann, Patricia R. Reel families: a social history of amateur film. Bloomington, IN: Indiana U Press, 1995., Fox, Broderick. Rethinking the amateur acts of media production in the digital age. Los Angeles, CA: U, 2004., Wasson, Haidee. Museum movies: the museum of modern art and the birth of art cinema. Berkeley: U of California Press, 2005., Fuentes, Maria. Orphan Film: Definition, Value and the Archive. Thesis. University of Amsterdam, 2010.
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ideology. As I will show, it is neither truly possible, nor appropriate for institutional practice, to think these two aspects separately.
3.1 Analog Restoration
To begin with, I will examine the possibilities of analog restoration of reversal films that are open for film archives in the present tense. Prevalent problems resulting from the image's contrast are probably the most illustrative and most pressuring, when it comes to this aspect of archival work. They are the prime technical reason (second only to economic imperatives) for why nowadays many film archives prefer a digital route over a photochemical.33 In a conventional positive/negative printing process the contrast levels of the final release print are achieved primarily in the printing and grading of the positive print, and not during the exposure of the original camera negative. The negative intends to flatten out the recorded light, to capture a low contrast, in order to record as much information as possible (a ‘flat’ negative records a lot more light than visible for the human eye) and leave room for the final grade, which then pushes certain luminances, resulting in a more tonal, and therefore more visually appearing image. Conventional positive print stock has a median gamma (a measuring unit for an image's luminance values and indicator of its contrast, with a higher gamma meaning a greater difference between the darkest and brightest values, hence a heightened contrast) of about 1.5.34 In printing from negative stocks, which usually have a gamma of 0.6, this results in prints containing a gamma of about 1.0.35 Reversal stocks too have a gamma of 1.5, however because they are receiving their brightness information not from a 'flattened' negative, but from the incoming 'real' light, they automatically depict luminance values with a corresponding gamma of 1.5, hence they have a heightened contrast
33 An ethical reasoning is that digitization of 8mm films is considered to reflect better the original characteristics than a blow-up onto other analog formats (an option of photochemical duplication probably most relevant for small-gauge film) would do. 34 Meyer, Mark-Paul. E-Mail Conversation. Message to the author. 13 Apr. 2017. E-mail. 35 Read, and Meyer. Restoration of motion picture film. p. 161.
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as compared to prints obtained from a negative/positive process. There is no possibility to drastically influence this in the recording situation – and no intent to alter the chemical structure of the emulsion either, as the aim of reversal materials was and is to provide a singular, projectable image that corresponds to a certain visual appearance.
Figure 3. The characteristic curves of a color negative film (Eastman EXR 50D, left), and
color reversal film (Kodak Kodachrome 64, right), as retrieved from Kodak data sheets.36
While this might seem miniscule at first, this condition complicates the duplication process due to the comparable loss of information in the reversal originals. The heightened contrast in reversal films is achieved at the expense of luminance subtleties. Any further printing of reversal positive film onto something other than another reversal element, the creation of an intermediate stage, a so called 'intermediate negative' is necessary. Taking into account that this new negative is obtained from a print with a heightened contrast, a considerable amount
36 "KODACHROME 64 and 200 Films." TECHNICAL DATA / COLOR REVERSAL FILM. Eastman Kodak Company, June 2009. Web. 21 June 2017.
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of information will be lost, as it does not receive the same amount of light information as it would have in exposure to natural conditions. Hence, any analog restoration product of a reversal original is inferior in quality to the original.37 This is why in many cases such efforts have been done only for archival storage purposes, without the production of a new projection element.
3.2 Digital Restoration - Scanning in the Rift between Analog and Digital
Preservation efforts in the digital realm, naturally also have to face distinctive problems.
Early on into the research of this project, it came clear that the major problem for the all- digital or hybrid restoration of color reversal films is to be found in the digitization stage, the scanning process ,both in terms of its technical improvement (which will come inevitably), but even more so in terms of its appropriate assessment and use.38 Before going into detail of the specific problems that occur there, I will present a reflection on the contextual breadth of the scanning issues.
The process of scanning, which mirrors the analog stage of printing, is the most invasive intrusion into the restoration dispositif. It creates a facsimile, a new product that is referred to as copy, duplication, imitation, or reproduction. It is the moment information is retrieved from an original source and transformed and embellished into a new product. Following form
37 A few negative stocks have been designed specifically for the copy of reversal positives, such as Kodak's Eastman 5251. This stock was also used for the duplication of tinted and toned films. See: Read, Paul. "‘Unnatural Colours’: An introduction to colouring techniques in silent era movies." Film History: An International Journal 21.1 (2009). p. 25. Fuji's F-64D has provided good results when copied from reversals, while it was not originally designed for this purpose. See: "Interview with Gerard de Haan (Haghefilm)." Personal interview. 15 Mar. 2016. However, neither of those achieved sufficient (meaning comparable to the negative/positive process) contrast levels. Kodak also did produce positive camera reversal stocks that were intended not for immediate projection but further copy, with Ektachrome Commercial (ECO 7252) being the most prominent. See: Read, and Meyer. Restoration of motion picture film. p. 161. This is characteristic of the widespread appraisal of the look of reversal prints in projection. See: Frye, Brian. "The accidental preservationist: an interview with Bill Brand." Film History: An International Journal 15.2 (2003). p. 217. It is clear that generally no positive film stock, current or past, has been sufficiently able to duplicate reversal originals. While any printing process means a loss of photographic information, this is particularly severe in the duplication of reversal films. 38 "Interview with Gerard de Haan (Haghefilm)."
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this intervention, the further work of the restorer is nothing but erasing digital benchmarks and artifacts, resulting from the capture, to reach a stage that can be compared to the original viewing experience; hence: to make the digital disappear. The end of the process sees two images that allow for comparison. This is why the scanning procedure is the seismic shift in the restoration process, the step that calls for the most attention. There are two major issues ever present in the scanning of reversal film, which intertwine technological limitations with theoretical sentiment. These are the appropriate representation of color spaces in the digital realm and the previously introduced issue regarding the heightened contrast in the original prints, which, in the digital realm, causes different problems. Both of these issues are only technical problems at first glance and point towards a larger discussion: the calibration of an institution's entire digital infrastructure. The fundamental origin of both problems refer back to what has been stated previously; the limited compatibility of modern film scanners with reversal films, as they were initially calibrated for the dominant film forms, negative and print stocks only. To begin with, I will address the issue of color spaces.
In order to approach this problem in full breath, it is beneficial to understand the difference between additive color systems and subtractive color systems. Additive color systems add and mix different light wavelengths, mostly corresponding to the red, green and blue sectors of visible light, in order to achieve nuances in the other colors resulting from the degree of overlap of these three primaries. In film practice this meant for both capture and projection that the light rays have to go through rotating filters of red, green and blue to achieve the impression of a color film.39 In 1914 a different system was developed, which similarly recorded light going through filters of red, green and blue but captured the respective
'secondary color', which is cyan, magenta and yellow.40 As this result is achieved in filtering
39 Flueckiger, Barbara. "Temporal synthesis (rotary filters)." Timeline of Historical Film Colors. 40 Ibid.
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out a certain degree of the incoming light, this model is called 'subtractive'.41 In contemporary reversal stocks, the filters are incorporated in the film carrier, while in the past they were also built in the recording device. In the history of motion picture film, few examples experimented with additive color systems, most of them in creating specialized capturing and projection apparatuses (such as the rotary filter of the early Kinemacolor system).42 The vast majority, including all reversal stocks, used and use subtractive methods to record and depict color. In contrast, digital image capture technologies, most frequently (with the exception of early experimental digital cameras) make use of an additive color system. The translation of a subtractive color sample into an additive model is not innately lossy, however, it is argued that it is prone to a loss of color information, if not properly encoded through a central profile connection space, which functions as a common denominator in the communication of the individual machines in an image processing environment (such as camera, computer, printer, or scanner, computer, film laser, for example) in incorporating the output device's color profiles into the transcoding of the file in question.43 'Color space' refers to the spectrum of colors (the gamut) a device can depict, and is the integral part of Sharma's device profiles.44
Especially with the advent of digital technology (but already with television), the amount of and the difference among color spaces increased rapidly. The profile connection space that
Sharma introduces is a digital color space that is informed about and communicates between both the color space (profile) of the image producing device (a film scanner, for instance), as well as in the later process with the color profile of the output device (for example a film laser, or a hard drive to be put into a DCP-projector).45 Workflows incorporating a central connection space are very rarely found in common film scanning practice; often the captured
41 Hincha, Richard. "CRISIS IN CELLULOID: COLOR FADING AND FILM BASE DETERIORATION." Archival Issues 17.2 (1992). p. 127. 42 Ibid. 43 Sharma, Abhay. "Understanding Color Management." International Psychogeriatric Association Bulletin (March/April 2005). p. 17. 44 Ibid, p. 20. 45 Ibid, p. 17.
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scans are stored directly on the computer, without rerouting the images through other processors.
Figure 4. Illustration of Sharma’s concept of a profile connection space.46
The biggest challenge for the restoration of color film is that color perception is relative.47 In theory, a scanner's ideal function is to translate the color values of a film sample, that it attains in photographic a projection, into values responding to the three color channels of any visual image, be that on film, in video, or the human sensory apparatus.48 What makes this issue precarious and therefore worthy of consideration is the subjective perception at play. In particular the relation of the color 'appearance' as result of human perception as opposed to filmic/digital representation is one infused with experience, mood and memory, among other things and lacks a congener to a central conversion agency, which here offered a gateway into the discussion. In color restoration (and film grading), technicians employ a twofold approach of merging scientific data of measured colors (depicted through histograms, for instance)
46 Ibid, p. 17. 47 Flueckiger, Barbara. "Bridging the Gap between Analogue Film History and Digital Technology." 1st INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE COLOUR IN FILM. Friends House, London. 03 Mar. 2016. Lecture. 48 See also: Croci, Simone, Tunç Ozan Aydin, Nikolce Stefanoski, Markus Gross, and Aljosa Smolic. "Advanced tools and framework for historical film restoration." Journal of Electronic Imaging 26.1 (2017). p. 1.
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with subjective impression. Already in 1949, Hollywood cinematographer John Alton stated that "[n]egatives should be timed first for mathematically correct density, second for feeling, mood. Neither one alone is sufficient. It is an ideal combination of both that makes a good print."49 Paul Read and Mark-Paul Meyer state that quality control of film laboratory procedures "is more objective if the characteristics of this process can be converted into numbers."50 This procedure stands emblematically for the nature of film as being a mechanized interpretation of a subjective gaze upon reality. Such practices have been in place at film laboratories for a long time, dating back to when the restoration of films was not part of their profile. At the film laboratory, a common example of the incorporation of scientific tools in the subjective craft of color grading is through so called LAD's, Laboratory Aim
Density Systems, which compare the density levels of a test wedge exposed in the laboratory before the production of a new film element to a sample provided by the stock manufacturer, presumably perfectly exposed and developed, in order to calibrate the lab infrastructure.51
Paletz explains how this system is further used for grading the final prints:
“Like film developing, the process of grading, or timing, reveals how science
supports industry and art. Haghefilm [a photochemical and digital laboratory in
Amsterdam with a specific focus on archival jobs] uses a scale of 1 to 50, with
one applied to low density, or low-contrast, images of fifty for high-density, or
high-contrast, pictures. [...] The negative filmstrip of the LAD has as essential a
place in grading as the sensitometric wedge has in developing.[...] When printed
onto any positive with the average printer lights (25-25-25, midway between 1
and 50), the LAD should produce a film with color densities prescribed by Kodak,
representing the medium densities for every kind of stock. [...] Both the
49 Paletz, The Finesse of a Film Lab, p. 12. 50 Read, and Meyer. Restoration of motion picture film. p. 105. 51 Paletz, The Finesse of a Film Lab, p. 10f.
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sensitometer and the LAD system create scientific targets for producing the same
results no matter the stock or condition of the machine. [...] [L]ab's technicians
view a film image as both a set of standardized values and as a palette to paint
particular effects. Science is both the basis of a laboratory’s standards and the
background for its experiments in art."52
Of course, from a film maker's perspective, this reveals that somebody else, namely aforesaid lab technician, actually plays a crucial role in the look of the final film. Stan Brakhage, referencing early video intermediate procedures, noted that the actual color hues seen by a viewer are actually the result of a subjective “know-twiddling of an unknown.”53 It is clear that while in the post-production of current features, the cinematographer and/or director are consulted for the color grade, in the case of historical film this is often impossible and at times even undesirable, as a film maker might want to correct ‘mistakes’ that occurred in the initial production, and such practices would go against any form of historical accuracy and authenticity. Such and similar observations speak to the disparity between a film maker and his/her expected aesthetics and the scientific mandate of a film lab, which, as we now know, is not only scientific after all.
When talking about subjective color interpretation, it might be fruitful to establish a link to human perception. It is clear that not every human sees in the same way. Likewise, we do not have a blueprint or scale that we can refer to when discussion notions of individual perception. Hence, it could be argued that, for the case that is under investigation here, the restoration of color becomes an interpretation of memory.
Following along from there and linking thoughts presented in the previous two paragraphs,
Rosenthal et al., in referring to an experimental conceptual model of the human visual
52 Ibid, p. 11f. Haghefilm is a film lab in Amsterdam that has a strong restoration focus. 53 Lipman, In Search of Sight-Specific Cinema, p. 54.
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apparatus, define singular decoding mechanism in our eyes, which are, according to them, not taken into account in the development of current models of digital technology.54 They argue that, and this expands Sharma's concept, no digital color space can accurately reproduce the colors generated through the human visionary system, first because of the already mentioned different representational spaces but also because the human visionary system does not work exclusively along the temporal principles of light (light waves), but might rather use the frequency character of the incoming light (the photons), to process and carry on information.55 This is not the minor detail it seems to be, as all our imaging technology has been designed according to the wave characteristics of light, while its nature as photons, as particles – a discovery of quantum physics - is not considered. Rosenthal et al. argue that a recentering on the particle-character of light in technological research might be beneficial for the development of imaging systems with a heightened degree of realism for the spectator
(such as virtual reality systems), as the incorporation of all details of the functionality of the human eye, theoretically, allow for the production of images that are indistinguishable from reality.56 One reason for why this has not happened on a wider scale yet is clearly also because the traditional conception of light as a wave has a technological and philosophical head start of about 300 years. This shows that while many imaging systems are designed with the human visionary system in mind; the machines always only imitate one conceptual model of our vision. Current research in the natural sciences might potentially bring to the fore radically different concepts (as was done in quantum physics).
54 Rosenthal, Eric, Richard Jay Solomon, and Clark Johnson. "Waves vs. Photons: A new view of how we detect light and color." (2004): Creative Technology, LLC, 18 June 2004. p. 2ff 55 Ibid, p. 4ff. Visible light reaches the eye in photon bundles that reveal properties of both time-dependent waves and elemental particles. The authors of the quoted article argue that one aspect of this duality has been widely ignored in the conception of optical instruments, because it is generally assumed that the human brain infers the information from the incoming visible light in decoding its wave character. 56 Ibid. p. 8.
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Hence, the belief that one image system is more ‘real’, defined as being conceptually closer to the human body, and thus more authentic (in whatever definition), is irresponsible. For a discussion about film restoration, this means that it has to start with fundamental questions about our sensory apparatus. While for the authors of the quoted paper argue that, the presented misconceptions are the reason for the lack of realism of current digital images,57 I do, in this context, take a step back in wording and speak about a certain visual independence of all image-producing technology. This paper does not intend to prefer one model of vision over the other, but it advocates a detachment of notions of realism and authenticity in images from a single concept of the human vision.58 The path it explores intends no fixed conception.
Returning now to the profound implications in practice of problems of color restoration, and making the bridge to the proposed second major problem, one illustrative example of the abstract relationship of subjective vision and scientific principles within a film technological and archival discussion is the Callier effect. It describes the change in contrast of the same image when viewed under a direct light source, and under diffused light. Most digital capturing devices make use of diffuse light sources, meaning they direct light rays that are distributed equally over certain scanning area (for example the image area of a 35mm film frame) onto the sample material, as compared to directed light rays (also called specular light), which for example film projectors make use of.59 The alternating contrast levels in color film substantially alters the colors recorded, because the difference in the reflective angle of the light rays recorded by the sensor alters their wavelength, hence their color appearance. These deviations have to be either automatically corrected by machine algorithms or manually fixed by the operator. Other problems related to contrast are very
57 Ibid. p. 2. 58 In similar discussions about the realism of photographic systems, debates about whether analog film is conceptually closer to the human vision because of the shared use of subtractive color production were very common. Also here, this paper will not participate in such conversations. 59 Flueckiger, Barbara. "Color Analysis for the Digital Restoration of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari." The Moving Image 15.1 (Spring 2015). p. 30.
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similar to those occurring in the analog realm. Like a new internegative struck from a reversal print will not have a low contrast like a camera negative, the digital scan too can only reduce the contrast of the input image to a certain degree.
3.3 Further Issues
Besides commonplace problems with color change and heightened contrast, there are a few further issues that the restorer encounters in the process of digitizing reversal originals. Many scanning processes are characterized by the creation of excessive elements, elements not found in the original sample ('noise'). What has been mentioned in reports of past projects is, among others, the creation of digital artifacts in face of an original's coarse grain structure.60
In the case where intermediate stages have been created, in the past, the scanning of those, too, did not achieve comparable results, and – where possible – the reversal original has been used for further efforts.61 Archives, beyond that, struggle with varying levels of material stability of reversal films.62 Other issues that arise on a constant basis are a particular color change in wet gate scanning63, the instability of the film frames due to damaged perforations, or imprecise camera shutter and gate mechanisms, jumping frame lines64, the difficulty of cropping a round-edged film frame into a rectangular digital image, the changing exposure and the related decisions of setting the scanner's black and white levels, as well as the overall
60 Lepore, Matteo. "Lost and Found. Restoring James Benning's AMERICAN DREAMS (LOST AND FOUND)." Work/s in Progress: Digital Film Restoration Within Archives. Vienna: Synema, 2013. p. 163 61 Read, An introduction to colouring techniques in silent era movies, p. 27. 62 While Kodak's Kodachrome, the most widespread reversal film stock proved to be a highly stable film carrier that, although not without minor signs of degradation, stays relatively unaltered for many years if stored under appropriate conditions, other stocks are not. Color fading is one of the major issues not only for print film but for reversal film alike, and considering the absence of a camera negative that would allow for comparison; this loss could remain undetected or is only retraceable due to experience on the side of the film archivist. Black and white films are, on overall terms, much more stable than color films. It is believed, that a vast majority of noncommercial and non-narrative filmmaking (among them home movies) has vanished. See: "Editorial: FILM PRESERVATION: A Critical Symposium." Cinéaste 36.4 (Fall 2011). p. 1. 63 "Interview with Gerard de Haan (Haghefilm)." For instance can be seen a fade to green in some Kodachrome originals. 64 Interestingly, the correction of the problems arousing from imprecise transportation of the film through the gate of the scanner is often corrected live, meaning during the recording, which evokes an original projection, where the projectionist constantly had to tweak the frame line and focus.
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instability of the machines and their frequent need for service and repair. In all this, we have not even touched the complex issue of magnetic sound recording, the type of sound most prominent on reversal carriers. While none of these issues do arise from color translation, they do account for decisions for or against the digitization or restoration of particular film examples in question. Such are also to be found in the following description.
Besides problems of technical nature, it is crucial to consider the array of issues with reversal films that exceed its mechanical foundation. As a result of the huge following among independent film makers and moving image amateurs, most film archives today hold an immense amount of reversal films, making cataloging a very labor intensive task. In many cases the film makers have died or are otherwise not available for consultation, leaving behind orphaned films that lack contextualization. This makes the tracing and subsequent production of copyright and ownership metadata in many cases very difficult. What is more is that films shot on reversal in many cases were personal memories, anthropological records, rather than 'film'. Their mass of uniform expression is striking; the family on Christmas Eve, the children's first bicycle ride, a visit to the countryside, and sex, are tropes that reoccur constantly.65 Hence, a selective preservation (if one deems sheer digitization as a preservation effort) can be criticized as unauthentic, as it misses the representation of a mass.
Correspondingly, the original viewing dispositif was hardly outside the space of family and friends; a fact that clashes with the public and educational agencies archives usually aim to fulfill.66 A further, more general complexity for film preservation is the uncertain future of analog film stock production. Today there is no existing film stock on the market that is
65 This aspect was explored in the Huis van Alijn exhibition last year. Homeless Movies. 26 June 2016. Exhibition. Huis van Alijn, Gent. 66 Exhibitions of amateur films and home movies are still scarce and rarely do these works execute a role other than supporting other materials. This is the case in art museums and galleries just as in film museums. See: Meyer, Mark-Paul. "Conversation in Vijfhuizen." Personal interview. 30 Oct. 2015, Wasson, Museum Movies. Two recent examples of attempts to contextualize home movies in a public space were conducted at the Museum Limburg in Venlo, The Netherlands, and at Huis van Allein, in Gent, Belgium. See: A century of home cinema. 28 May 2016. Exhibition. Limburgs Museum, Venlo, Homeless Movies, Huis van Alijn.
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designed for the further copy of positive images resulting from a reversal process.67 As the entire reversal film system has its root in the aim to create a cheap method for the creation of positive images, they were not meant to be printed in the first place. This lead to a lack of duplication materials needed to secure the longevity of a film title.68 Due to these reasons, the archival world not only lacks a conceptual model of the nature of these films in question, but also a technical construct that abides to first, this theorization, and second, the prevalent circumstances in place at the film archives.
3.4 Customization
Something that is crucial to bring up here is that rooted in these and other problems, film archives and laboratories have a long tradition of adapting and enhancing their factory-built infrastructure according to their individual needs and to be able to properly handle archival film. Even when in the 2000s, companies like ARRI and Oxberry started manufacturing scanners for solely archival purposes, this practice did not find an end.69 A practical example of a film laboratory deeply rooted in experimental practices is Cineric in New York, which is focused on the handling of very damaged and shrunken films, which they often tackle
67 References to this can be found in Lipman, Technical Aesthetics in the Preservation of Film Art, p. 89, and at a different place with specific reference to the problem of Kodachrome preservation (Lipman, Technical Aesthetics in the Preservation of Film Art p. 92) as well as in Read, Introduction to Coloring Techniques in Silent Cinema, p. 25, Bill Brand’s comments in: Windhausen, Federico. "Spectrum Analysis: Discussing the Films of Paul Sharits with Bill Brand, Chris Hughes, John Klacsmann, and Andrew Lampert." The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 15.1 (2015) p. 109, and : "Interview with Gerard de Haan (Haghefilm)." 68 This lead to a lack of resources (meaning film stocks) to adequately duplicate positive film. Oftentimes, film manufacturers deliberately decided to discontinue reversal stocks, making way for a canonization of a negative/positive filmmaking. See: Lipman, Ross. "Problems of Independent Film Preservation." Journal of Film Preservation 53 (November 1996). p. 49. He specifically refers to Kodak's discontinuation of Eastman ECO 7252 in 1984, which was a reversal stock with a relatively low contrast, intended for further copy onto internegative stocks. Now, we find ourselves in the paradox situation of a canonized negative/internegative filmmaking while at the same time encountering a massive body of reversal films, which are unprintable in this logic. See: Couzin, Dennis. "Dear Film Artists." Experimental Film Coalition Newsletter 1 (June 1984). p. 2f. Besides economic reasons, this is why many avant-garde film makers acquired the skills and knowledge to operate nonconventional means of film duplication (for example through the use of an optical printer) in the past century, which are now invaluable for film archives. The canonization of the negative/positive workflow reveals itself also in the domination of digital intermediate proceedings as is the widespread case today. 69 "Interview with Gerard de Haan (Haghefilm)."
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employing specialized optical means.70 However, at this point it became much more difficult, facing rapidly accelerating capacities of digital technologies and a corresponding production output of newer machines and, very importantly, also correlating with a changing client demand.
The high costs of the acquisition of a scanning infrastructure means that especially smaller institutions still work with the scanners from older generations. More affordable scanners are often targeted for regional or national film archives that hold extensive amateur film collections and are driven by access-oriented models. Hence often these scanners offer limited possibilities of image processing and correction. I am arguing that due to the prevalent problems at hand, these efforts of appropriation and customization of industrial archival machinery needs to continue and in fact be expanded. I believe that the greater potential of digital image capturing devises (scanners, in this context) has not yet been unearthed and that the first step to achieve this liberated position is through experimentation.
3.5 Ethics in Digitization
The practice of digitizing analog film materials in general and reversal films in particular poses to the restorer not only a wide array of technical questions but subsequently exposes him/her to ethical and conceptual complexities intrinsic to this technology. "Digitization transforms physical objects into data."71 It relieves film from its material existence, extracting only its content, while everything else around this new artifact is created anew. The manifestation of analog film is bound to its materiality, similar to a painting. This relation becomes almost entirely abolished with digital video.72 It alters the (future) viewer's
70 Fossati, From Grain to Pixel. p. 186f. She discusses the company in her concept of film restoration as a craft of simulation, particularly because of the company’s experience in special effects. Ibid. p. 197. 71 Olesen, Christian Gosvig, Eef Masson, Jasmin Van Gorp, Giovanna Fossati, and Julia Nordegraaf. "Data- Driven Research for Film History: Exploring the Jean Desmet Collection." The Moving Image 16.1 (Spring 2016). p. 84 72 Gartenberg, The Fragile Emulsion. p. 143.
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conception of the images.73 This is the case for not only the specific film example or fragment in question, but beyond contributes to a collective (non-)memory of ever-present images. In rendering images immaterial, and stripping off its production process, such means contribute to a discourse driven by technology producers, who have no custodianship of heritage but mere commercial interests. It is above all the crucial role of film heritage institutions, to communicate to a public the importance of historical modes of seeing film images.74 In this vein, the aim of the archivist must then be to "expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history' destruction of the body."75 In digital translation, this information becomes less visible to the general spectator. Above all rests the impetus of digital technology that is ever present, with its viewing gesture widely attained through our everyday exposure to digital images.
Complexities of the presentation of digitized film images arise above the ethical domain, too, expanding well into technology's fundamental design. The sole analog original is not
'computer readable' - if it were, any optimizing procedures (the excessive field where both technologies clash) would be redundant. Digital displays were produced for the portrayal of digitally generated images only and contain their own contextual logic, which finds its expression in the aforementioned RGB color scope, which essentially does not function with a real referent (a white sheet of paper, or a polyester film strip). Within digital technology, technological progress aims for a reduction of human intervention, of human correction.76
This has as a result that within the enclosed technological system, within the realm of digital, autonomous communication, the human is a dyslexic. Its language is better understood by
73 Ibid. 74 See for this discussion for instance: Usai, Paolo Cherchi, Alexander Horwath, and Michael Loebenstein. Film: museums, curatorship and the digital marketplace. Vienna: Austrian Film Museum, 2008. 75 Bertellini, Giorgio. "Restoration, Genealogy and Palimpsests. On Some Historiographical Questions." Film History 7.3 (Autumn 1995). p. 40 76 See for example: Rizzi, Alessandro, and Majed Chambah. "Perceptual Color Film Restoration." SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal 119.8 (2010).
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machines.77 The digital hegemonial system does not conceptualize comparable analog/digital image processes, for the digital image is considered the singular, ultimate end point.
"Consistently, when modern innovations appeared in modern history, they took
the form of historical restitutions. New forms ‘cited’ the old ones. […] Nowhere
was the restorative impulse more evident than in the forms taken by the new
technologies themselves, which imitated precisely the old forms they were
designed to overcome. Early photography mimicked painting. The first railroad
cars were designed like stagecoaches, and the first electric light bulbs were shaped
like gas flames."78
New instruments require new skills, but they also allow for experimentation.79 Digital technology, being this relatively new instrument available to film archives has not yet fulfilled its stage of experimentation. From a mechanical point of view, it still mimics analog technology.80 Given the accelerating development of digital imaging technologies it can be only a matter of time when the industry accepts its intrinsic difference from analog mediums and fosters the qualities that lie in its different character. The restorer now has a new unique
77 Interestingly and related to the case study under consideration here, the inventors of the Kodachrome process, were known to the Kodak research division as 'God and Man', taking reference to the complexity of developing Kodachrome outside official Kodak laboratories. Hence, it must be pointed out that the dependence on technological industries is not new to the digital technology. It is, in fact and as pointed out earlier on, inherent to the entire history of film. 78 Werckmeister, O.k., and Susan Buck-Morss. "The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project." The Art Bulletin 73.4 (1991). p. 111. 79 Horwath, The Old Life. p. 17. This is yet another incident that correlates to film making practices, one strand that has even been subsumed as "experimental film". 80 This is detectable in that for example a so called ‘full-frame’ sensor of digital cameras has exactly the measurements of a 35mm film strip, in that digital camera geometrics, their lenses, etc, are built after analog single-lens reflex cameras, or (also in film restoration), that pixels and grain is still used comparatively (Due to their character based on imperfectly distributed organic materials, photographic film does not allow to be translated into a perfectly compiled and evenly distributed graticule of pixels). Of course, nostalgia and a ‘retro- movement’ do further contribute to this juxtaposition. Signs for change can be seen in the new ARRI Alexa Mini digital camera, or in the RED cameras, which show quite different construction characteristics. Fossati attributes an entire chapter to the discussion of simulation as common practice in film archives and points to, in quoting Lev Manovich and David Rodowick, the heightened potential digital technology obtains for the simulation of older images, and older technology. Manovich, Lev. “Old Media as New Media: Cinema.” The new media book. Ed. Dan Harries, London: BFI Pub., 2002. p. 209-18, Rodowick, David Norman. The virtual life of film. Cambridge: Harvard U Press, 2007, quoted in: Fossati, From Grain to Pixel. p. 42.
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range of effects at his/her disposal that can finally liberate him/her from the everlasting dependence on the comparison to the 'old' medium film.81 Further, in theory and discourse, analog and digital parameters are widely compared; think of the omnipresent uncritical translation of grain distribution into pixel quantity. For Horwath, the crucial approach to digital restoration is one of experimentation and transparency, for it contributes to discussions about the archive's role in promoting cinema.82
But what is it then that one has to rethink? Practitioners in the field have argued, now as the restorer has a sheer endless array of possible manipulations at his/her fingertips, at any moment s/he needs to critically assess not only these means at hand, but moreover its analog equivalent, the feature affected and manipulated through this use.83 Thereby, in a positive reading, digital technology opens up unforeseen possibilities for discussion, rethinking, and, ultimately, scholarship. Adding to this, it is stated that asking about a film's originality and authenticity actually poses a philological and a cultural question.84 Hence, questions about authenticity in effect incorporate strategies from empirical research and scholarly positioning.
Accordingly, one has to employ "interdisciplinary trajectories of historical investigations" to decipher the authenticity of film restoration.85
To sum up, this chapter leads to a close encounter of the issue at hand: Because of their manifold possibilities, their more readily available resources, as well as economical, ethical and aesthetical reasons, most film archives today widely use digital technology to restore reversal films. This procedure entails technical problems, most prominently color alterations
81 Interestingly, this moment falls together with an ongoing threat of bankruptcy of film manufacturers and the discontinuation and disappearance of analog film materials. 82 Horwath, The Old Life. p. 18. 83 Wilkening, Anke. "METROPOLIS 2010: A New Effort to Recapture the Lost METROPOLIS." Work/s in Progress: Digital Film Restoration Within Archives. Vienna: Synema, 2013. p. 147 84 Bertellini, Restoration, Genealogy and Palimpsests. p. 285.He says that: "The former deals with issues of authorship, production circumstances, and textual evidence. The latter with transactions between film poetics and the cultural density of contingent historical receptions." 85 Ibid. p. 287.
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and heightened contrast levels in the digitized versions, as well as a number of ethical issues arising from the translation into a new medium. Due to a long experience in the adapting and customizing of archival machinery, archivists, restorers and laboratory technicians have developed ways to make analog tools work according to their needs. The availability of digital scanning infrastructure has rapidly increased since the millennium, thus making thorough experimentation and adaption all the more difficult, as these processes take time to thrive. It is now possible, after an initial outcry and confusion about this technological change, to think about and structure this era of experimentation.
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4 Towards a New Dispositif
The following chapter aims to formulate suggestions of how to reconsider reversal film restoration practices, based upon the prevailing difficulties as outlined in the preceding chapter. It will add to already stated aspects with new insight from scholarship, leading to a proposed enhanced framework for practical efforts. Starting from the premise that each artifact, each film demands individualized consideration, the following writings should be considered as possible angles for approaching a restoration case. The final decisions, at any instance, lie with the restorer. I aim to equip him/her with a new approach, a new way of considering the practice. I will bring forward my suggestions after outlining specific points of attachment for my critique, and it will be followed by references to currently existing practices in the film archival world, which make use of means similar to the ones suggested in the following.
4.1 Digital Hyperreality
What I hope is clear from my writings so far is that neither analog, nor digital images can be considered imprints of reality. Tom Gunning states that the power of the digital is to maintain a recognizability, which relies on psychological mechanisms of image consumption and cannot be subsumed under the indexical process.86 The reasons for this he sees in the way light is captured in these technologies, which fundamentally differs from photochemical light capture. This difference is that digital sensors create numerical sets of data from the light energy that reaches its surface (the light is the impulse defining the collocation of these
86 Gunning uses the phrase "visual accuracy and recognizability" to point to the entanglement of indexicality (the fact that photographs count as official records, as in passports, e.g.) and iconicity in the common notion of photography. See: Gunning, Tom. "What’s the Point of an Index? or, Faking Photographs." Still Moving (2008). p. 25. It is interesting to note that the question of the natural character of colors reveals parallels to discourses about reference and indexicality of photography and film. Such discussions are evidently present in color film theory.
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values), while photochemical capture is the result of a chemical process during which the recording material itself becomes transformed. Hence, digital capture is a process of remediation, while photochemical film entails processes of transformation. Gunning's point is that, being its intrinsic nature, the digital image presents us with a counter-reality, which allows placing it in the lineage of phenomena like the panorama or diorama.87
In digital restoration, in the output product, the recognizability that Gunning asserts the digital image is understood not precisely in conjunction with an outer reality (as in photography), but with an analogous reality: the visual characteristics of the starting material.
This visual accuracy is (supposedly) historically defined; through the proposed look of a historical, aged film artifact.88 Hence, this historicity claim is the additional dimension of the
(digital) restoration dispositif in relation to and beyond (digital) photography. The aim of the digital is not to (re)produce reality but to make possible statements about it that precisely result from the lack of being an all-embracing perfect indexical referent of it. Pescetelli argues that this aim for historical accuracy and the need for producing something that is enjoyable to watch (in reducing unwanted artifacts and patina), contradicts itself, because historical accuracy, achieved in the restoration through recognizability to the original, manifests itself in visually unpleasant features.89 Since it is a form of interpreting copy, the restoration version holds an iconic relation to its original.90 In archival practice, this often leads to an interchangeable treatment of the outcome product and the original, with the former not considered an integral and irreplaceable part of the film itself, as is in the restoration of the classical arts.91 I argue that it is not just a historical indexicality that is at play, as this historicity is not automatically (without human interest and intervention)
87 Ibid. p. 31. This thought is very much in line with a media-archaeological stance, or a 'new film history'. 88 Pescetelli, The Art of Not Forgetting, p. 262. 89 Ibid. p. 261 90 Ibid, p. 271 91 Ibid.
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displayed in the original but is only a characteristic assumed by the restorer (who bases his/her assumptions on experience and knowledge), and thus becomes a discursive act. In digital restoration, in order to achieve a historical 'look', extensive intervention is needed (it is not following the logics of the analog printing process) – it becomes a social construct.92
Tools can expand possibilities and manual efforts, but only in cooperation with a human agency achieves the output justification.
4.2 Indexicality and Reversal Film
In order to make way for encompassing arguments about the digital restoration of reversal films, after discussing indexicality within the digital restoration dispositif, I now want to apply this perspective onto the underlying object under investigation, color reversal film.
Gunning claims that the use of color could either strive towards a completion of a 'total cinema' realism (a notion conceived by André Bazin), or construe a spectacle, a visible attraction.93 With reversal color film, arguably the latter is the case. Here, the notion of indexicality sees itself abolished with heightened precision compared to other media. It barely carries a referent to real colors: because reversal film circumvents the step of printing - where the aesthetic characteristics of the print are manually controlled in live reference to the negative – the emulsion of reversal materials needs to be able to instantaneously render much greater peaks of exposure than negative film into appealing visual referents. Due to this, and the incentive of manufacturing a cheap stock, thus the use of inferior color couplers, etc.,
92 It is clear that also in the analog age the printing process did not automatically copy any characteristics of whatever sort contained in the original onto the print (scratches being erased in the wet-gate process, for instance). However, the analog printer is based on the exact same principles as a camera, and is subjected to the same physical processes. I believe the intrinsic difference lies in this distinctive mode of capture of the digital, which creates a digital matrix out of the incoming light intensity, thus the parameters occurring in the translation are far less suppositional. Nevertheless, there are film makers like Nathaniel Dorsky, for whom even an analog print is a facsimile. See: Dorsky, Nathaniel. Devotional cinema. San Francisco: Tuumba Press, 2003. Print. 93 Brown, Simon. "Colouring the Nation: Spectacle, Reality and British Natural Colour in the Silent and Early Sound Era." Film History 21.2 (2009). p. 139. The two modes of the use of color in cinema have seen shifting concentrations within film history. See: Jumibe, Yoshua. "Guest Editors Foreword: Restoring Color." The Moving Image 15.1 (Spring 2015). p. ix.).
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subtleties in hues are lost and the fluctuation range within batches of the same stock is high.
Colors are rendered into extremes, resulting in a high color contrast. Referencing the quote at the very beginning of this paper, reversal films, exceptional to any other film material, capture an 'ecstatic state', a singular, fugitive moment of reality.94 Reversal film is exceptional in that the medium itself instantaneously translates the record, without human intervention, without an intermediate.95 To be more precise, in the developing process of a reversal film, the intermediate stage is one that is only a passage that cannot be noticed from the outside and takes place in the ‘black box’ of the developing tank. Reversal restoration is thus the decoding of a moment that bears no resemblance to our perception of the real as obtained through the human vision system - a paradox practice of empirically controlling delirious outbursts. The referents in the domestication of these hallucinations then are falling back onto the realm of the restorer, who draws upon subjective parameters. For, in this case, the conventional dispositif of film restoration does not apply any more: the reversal film artifact in question, having manipulated the recorded light to a degree that is arbitrary at most and surprising at least, only enables limited capabilities of categorization. It denies automated, standardized procedure. These types of materials do not provide a trustworthy reference for the grading of its deriving substitutes, the ‘restored’ versions, as camera negative film, and common positive print film does. The visibility of referents to the real is obscured and transformed. The referring to the artifact under investigation, a fostered strategy in the restoration dispositif becomes complicated with reversal films, as the first generation source, the initial record – which, in ‘conventional’ filmmaking is the camera negative - seems to be missing, but is actually, and similarly, to be found in the process before the positive image: that is, with reversal film, the conditions of the light in initial capture,
94 Wilkins, At This Moment. p. 96. This finds its expression for example in the famously excessive Kodachrome reds. 95 ‘Intermediate’ as a term in itself stands for the technical in-between (an intermediate copy, or also a ‘digital intermediate') and at the same time for the human translator.
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acquired from the scene photographed. For the practice of digital reversal film restoration, this means that the only referent to the real is the imagined notion of a reality as conceptualized by the spectator, who is a film restorer in this case, who tries to circumvent and domesticate the fanciful character of these materials. Such a restoration is a purely personal appropriation of the real through the restorer's vision system and only initiated through the blueprint at hand, the reversal original. It is conceptually wrong then to consider his/her practice as a meticulous analysis of images of pure approximation and imperfection, because the reference used in such analysis is conceptual reality, real colors - a reference the object of analysis vows no devotion to.
4.3 Preserving Historicity
Analog film always contains more information than is visible for the spectator when shining light through it and in fact also more information than the human visual sensorium can extract from reality. This is true for negative film, which records invisible nuances of light as a low-contrast image, for example, but in fact for any kind of film and in particular for reversal, albeit in a slightly different fashion. Reversal film might have capacities to display light invisible to the human eye, and invisible to other types of film. An indicator for this is its military use, which adapted reversal stocks intended for TV-production, but also had its own stocks produced.96 However, and at any case, there is a different kind of information also captured by the films. The greater potential, I believe, of reversal films to record surplus information about an outside reality is rooted in its nature as unicum. It is inscribed with markers of time throughout its entire existence, from its manufacture, from before its exposure, in the moment of shooting and also afterwards in a projection history. Damage,
96 An example for the first is Eastman Ektachorme VNF 7250. See: Quinn, A. Earl. "A Superior 16MM Reversal Color Film For High-Speed Motion Picture Photography." 13th Intl Congress on High Speed Photography and Photonics (1979). An example for the latter is Kodak Infrared Ektachrome. See: Suits, Gwynn H. Infrared color photographic film . Patent US 4469779 A. 16 Mar. 1983.
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scratches, marks, dust, fingerprints, processing mistakes, but also chemical decomposition is recorded above and beyond the visual image content.97 Hence, the unique potential in this regard is to be found precisely in the aforementioned historicity of the artifact. What can be drawn from this reasoning is that firstly, it renders a logic of borrowing of machines used for film restoration from the functionality of the human visionary apparatus fruitless, in that such logic is (quite literally) blind to a considerable amount of information, and secondly, it situates reversal film closer to the realm of the classical arts.
What comes to mind at this point is Nelson Goodman's distinction of art forms in autographic and allographic definitions.98 Starting from the quest to identify art forms whose history of production is integral to the work itself, according to him, autographic art forms are practices like painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, etching, etc., where the original piece entails
(or is ascribed) a heightened status over forged or copied pieces, however close to the original they may be.99 Thus autographic arts are also those art forms where a certain template is used for further copy, because here the notion of authenticity is only applied to those copies that originate from the single source as produced by the artist. In contrast, an art form like literature or classical music, which is in most cases performed with a written down score at hand is, according to Goodman's definition, an allographic form of art.100 How does this concept apply to the art form under investigation here? In a negative/positive filmmaking process, the negative coincides with the element immediately produced by the artist (for matters of simplicity I will not interrogate whether this is the cinematographer or director, or someone else entirely but use the neutral concept of the ‘film maker’), since it was directly
97 Surely this is the case for any film print, however in the negative/positive system the markers of time characterizing one item (I am conceptualizing ‘a film’ as one product, as is done basically everywhere) are not inscribed onto the same single material representative of the particular item. 98 Goodman, Nelson. Languages of art: An approach to a theory of symbols. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett publishing, 1968, in particular chapter three of the book. I will come back to thoughts of Nelson Goodman later in this chapter, in a paragraph that aims to conclude a train of thought started at this point. 99 Giovannelli, Alessandro. "Goodman's Aesthetics." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University, 07 May 2005. Web. 25 May 2017. 100 Ibid.
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exposed in the moment of production, by the film maker and his/her recording device. In a
Goodmanian definition then, prints struck from the original camera negative are still autographic works of art, since they come off the original as used by the artist in the creation of the piece. In the still photography discourse, this relation is defined through the term
'vintage print', meaning the first print struck from the camera negative, often by the photographer him/herself. However, in film production this notion gets blurred in that firstly, the original source negative never was conceptualized as the final structure to be exposed as an artwork, and secondly prints were often struck not from the camera negative, but from duplicate negatives and other, editing and later generation elements. And thirdly, one could add, the intrusion of digital images in this dispositif (in digital intermediate stages) locates this type of film even closer to Goodman's concept of allographic arts.101 Be that as it may, it is clear that reversal film, in its parallel position in respect to the camera negative, the painting or sculpture, is indeed to be clearly identified as an autographic form of art. The physical medium seized for production is also the element indented as the final artwork, and the artwork's ultimate manifestation.
Therefore - and with the established route to the autographic arts – the preservation of the aforementioned markers of time becomes a potential and in fact a necessity for authentic representation of the material's nature. Contradictory is the nature of the digital image, which denies any history and in fact cannot fulfill its designated function with the inscription of markers of time: the drop out of single bits can make an entire file unplayable, the image illegible and the information irretrievable. This does not mean that digital technology is incapable of preserving the markers of time of a reversal original, in fact, as I will show in the following, the opposite is the case.
101 A discussion of this can be found here: D'Cruz, Jason, and P. D. Magnus. "Are digital images allographic?" Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 72.4 (Fall 2014): 417-27. Web.
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4.4 A Second Layer of Relevance
From this it follows that the possibility for interference and operation to hide behind an image that still remains recognizable is vast. Every restoration project creates a second layer of data beyond what is put into the visual appearance of an image. If this would not be the case, every bit of manipulation of the digital image would result in different appearances. But with digital image editing, which has the potential to affect the single smallest units, the individual pixels, some changes are not detectable by the human eye. In fact, something else is at play: the same appearance of identical copies of the same image evokes different reactions among different viewers. In other words, in a digital restoration workflow the original, through scanning, format translation and technological and human interference, gets loaded with presumably unwanted referents, misleading information, which are then gradually reduced, to achieve an aesthetically comparable image in relation to the perceived reality character of the original. It is clear that in this notion, aesthetics is the key denominator that drives technological intervention and delineates, with the restorer as the medium between the original and the restored image, the ultimate nature of the newly created and disseminated images.
Recognizability, memory and interpretation are revealed in the final product. The spilling object/input conglomerate, this excessive digital metadata, which exceeds beyond what is framed as the final product, produces another digital image. This second interface is comprised of and reflects the entire restoration process (as metadata) but also the restorer's and thus an institution's interference, hence their interpretation of the material. In doing so, it becomes a document about the hermeneutics of the archive at a specific moment in time. I argue that the situation today calls for the consideration of this produced data, and not just for reversibility claims as is the common practice of consideration today. As I have tried to show,
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the current practice of reversal film restoration is too invested in traditional notions of authenticity, originality and perception, and sees this all in relation to the look of the final
'restored' version. These notions do not apply to digital tools anymore. In the analog era, a film processed entirely photochemically by a professional laboratory had to look 'perfect' right out of the developer, while today the digital technology contains vast capabilities to interfere with what became only preliminary (as opposed to final) laboratory results: colors can be remapped, gamma curves changed, hues edited, etc.102 These potentials scrutinize established notions of originality and authenticity. If the craft manages to overcome these hard-held beliefs, with the help of reminders of their tradition in experimentation, greater potential of digital technology outside purely visual norms could be achieved.
In order to achieve this repositioning, it is fruitful to investigate first why notions of appearance are in such a way central to the sociocultural appreciation and critique of visual phenomena. I will do this in approaching this question from the broader philosophical ontology of aesthetics. Being a very loosely defined (and highly debated) term, one of this ontology’s purposes is to describe aesthetics as the sensual presence of an artwork.103
According to Deleuze we decode these patterns with principles that are similar to a language, but are not subordinated to the rules of logic, as oral and written language is.104 Nelson
Goodman, who already appeared at an earlier stage of the thought process, picked up at this point and argued that in this context the language at play functions only as an indicator pointing towards something but that meaning is generated somewhere else, at a space beyond this allocation.105 Hence is the potential of art seen in making comprehensible (in expressing) processes of natural objects that are unrecognizable when observing the natural objects
102 Edgar, Albert. "E-Mail Conversation." Message to the author. 17 May 2017. E-mail. 103 Heinrich, Richard. "Elemente der philosophischen Aesthetik [Elements of a philosophical aesthetics]." Public Lecture. University of Vienna, Vienna. 03 May 2017. Lecture. 104 See: Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. "A Tousand Plateaus." Trans. BRIAN MASSUMI. Minneapolis: Te University of Minnesota Press (1987). 105 Goodman, Languages of Art. p. 116.
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themselves, and authenticity defined as the expression acquired only and exclusively from the presence of this relation of nature and artwork.106 Because this correlation takes place beyond structures of logical language, the realm of the visual signs, visual language is understood as the most appropriate point of attachment for a translation of works of art into structured language. However, as the medium reversal film exceptionally discloses – what I have tried to show earlier in this chapter – the relationship between artwork and represented object is far from being linear and the conclusions drawn always depend on the context of the beholding subject.107 Digital language, is argued, advocates a belief system that positions rational calculation as account of explanation for aspects of social and mental nature.108 While for
Golumbia this is a largely negative development, in that human language is inherently
'analog' (as it is not always following aforementioned logical principles) and thus evasive of this digital logic, in the following thoughts and in the subsequent chapter I aim to locate potentials that can arise in the collision of this 'analog' nature and 'the logics of computation'.109
4.5 A New Dispositif
I now aim to present a tentative model of the application of this proposed model into existing infrastructure. This investigation will spill into the consecutive chapter, where actual case studies will be discussed in sight of potentials according to the concept presented here. I ground my argumentation in the differentiation of the analog and digital as two distinct media. Their presumably direct translation in effect creates not only a new product of the present, but excessive noise, overflowing information that is both inherent to a digital image and left aside, erased in restoration practice. One simply cannot ignore the fact that this
106 Heinrich, Richard. "Elemente der philosophischen Aesthetik [Elements of a philosophical aesthetics]." Public Lecture. University of Vienna, Vienna. 10 May 2017. Lecture. 107 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art. p. 122. 108 Golumbia, David. The cultural logic of computation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. p. 1. 109 Ibid.
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immensely powerful tool produces so much more than only a facsimile of an original artifact.
The surplus value resulting from a revisited concept of the potentials of digital technology in film restoration is to be found in information extraction from and about the original sample.
Such attempts would be analogous, to again stress this comparison, to the nature of experimental quantum physics, which analyses particles resulting from a collision of beams of matter in order to infer about the subatomic structure of the beams themselves. The applied matter becomes analyzable through interference with the surface applied onto, in that this clash produces a third kind of matter, which can be detected, read and impropriated in the form of metadata. In the case at hand, the process of creating a digital image from the encounter with an analog source (which, interestingly takes place with beams of particles – light – too) creates not only a visual image but additional matter beyond that.
This means that, while nowadays rendering only takes place in between the digital translation and the output image, actually the chain described earlier on needs to be expanded to achieve a thorough symmetric balance, on all sides of this media translation and with respect to both original and facsimile. Such positioning calls for investigating the automatic and semi- automatic processes of media translation, as illustrated below. If this is done with the empiric data that is created in the translation process, then the digital becomes a means of escaping a dispositif that until now has found its legitimization only in a purely subjective argument of visual approximation and recognizability.
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Figure 5: Illustration of digital restoration workflow with the overlooked field of excessive
metadata.
What I propose in this argumentation is an archaeometric approach towards digital technologies in film restoration. Archaeometry or archaeological science means a methodological model that utilizes scientific means in the study of archaeological materials.110 The advent of digital technology in the field brought about revolutionary means to follow this trajectory. Currently, this potential is hardly exhausted, because what is sought after are traditional conceptual restoration models. This is where the discussion becomes full circle: applying an archaeometric model towards the film restoration craft automatically implies the concept of film as archaeological source. A notion of film that repels such thought makes the application of archaeometric means redundant, as they would not inhabit the same conceptual space. The notion of film as historized object is relevant in particular for reversal
110 See: Artinón-Torres, Marcos, and David Killick. "Archaeological Theories and Archaeological Sciences." The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Theory. Vol. 56. Oxford: Oxford U Press, 2015. 242-47.
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film as being the preferred medium for moving image amateurs. It could be said that this is the point where two subjacent layers converge: the statement of a (reversal) film beyond artistic expression (and for that matter education, manipulation, entertainment, etc.) is historical evidence. The second layer of information crated in the digitization process refers precisely to information about this evidence. The consideration of this information thus has to be a logical association to be made hand in hand with the framing of film as historical source.
Applying this onto the use in practice, it justifies the digitization of referents of this historicity, such as markers of time, etc., as is suggested in the restoration of visual arts with a much longer tradition.
Summarizing the key concept of my paper, I believe, that for film restoration, the digital not only "[…] provides an alternative way of copying and presenting film […]"111, but actually offers improvement with its core potential of extracting information inherent to the analog originals. In doing so it contributes to current initiatives about revisions of the traditional notions of film, towards an appropriation of the medium as source for historical information.
Ongoing obsessions with faking certain aesthetics, paired with the language empowered by the industry and the inherently archival dream to "[...] minimize the gap between the present and the past, fulfilling the victory of 'preservationism' [...]"112 prohibit the disclosure of the greater potentials these tools have to offer. The entire scanning process, in design and approach, subdues itself to the source sample and its associated visual characteristics and experience. The identification of inherent differences setting apart those two forms of media allows one to think outside this box, opening up a hardly exhaustible array of possibilities and information about the source sample and its history. The use for this information is widespread and includes additional decisive criteria for preservation and conservation
111 Walsh, David. "There is No Such Thing as Digital Restoration." Work/s in Progress: Digital Film Restoration Within Archives. Vienna: Synema, 2013. p. 42. 112 Pescetelli, The Art of Not Forgetting. p. 260.
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strategies (which thereby fall back to the source material), the regain of original color information, to the point of exploratory presentation opportunities. A more detailed discussion about the gained potentials for practical use will follow in the consecutive chapter.
Borrowing strategies from other sciences enriches traditional and often deadlocked film archival notions while simultaneously relieving the restorer from fears of subjective intrusion, historical inaccuracy and inappropriateness, through pinpointing an empiric potential.
Especially in the reversal film world, matching any original form through purely aesthetic assumption is close to impossible and unauthentic. Hence, the inclusion of empiric analysis as an instrument for measurement opens up a thinking about the purpose and meaning of decisions taken by the restorer. It allows thinking above and outside a presumed digital objectivity and human subjectivity.
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5 Application in Practice
This chapter aims to locate and contextualize the theoretical discussion of this paper (which also culminates at this point), in actual restoration activities of the film archival field. Its aim is to illustrate the feasibility and usefulness of my proposed dispositif, while outlining potential deviances between current concepts and the concept sketched here. Also presented will be projects that suggest deviating trajectories within a similar notion. It will be followed by a critical analysis that evaluates the potential of my idea, after having pointed out its relation to existing practices. The way this chapter is structured is the following: first, I will introduce a case of a digital restoration of a reversal film that employs commonplace techniques, then I will present a tentative restoration framework that draws from the model proposed in this paper, and lastly I will present projects from practice that follow a similar trajectory as is advocated in this model. The project presented in the first part of this chapter aims to illustrate some of the problems as outlined in chapter three of this thesis, where a summary of difficulties arising with the restoration of reversal films is given. Moreover, it is intended that this introduction should also make possible the link to the content of the preceding parts of this paper, in pointing to possible points of attachment for hypothetical future revisions of this particular restoration.
5.1 Illustrating Practice – The Restoration of American Dreams (lost and found)
The case that will be represented as the first pillar is the 2010 restoration of James Benning's
American Dreams (lost and found), originally created in 1984, by the Austrian Film Museum
(OFM). I believe this example stands emblematically for many cases conducted around a time when digital technologies first became useful tools for the film restoration craft.
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American independent film maker James Benning has a long connection to the OFM. In 2007 he deposited all of the master elements from his films with the institution, among them the original camera reversal elements of American Dreams.113 Soon after the deposit, it was realized that the elements for this film and many other elements from the collections suffer from severe vinegar syndrome, the irreversible decomposition of acetate film base.114 Hence, immediate preservation efforts were initiated and because the films also showed evidence of color decay (thus calling for active interference with the materials, and not only passive preservation, to make accessible a previous, 'original' state of the object), what followed was the Film Museum's first major digital restoration project.115
The elements of American Dreams were comprised of 16mm silent reversal film, on Kodak
Ektachrome stock, and magnetic sound tracks.116 This report will focus exclusively on the visual elements, as the entire paper leaves asides aspects of sound restoration (which are, as should be noted, highly calling for detailed consideration in their own right). The reversal elements were scanned with a wet-gate (a box in front of the sensor filled with a liquid, mostly perchloroethylene, which prevents the capture of film scratches in the scan) at a resolution of 2398 by 1830 pixels on an Arriscan.117 Scanning the entire area of a film strip with this resolution roughly accounts for a full 2K (2048 by 1080) resolution over the image area, cropping out the film's edges and perforation holes in the presentation version (cropping what is referred to as an 'overscan'). Onto the digital image was then applied both automatic and manual dust removal as well as a deflicker effect onto some short sequences.118 'Defects' resulting from the original production were not corrected; such were 'jumping' first frames of
113 Lepore, Lost and Found. p. 160. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. A moment in time which interestingly also coincided with Benning's turn to digital filmmaking techniques – possibly the reason for why Benning himself was supportive of the idea of restoring this film and a second one, Landscape Suicide, originally released two years later, digitally. 116 Ibid. p. 162. 117 Ibid. p. 163f. 118 Ibid. P. 164
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each shot (rooted in the imperfect film transport of the camera), visible original splices, dust and hairs in the camera gate, etc.119 A detailed illustration of the restoration workflow is depicted below. Color correction was necessary, because, as mentioned above, the originals saw a shift in color. This process was enhanced due to the fact that the Ektachrome originals have not been processed with the intended reversal process, named E-6, but rather with the C-
41 process originally designated for color negative development.120 Processing a reversal with the C-41 process, which uses different chemicals, different temperatures, etc., results in an even more pronounced color contrast and more saturated colors than what is otherwise achieved through E-6 development (see images below).121 During the color grading process preliminary results were lasered onto 35mm print stock, which were then compared (via projection) to the 16mm release print struck from the first generation originals as provided by
Benning.122
119 Ibid. 120 Lepore, Matteo. "E-Mail Conversation." Message to the author. 14 Mar. 2016. E-mail. 121 This process is often referred to as 'cross-processing', which, however, is also used to refer to any experiment that distorts colors. Most often, this term means a photochemical technique that aims for achieving highly saturated, somewhat distorted colors resulting from the use of chemicals not originally intended for the processing of the respective stock. The term is most commonly used in describing the processing of reversal film with color negative chemistry and vice versa. See: "Cross Processing: Weird Science." The Darkroom UK Ltd. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 May 2017.
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Figure 6. The workflow of the restoration of American Dreams (lost and found).123
Figure 7. An E-6-processed reversal image (left) and a cross-processed (C-41) reversal image
(right).124
123 Lepore, Lost and Foun. p. 168. 124 "Cross Processing: Weird Science." The Darkroom UK Ltd.
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Figure 8. Original frame of faded reversal element (right), graded scan after color correction
(left).125
The major problems that occurred in the restoration process were the intrusion of additional digital noise generated by the image sensor, due to the harsh grain structure of the originals, and the overall high density and contrast.126 These are among the prevalent problems of reversal restoration, as were outlined in chapter three. In this case, two different applications had to be used in the digital step to encounter these problems.127 The high contrast additionally caused complexities in the grading process, when trying to reproduce color information from the dark and bright image areas.128
I believe this restoration can be used as an illustrative example for prevalent practices of digital reversal film restoration around the time when digital technology became widely accessible and properly adaptable for the film heritage institutions. It reveals a commonplace workflow: the original elements are scanned, lightly digitally enhanced, compared to existing prints and transferred onto a presentation format. While the later step in 2010 (and up until only a couple of years back) almost always inevitably meant putting the data back out to
125 Lepore, Lost and Found. p. 161. 126 Ibid. p. 163. 127 Ibid. p. 164. 128 Ibid. p. 166.
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photochemical film, oftentimes today this final step means comparing a digital image to an analog original, from which a digital end product is produced.129 Besides, as outlined, this restoration also emphasizes often seen problems within digital reversal restoration related to the high contrast of the original. Further, the report specifically mentions the disappearance of tools associated with traditional photochemical laboratory work and analog stocks in respective projects as being a major problem for conducting such practices – and not only for purely analog workflows, as also in the digital intermediate process the creation of prints for comparison, presentation and so forth (not to mention film as an archival storage element) is necessary.130 To me this points to the necessity of carrying on practices and traditions from presumably outdated analog laboratory work into the future, firstly to enable and ensure the continuation of practices of technological appropriation, and secondly in order to make possible the survival of the technological foundation necessary to achieve this potential of appropriation and reference, as even many digital operations are shaped according to traditional models. The same is true for the machines itself. Hence, the knowledge required in this context does deviate, but not as much as one might think. In his documentation, the restorer ultimately points to an adjacent discourse, one that already found discussion here earlier on, and he concludes with the following statement:
"Soon the use of transmedial equipment (like scanners and laser film recorders)
will be made redundant and, at worst, dismissed or, alternatively, adopted for just
a few extremely specific tasks like the production of medium-specific film-art
works or archival restoration projects. As examples of the former are
comparatively too few to make a difference, it will be up to the film archives to
keep film alive in future. When film has finally served its purpose for the
129 Nevertheless one has to note that the practice of lasering data out onto film is still a practice commonly used, for the creation of presentation prints but in particular for the production of preservation elements (where this practice is, in fact, increasingly seen). 130 Ibid. p. 169.
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mainstream cinema market, there will be room to carve a new niche aimed
exclusively at museological activities. Machines could be developed to more
efficiently and respectfully preserve the treasures of the past, and digital tools for
motion picture film restoration can be pushed beyond their current limits to reach
their real potential."131
Evidently, the content of this thesis particularly touches upon the second half of the statement. I believe that the period from right after when the reported restoration was conducted up until today was precisely the period when the mentioned purpose of film as industrial product came to an end. Interestingly though, the practice of reversal film restoration still has not drastically changed. Evidence for this can be found for instance when looking at a recent restoration conducted by the Dutch EYE Film Institute of a Frans Zwartjes film shot on 8mm reversal film. In this case, likewise, the original elements were scanned at
2K resolution (in this case without the use of a wet-gate), followed by a light digital restoration, comparison with the original, and output to a presentation format, which in this instance was a file on a Digital Cinema Package.132 The stage of uncertainty (about film manufacture, machine stability, etc.) has not yet been overcome (and it does not seem it will be in the near future) and the restoration practice is still very much driven by the promises declared by the participants of the digital revolution, which were both the cause and later profiteers of this stage of uncertainty. Only partly does one detect positions of radical deviation of implied notions of use within the digital technological framework – only in rare examples is the push beyond technological limits that Lepore called for in 2010 found in
2017. Two examples of such cases of experimentation shall be outlined as the third pillar within this chapter.
131 Ibid. 132 Monizza, Simona. "E-Mail Conversation." Message to the author. 10 May 2017. E-mail. As pointed out, the choice of the output format is the major difference from current to past procedures. What contributed to the decision here is also the sheer impossibility of lasering back onto the film's original gauge format, 8mm.
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For the specific case study at hand, what is it then, that a hypothetical revised restoration in this current moment could employ, and how could it benefit from a change of focus as promoted in this thesis? Foremost, it is clear that Benning's film, in the present case, is not conceptualized primarily as historical material in the notion that it is conceptualized as an active, utilized and worth of display film rather than a merely museological, anthropological source. To me, this is palpable in that only after a wet-gate scan, the dust removal and deflickering, was the scan checked against the available print. This comparison could not have investigated markers of time which must have been present in both the reversal original and the available release print. Contrasting a cleaned-up version against a presumably circulated, hence worn, release print does not provide for any ground of comparison regarding these indicators, if it would have been indented to reflect upon these in the released version. The reason then for why other 'unwanted' artifacts (the dust in the camera gate, for instance) have not been retouched in the scan does not occur to me. Following my line of argument, any marker of intrusion into the artist's vision, be that through circumstances beyond control during production or inscribed aging processes after release, contains the same authority, because, as I have shown, reversal film is in its nature closer to forms of art whose multiple appearances during history are considered integral to our understanding of them as 'artworks'. In these examples, restorers do attain an indistinguishability of work of art and markers of time inscribed on them. The historicity imposed onto American Dreams is thus one of no-time. This notion should be particularly irrelevant for reversal film cases, because only a negative/positive dichotomy opposes a pristine original versus a copy that is allowed to 'age' (and here also only during its primary distribution cycle, and not after initial exploitation).
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5.2 A Hypothetical Experiment133
Before presenting examples which aim for this "push beyond current limits", it is my objective to offer at this point a hypothetical restoration case of a reversal film. While this illustration here is not much more than a gedankenexperiment, I encourage the reader to think of it also in relation to the actual case just introduced. This will be an imaginary restoration of a film shot on the most famous and most widely used reversal stock, Kodak Kodachrome. In order to make way for this investigation I will briefly outline to relevance of Kodachrome for film history.
In 1935, Leopold Godowsky, Jr. and Leopold Mannes developed the first commercially successful subtractive reversal process for Eastman Kodak, the world’s biggest manufacturer of photographic film, who introduced it first as a 16mm motion picture material and the year later in the 8mm format as well as for 35mm still cameras.134 Kodachrome, as the new product was named, became highly popular for both professional uses, especially in photography, but also amateur practices, in particular for motion picture film with the introduction of 8mm and Super-8 Kodachrome in 1965.135 Up until Kodak stopped the production and processing in late 2010, it was by far the most widespread film stock for amateur film makers while at the same time a popular choice for avant-garde film makers who were facing limited economic resources. Its color reproduction and smooth tonal range is often said to be unrivalled, even by contemporary digital cameras.136 It is today the most important contributor to the masses of amateur 8mm materials in the film archives worldwide. Its discontinuation produced an outcry among retired and active film amateurs,
133 The author owes gratitude to Frank Bruinsma of the Super 8 Reversal Lab for the though-provoking impulse to this experiment. 134 Rijper, Els. Kodachrome: the American invention of our world, 1939-1959. New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2002. p. 14. 135 Ibid. 136 Foresman, Chris. "Death of Kodachrome belies technological leap it represented." Ars Technica. N.p., 30 June 2009. Web. 25 May 2017.
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but also photographers and film makers.137 Kodachrome is different to other reversal stocks in that it is not processed with the E-6 method, but requires a highly complex (and dangerous, due to poisonous chemistry) 14-step process.138 This process was designed by Kodak to prohibit photographers and film makers to develop the films themselves, to rather have them bring the films to a (Kodak licensed) laboratory. As this proved to be a highly successful strategy, today, after the laboratories stopped processing Kodachrome, it is almost impossible to gain a positive color image from unprocessed rolls. There are processes to re-develop E-6 films that have been (accidentally) developed as black-and-white, and to gain a color image, however this process does not function for Kodachrome.139 The demise of Kodachrome laboratories is a significant consideration for film archives too, as many collections include unprocessed rolls of Kodachrome. This is due to its immense popularity among moving image amateurs, which often exposed more rolls than they eventually processed, considering the generally higher price of film development compared to raw stock. The same is true for still photography archives, which equally hold vast amounts Kodachrome rolls. The processing of exposed but unprocessed film has been an important aspect of a few recently initiated projects, for example the Rescued Film Project, or the discovery and publication of the archive of street photographer Vivian Maier.140 It is needless to say that both of these examples deal with Kodachrome holdings. And they do so in the only possible way, which will be presented now.
137 Hegener, Michiel. "Alsof je een schilder zijn verf afpakt." NRC Handelsblad [Amsterdam] 21 Apr. 2006. 138 Processing Steps - Processing Kodachrome Film. 2000. Eastman Kodak Company . Rochester. http://collection.europarchive.org/nli/20110223083227/http://www.kodak.com/global/plugins/acroba t/en/service/Zmanuals/z50_03.pdf 139 Ibid. 140 Bettwieser, Levi. The Rescued Film Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 June 2017, Maloof, John, and Allan Sekula. Vivian Maier: American street photographer. New York: PowerHouse, 2011. Beyond these initiatives exists Film Rescue International, a Canadian laboratory devoted to the handling of as many film stocks as possible, including the development of still and motion picture Kodachrome (to black-and-white). "FAQ." Revealers Of Lost And Found Treasures. Film Rescue International, n.d. Web. 20 June 2017.
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While today it is almost impossible to develop Kodachrome in color, it can still be developed to a black-and-white negative image, and rather easily and cheaply so. It is important to consider, that unexposed Kodachrome, after its processing was stopped, was and still is widely available. Because the demand for it has widely decreased after 2010, today it is by far the cheapest available reversal film stock on the market (if not the cheapest motion picture stock of all).141 Hence, it becomes potentially interesting for amateur film makers still working with film, as well as experimental and avant-garde film makers. Moreover, taking into account the large presence of unexposed Kodachrome in the archive's vaults, there is again potential demand for retrieving the images out of these films. Accordingly, the example of Kodachrome can be utilized to illustrate the potential of film technology to serve other means after its commercial exploitation. If there would exist the technology to regain a color image out of Kodachrome again,142 it could stand emblematically for a liberating film technology, serving not the industry but enthusiasts, artists and heritage institutions.
Furthermore, and this adds an interesting perspective, it would counteract the prevailing negative/positive dictate, which is currently in the process of being applied onto the Super-8 format, arguably the last format that widely functioned outside this discourse, with Kodak currently producing only negative color film in Super-8 cartridges.143
I now aim to present a technical framework of how to achieve this digital reproduction of
Kodachrome colors with already existing, or slightly adapted infrastructure currently used in digital film restoration. Before, it is crucial to understand the structure of a Kodachrome film.
All Kodachrome film stock is structurally a three-layered black-and-white film. Each individual layer is responsive to the different wavelengths corresponding to the primary
141 The price for a roll of Super-8 Kodachrome online is about 10$, whereas for example a roll of Ektachrome Super-8 costs 60$ and more. 142 Even digitally, the colors gained from a Kodachrome source are spectacular and unparalleled to any other reversal film. 143 However, Kodak announced plans to reuptake the manufacture of Super-8 Ektachrome reversal stock in 2017. See: "Kodak Brings Back a Classic with EKTACHROME Film." CES 2017 Press Release | Kodak.
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colors red, green and blue. The three color couplers added in the processing react with the three color developers, also added in processing, which creates the respective dyes. The three layers are stacked onto each other on a transparent film base. When developed as black-and- white, the color couplers and developers are not added; hence the matrix of the three layers is not formed. However, the three layers are still present, and they recorded different wavelengths during exposure. A traditional notion of reversal film restoration would at this point find a halt: the resulting image, the film strip at hand is a black-and-white film, which does not contain any colors, and thus no starting point for color grading. In this logic, the addition of colors onto the monochromatic image in the restoration process would not be able to take place on any comparative grounds and thus be purely imagined by the restorer and hence unauthentic. Here, a different approach can provide a solution. Considering that the three color layers are still present in the film strip, they must be made distinguishable from each other. Scanning technologies offer a few possible ways to do so, which I will outline in the following.
The first possibility to distinguish the individual color layers is to scan the film three times, each time with different wavelengths. These wavelengths must coincide with the wavelengths the three layers are sensitized for, then, what is recorded is each time the color pigment distribution recorded by each layer, as a red-and-white, blue-and-white and green-and-white image (or a red-and-black, blue-and-black, or green-and-black image, if processed as black- and-white reversal).144 This concept is used for the preservation of color films, where each color channel is recorded onto one black-and-white negative, because a silver-based black- and-white negative fades much slower than color film based on organic dyes. This system also formed a very popular color film process, which I will bring forward shortly.
Considering that the scope of this project does not enable the professional implementation of
144 Comparable practice is to be found in the field of medicine, where a CAT-scan is also capable of visualizing particular depth ranges of the human body while masking others.
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this part of the thesis, I assume there are complications arising in this process, but theoretically, what one should gain after this scan are three color-and-white negatives, each depicting a topographical distribution of one primary color within the image, with the density and contrast reduced by two-thirds compared to conventional negatives.
The same concept has been used by the Three-Strip Technicolor system, which recorded – with purposefully built cameras – three strips of black-and-white film instead of one color image.145 There, the resulting negatives were printed onto a positive receiver film, as well as coated with a dye of the complementary color: the 'red' negative with cyan, the 'blue' with yellow and the 'green' with magenta.146 The three negatives were then again printed onto the receiver film, which added the respective color.147 The results were stunningly colorful images, far superior to other color systems available at that time. While Technicolor was a highly expensive and labor intensive process, today many of the individual steps can be performed digitally with much less effort. Utilizing the Three-Strip Technicolor process for the case at hand this means converting the scans into positives (which is easily done in inverting their luminosity curves) adding onto the three scans layers with their corresponding complementary color and merging them to one image.
A second option of distinguishing the three layers is by their differing grain structure.148 This would mean scanning the image only once, with white light, and gaining a single black-and- white (negative) image. Due to their chemical composition, each color layer will have different grain structures that overlap in the scanned image. Noise reduction tools could then be adapted to detect the grain corresponding to each layer and extracting three images. These would then be colored with red, green and blue filters and merged into one image. It is clear
145 Technicolor 3 Strip. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 May 2017.
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that this process would require additional color grading in the final stage, for instance in applying existing Kodachrome-LUTs. LUTs, short for look-up-tables are digital color matrices (functions) that emulate the color rendering characteristics of a particular stock. The can be created subjectively, in mimicking a certain look, or empirically in measuring density and color contrast of an original. However this would be more precise than coloring the original scan, because of the extraction of the three color layers and the respective color mapping. Compared to the first idea this would have the advantage of a faster workflow, as the film is only scanned once. In both cases described here, the result would be a color image obtained from a black-and-white Kodachrome.
5.3 The (Preliminary) Experimental Implementation
It needs to be stressed that this experiment, as it is outlined here, is merely a hypothetical one.
It's functionality in theory needs to be proven through practical implementation. While the implementation into institutional practices and testing on this level exceeds the scope and timeframe of this thesis, in the following I will briefly outline a preliminary experiment conducted by the author with limited consumer equipment. The experiment follows the first method of retrieving colors, as outlined in the preceding subchapter.
It needs to be mentioned before going into the detail of the experimental setup, that the test were conducted only with 'conventional' Kodachrome slides, developed with a K-14 process, as the only available black-and-white Kodachrome would have been a Super-8 film, whose image area was too small to be digitized with the equipment available. While, as stated earlier, this theoretically should not make a difference, I very much expect to encounter an array of problems when scanning black-and-white Kodachrome and applying the same set of techniques as for color films. Some of these problems that might occur are described in the subsequent paragraph. The experimental setup was as follows: a conventional three color
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RGB light-emitting diode (LED) was placed under the slide, which in return lay on a sheet of paper, to disperse the light emitted by the diode. The slide was photographed in the RAW format with a conventional digital consumer camera (Panasonic DMZ-FZ50) using the macro function of a Leica 35-420mm zoom lens.
Figure 9. Setup of the experiment.
The wavelengths of the LED were tested with a do-it-yourself spectrometer and the
Theremino_MCA software program.149 The results read 525nm for the green LED, 636nm for the red and 439nm for the blue diode, which was close to the respective sensitivities of the
Kodachrome 64 stock of the slide (see below).
149 Theremino Spectrometer Construction. 1 Sept. 2014. Theremino System. http://www.theremino.com/wp- content/uploads/files/Theremino_Spectrometer_Construction_ENG.pdf
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Figure 10. Sensitivity of Kodachrome. From left to right: blue layer, green layer, red layer.150
The slide used was purposefully selected from the author's private collection, because it contains very high levels of red and green, with (presumably) almost no blue present in the image. This was done in order to simplify the experiment, in that the image was only to be digitized with the red and green light. A scan of the slide with under light can be seen below.
Figure 11. A Scan of the slide used for the experiment.
150 TECHNISCHE INFORMATION KODAK Farbumkehrfilme. N.d. Technical Kodak Manual. Kodak GmBH, Vienna. http://wwwat.kodak.com/DE/plugins/acrobat/de/consumer/produkte/filmwelt/produktlinien/kodaChrom e/kodachrome_tech_datenblatt.pdf
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The photographs were taken with the green diode at 2.4 Volts and the red diode at 1.7 Volts.
Due to its technical construction, the red diode responds to a lower voltage than the green and blue diodes do. The pictures were taken at an aperture of 2.8 with a shutter speed of 1/13 second and an ISO 100 setting.
Figure 12. The red and green ‘scans’, before any correction applied.
The RAW-images were imported into Adobe Photoshop CS6, the distortions of the camera lens corrected and rotated, the saturation reduced to zero, leaving a black-and-white topography of the respective color distribution of the green and red layers in the film.
Because the image almost entirely contains green and red information, the scans look like negatives of each other.
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Figure 13. The black-and-white color topography image of the green (left) and red (right)
layers.
Each layer was then applied with a filter of the corresponding complementary color, in digitally tinting the images through the use of Photoshop's RGB-mixer function, where the author, treating the image as if it were a color image, reduced for the red image the information of the red hues of all three channels, and did so respectively for the green image.
This resulted in the red image being tinted cyan and the green image being tinted magenta
(see below).
Figure 14. The black-and-white records of green tinted magenta (left) and red tinted cyan
(left).
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He then combined the two images into one, reducing the transparency for each to 50%, overlapping the two color layers. Finally, he inverted the luminosity of the image, because, dealing with a reversal original instead of a negative, the respective complementary colors were affecting the 'negative' areas of the particular color. The result was a color image that resembled the original, but was also somewhat far from its original colors.
Figure 15. Comparison of experimental outcome image and original starting slide.
The author thought the deviation to be due to first, not producing a record for the blue layer and even though it did not appear from the outside, there must have been substantial parts of blue present in particularly the green register, and secondly simply to the imperfection of the equipment used, in particular to the utilized LED source and the image sensor of the camera.
What is noticeable in the compiled image is that the darker areas in the original image (for example the parts right below the blossom, or the background in the upper left corner) have turned towards white in the manipulated version (see figure 15 for a comparison). This is a result from the applied luminosity inversion. I concluded from this that in order to gain correct black levels in this way of scanning Kodachrome, one must add a fourth scan, with white light comprised of all three wavelengths. This then should be used to extract the topography of the areas that did not leave through any light – the black areas of the image –
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and interpolated with the final, superimposed image. The author inferred from the results that a workflow like this is theoretically possible, and not very complex in its execution, but it might require image correction. The amount of correction that would be needed conducting such an experiment with professional equipment would probably decide for its feasibility in practice.
It is clear that even though this research provided (preliminary) positive results, these cannot be easily applied to all attempts of the retrieval of colors of black-and-white Kodachromes.
There are a few complications to consider, and these can form a possible critique of the undertaking sketched here. First, the experiment assumes film samples that are perfectly in shape, have been perfectly stored and therefore do not pose any scanning problems related to deteriorated materials. Because old Kodachrome, which has not been properly stored (at cold conditions, potentially freezing) before and after exposure accelerates its internal deterioration mechanisms, and this might make it impossible to gain the information off the individual color layers, being the crucial principle of this imaginary model. These mechanisms include the forming of an ‘age fog’, resulting from ionization of remaining silver crystals in the emulsion, the loss of film speed sensitivity in the independent layers, and the formation of additional grain structures.151 In particular the first could pose a major problem, as it could have already be seen in experiments in times when the regular Kodachrome process was still available, in that the processing was no longer properly possible with very aged stock, due to the mentioned age fog, and resulted in either very dark images, or images that have exceeding amounts of one specific color layer in them, as is the case when the three layers deteriorate in different speeds.152 Also, as can be seen in figure 10, the three color layers of a Kodachrome film do overlap slightly, meaning that also the readings of the
151 The author owes gratitude to Martin Baumgarten, who pointed out these three factors as possible complications. Baumgarten, Martin. "E-Mail Conversation." Message to the author. 15 May 2017. E-mail. 152 Ibid.
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individual scans carry overlapping information from the neighboring layer. What has been mentioned as a further difficulty is the fact that at all times all layers are sensitive, in different degrees, to the blue spectrum.153 In its indented purpose, this is circumvented through the use of a thin foil (a colloid, in the case of Kodachrome this is called, after its inventor, the Carey- lea filter) blocking the blue wavelengths before they can reach the red and green layers.154
While this blocking layer turns invisible in the K-14 processing, it cannot be made invisible in any black-and-white process, where it retains its yellow appearance (which is the reason black-and-white Kodachromes often actually are not purely black-and-white).155 The presence of this layer might interfere with a reading obtained from particularly the blue and adjacent green layer, and might potentially lead to difficulties in obtaining the correct data.
The problems related to age are particularly relevant for archives, which hold Kodachrome materials dating back to the time of its invention. Further, for film makers in the present aiming for working with Kodachrome (again), the available films must have been stored in very good conditions, preferably even frozen, to allow for as little chemical reaction as possible. A problem that is very prevalent in the processing of Kodachrome as black-and- white, and which has not been a problem in traditional processing is the removal of the Rem-
Jet layer, the ‘Removal Jet Black Backing’.156 At some point during the processing must the film be soaked in an alkaline bath, which weakens this layer and makes it possible to trace.
However the complexity is that the layer is opaque, hence it is difficult to observe the moment it has completely gone of the film.157 Further, considering the length of moving image film, this can be a very tedious and time-consuming procedure. At any rate, this does
153 Alan, Marcus. "E-Mail Conversation." 154 Ibid 155 Ibid. 156 Generally, due to the chemicals used, the process of developing Kodachrome as black-and-white is much easier than the K-14 process, which, as mentioned before, was almost impossible to be done on a non- professional level. Only the removal of the Rem-Jet backing distinguishes it from any other black-and-white photographic process. 157 Alan, Marcus. "E-Mail Conversation."
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not affect the color layers in the film. Moreover, it might be possible that the colloidal silver in the emulsion layers is opaque in the scan.158 When processed as color positive, the silver gets bleached, which turns it into a salt, which is then removed by the fixer, leaving only the color dyes.159 In black-and-white development, the image typically does not get bleached, for it would reduce the silver content, which is what forms the image in a black-and-white film.
A possibility to avoid potential transparency of the silver particles in a black-and-white
Kodachrome is to bleach it lightly after processing, for example with ‘Farmer's Reducer’, a chemical compound-mix, which dissolves away silver particles.160
In the late 1990s, a similar project like the author's tentative workflow was conducted at a research institution subsidiary to Kodak, 'Applied Science Fiction', later 'Austin Development
Center', and even later incorporated into 'KodakAlaris'.161 It was in this era (in the mid- and late 1990s), when traditional photochemical photography had surpassed its heyday and the industry aimed for an reduction of laboratory infrastructure and chemistry production, hence leaning towards the promises of the circulating early digital technologies.162 In this context
Kodak founded this research facility, to develop workflows that scale down photochemical operations and expand scanning infrastructure, basically formulating the foundation of what became an industry of its own, digital post-production. The main idea was to reduce the chemicals needed for film processing as much as possible, to scan the film as early as possible and discard the paper printing (the main concentration was on still photography) of every image on the film but instead produce a CD containing the digitized and corrected images for the client.163 In the beginning they primarily worked on the development of scanners to detect and erase dust and scratches on the film through the use of infrared light, in
158 Ibid. 159 Ibid. 160 Schneider, William R. Farmer’s Reducer Treatment for Negatives and Prints. 1991. Technical Manual. www.tmax100.com/photo/pdf/farmers.pdf 161 Alan, Marcus. "E-Mail Conversation." 162 Ibid. 163 Ibid.
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scanning the film twice with ‘normal’ white, and then with the infrared light, leading to the development of so called Digital ICE technology (Digital Image Correction and
Enhancement).164 While this worked fine with conventional color negatives and chromogenic black-and-white film, it proved to be difficult for Kodachrome, as its red layer tends to absorb also light in the infrared spectrum.165 Following from this observation, researchers at
Applied Science Fiction developed a scanning technique that circumvented this problem: first, the film was developed as black-and-white negative with only a very thin mist of developer sprayed onto it, then – before fixing the image – it was scanned first with reflected blue light shone onto the 'front' of the film where the blue layer is located, resulting in the registration of only that layer, then with reflected infrared light (to penetrate through the
Rem-Jet layer) shone onto the back side, hence recording the red information, and finally with bright transmissive light in its totality, to record all three layers and then to gain information about the middle green layer in subsuming the records of the previously recorded red and blue layers.166 Afterwards the contrast curves of each scan were reduced so that they can be combined – after interpolating them with corresponding RGB matrices – into one final color image.167
This practice can be considered as a possible professional implementation of the method as sketched earlier on, the tentative framework, in that it was circumventing and solving prevailing problems that are brought to the fore only in actual technological realization. This becomes obvious for instance in that the practitioners decided to scan the film samples from various sides, with different light features. It is worth noting that only after an initial
164Kodak Professional - Photoshop Plugins & More! Kodak alaris, n.d. Web. 25 May 2017.
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experimentation phase where the researchers able to come up with a technical solution that achieved the desired results.168
5.4 A Survey of Archaeometric Projects
The final pillar of this chapter intends to locate current experiments with alternative uses of digital technology in the field of film restoration. Methods following a trajectory similar to the one sketched in this paper currently only scarcely find application in the film restoration field.169 However, there is noticeable what could be identified as a 'scientific turn' within the film archival profession, which advocates a more empiric approach to the elements of film preservation. It is noticeable in academic scholarships, where the number of publications in this direction is increasing.170 In the following I aim to present a few exemplary projects from archival practice that can be analyzed following to this methodology, or that employ strategies that can be ascribed to the 'scientific turn'.
168 Alan, Marcus. "E-Mail Conversation." 169 Attempts have been made to break through the closed circuit of digital translation models, however these models often taking reference to the human vision apparatus. See, e.g.: Rizzi, and Chambah, Perceptual Color Film Restoration. As concluded in chapter three of this paper this is a concept unsuitable for the restoration of reversal film. 170 Recent examples of publications beyond what will be referenced in the following delineation are: the Amsterdam University Press publications Exposing the Film Apparatus (Fossati, Giovanna, and Annie Van Den Oever. Exposing the film apparatus: the film archive as a research laboratory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam U Press, 2016. Print.), The Datafied Society (Sch fer, Mirko Tobias. The datafied society: studying culture through data. Amsterdam: Amsterdam U Press, 2017. Print.) and Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art (Noordegraaf, Julia, et al. Preserving and exhibiting media art: challenges and perspectives. Amsterdam: Amsterdam U Press, 2013. Print.). Other publications to mention in this context are the Materiality and the Archive dossier in "The Velvet Light Trap" (Hughes, Kit, and Heather Heckman. "Dossier: Materiality and the Archive." The Velvet Light Trap 70 (2012): 59-65. Web.), the Film Preservation Symposium in Cineaste ("Editorial: FILM PRESERVATION: A Critical Symposium."), as well as what came out of the "FoFA: The Future of Film Archiving" initiative, which facilitated at the British Film Institute in consultation with film laboratory expert Brain Pritchard, gathers every year to discuss pressuring concerns of the film archival community. The spring 2016 issue of the FIAF publication Journal of Film Preservation had a focus on the discussions and findings of the FoFA-group (Fairall, Charles. "FoFA: The Future of Film Archiving." Journal of Film Preservation 94 (April 2016) Print.). Also worth mentioning it this point is the yearly The Reel Thing conference organized by AMIA-members Grover Crisp and Michael Friend, which brings to the fore primarily technical developments and concerns within the film archival community. In particular the conference's 2017 edition at the EYE Film Institute exhibited markers of this current trend ("EYE International Conference." EYE. N.p., 23 May 2017. Web. 25 May 2017.
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One of the largest projects currently in existence in this respect is the DIASTOR-project, conducted by the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich and the Computer
Graphics Lab at the ETH Zurich under the leadership of Barbara Flueckiger. Part of its aims is the development of renewed scanning infrastructure, for the digital recreation of original colors. While primarily focusing on visual appearance, they do research on alternative usage of digital scanning technologies.171 An example of this is Flueckiger's 'Information vs.
Appearance' model, which aims towards the creation of transfer functions that matches the color scope of the original onto the scanned image.172 In her project description she states that
"[e]very picture and every scan is the result of a specific interaction between light, matter, the image sensor, and its postprocessing chain" [and is only one specific reading under certain circumstances, by one individual, as I would add].173 Specific to this model is the acknowledgement of the distinct media expression both players in a hybrid conception occupy. Likewise, it takes into account the subjectivity involved in any restoration project. It needs mention that the DIASTOR project is partly a project of film history and partly on of film technology production. In that it almost exclusively focuses on the research about early applied color systems. Considering the diversity of color film technology, the developed machines will barely be useful for an advanced treatment of other color films. Again as a result, what will be needed to adapt the scanners for reversal films in particular, is experimentation and customization.
A further model of practice that searches for enhancements of current digital restoration infrastructure is Ulrich Ruedel's engagement, both as a professional archivist as well as with his study program at the HTW Berlin. This academic program differs from other courses
171 For example through attempts of the recreation of original film looks in a digital form, or with current stocks. Flueckiger, Barbara. "Bridging the Gap between Analogue Film History and Digital Technology." 1st INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE COLOUR IN FILM. Friends House, London. 03 Mar. 2016. Lecture. 172 Flueckiger, Barbara. "Bridging the Gap between Analogue Film History and Digital Technology." Interesting to think in this context is also a reference to Sharma’s color profile model. 173 Flueckiger, Barbara. "Color Analysis for the Digital Restoration of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari.". p. 30.
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about film archiving in that, being housed at an university for applied sciences and there being an offspring of the conservation and restoration specialization, it focuses first and foremost on the technical apparatus of film and film exhibition and the preservation thereof, including the entire technological gear necessary.174 In doing so, it puts in its center the drive for experimentation on top of existing strategies and practices of the conservation of photographic records.175 Ruedel in this manner advocates approaches to film restoration, and in particular color restoration, that operate with means originating in conservation science and archaeometry.176 He refers to Paul Read as the scholar who first followed such a trajectory, in his 1998 essay about historical tinting an toning techniques and their use for restoration purposes.177 Considering the use of scientific measurements and empiric analysis of film samples by laboratories from very early on, which were also involved in restoration procedures (as shown in chapter three) before the field was coined as such, I believe it is tricky to pinpoint a particular moment in time when the use of scientific means for specialized experimental practice within film restoration was first appropriated. However it is clear that only after the definition of film restoration as a scholarly practice, and with the advent of digital possibilities was also the use of scientific tools more widely seen.
Nevertheless, its use in practice today is, as I have said, still limited.
174 "Konservierung und Restaurierung." Audiovisuelles und Fotografisches Kulturgut (AVK). HTW Berlin, n.d. Web. 25 May 2017.
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Ruedel calls for the utilization of tools originating in the field of imaging science, a rather new discipline first formulated by optics scholar Graham Saxby.178 Ruedel defines imaging science as "[a] comparatively young formal interdisciplinary field, [which] explores the physical, chemical, optical, but also the neurological and psychological factors concerning the perception of what we call color."179 For him, with this definition, imaging science is the only field that considers the entire process of film preservation, in including its understanding of a particular historical technological mode, the appropriation of modern techniques in its recreation and the presentation for an audience in the present.180 What I have tried to implement in this paper is a strategy of denotating film restoration as a practice according to similar notions. Ruedel, when talking about the actual practices correlating to his proposed application of imaging science in film restoration, points to the use of X-ray radiation to extract information about an object's past in that in can visualize substances emitted by developing tanks in the time of production, leading to insight about the production machines and technology from when the film was made, for instance.181 As further use of such practices, Ruedel mentions that the scanning of film with light outside the human visible spectrum can reveal if the fading of certain dyes was a result of chemical decomposition, or frequent projection and thus the light of the projector lamp – again leading to insights about the film object's life.182 Speaking in overall terms, Ruedel calls for the appropriation of such techniques in order to gain information that one might not have asked for in the first place, as tools of imaging science have tendencies to reveal significant information that lies beyond
178 This is a tool that explores physical, chemical and optical processes but also neurological and psychological factors concerning the perception of color, reception theory and color science. Ruedel et al, Towards a More Accurate Preservation of Color. p. 225, Saxby, Graham. The science of imaging: an introduction. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2011. Print., Ross, Jonathan. "Graham Saxby obituary." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 12 Apr. 2015. Web. 25 May 2017.
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what is visible to the human spectator in distant observation.183 He claims that the use of such an similar techniques in film restoration "deepen[s] the understanding of the subjective, psychovisual moving image experience."184 What should be employed is a union of aesthetic and historical research.185
"This [understanding] is vital not only to preserve history but also because of the
necessity of access to born-analog works via digital versions and the potential digital
restoration indeed does offer. Precisely because it is outside and beyond the original
technology’s realm, the expanded ‘vocabulary’ of digital imaging might offer
opportunities to be more faithful in some regards to a particular heritage image than
analog technologies allow. But like any translation, a deep understanding of the
original language is a prerogative. As archivists, we can embrace the potential of
modern imaging technologies to explore the richness of historic techniques to
research."186
A recent example from restoration practice that utilizes a combination of digital and photochemical means in a comparable fashion as is advocated in this paper was conducted in
2016 by the Japanese National Film Center in cooperation with IMAGICA. Senninbari (The
Thousand-Stitch Belt), the film that was the subject of the restoration, was produced in 1937 with a two-color film system, which was limited in its representation of hues.187 Without outlining the entire workflow at this point (which included a substantial amount of photochemical testing), what the participants developed were digital LUTs that visualized areas in the digitized image where unwanted colors have been created, resulting from the
183 Ibid. 184 Hughes, Ruedel, p. 63 185 Ibid 186 Hughes and Heckman. "Dossier: Materiality and the Archive.". p. 163. 187 Daibo, Masaki, Tomohiro Hasegawa, and Kasuki Miura. "Limiting Colour Grading for Two-colour Film Restoration. Utilising a Spectraradiometer to Create a Specific LUT." Journal of Film Preservation 96 (April 2017). p. 97.
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process of digitization, as the digital being a color space with three primaries that in this case was forced to depict only colors resulting from two primaries.188 In other words, because they were dealing with a film produced via a two-color process that was portrayed in an alien color system, the creation of artifacts was inevitable. The involved parties appropriated digital technologies as means for calibrating the color spaces to work in, based on information about the potentials of color representation of their investigated original film materials. Thus, they investigated the translation gap between analog and digital film technology that so often is surpassed and, in the process, neglected.
Other examples of a different uses of digital technology, distinct from aesthetical interpretation can be found in the methods developed by the digital humanities, a discipline kin to the school of media archaeology. Such are, for instance, data visualization tools. In this field, they are considered "[…] helpful [...] because they can provide comprehensive overviews of collections and reveal macrolevel patterns and structures within them."189 The authors of the quoted article locate their research as attempt of a 'Data-Driven-Film History', with visualizations being a heuristic tool, revealing and posing new perspectives and new questions.190 Through the possibility of, in this case, digital data visualization tools, to zoom in and out to the microscopic and the macroscopic level of film presentation, a better understanding of the film restoration craft might be achieved.191 Because in such cases these technologies are employed to define, rename and circumvent the subjectivity in the restoration of a single frame, a scene, a film, an entire collection. Hence, it defies
188 Ibid. 189 Olesen, et al. "Data-Driven Research for Film History”. p. 83. 190 Ibid. p. 84ff. 191 Ibid. p. 93. Here, a link can be found to Horwath, who formulated that call for a better understanding. See: Horwath, The Old Life. p. 28.
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systemization and allows the subject to speak for itself – in the case of film restoration the film to speak for its own methodological need.192
In the case of the visualization of the Desmet collection, one can observe a use of digital technology to display what cannot be perceived by the human eye, which is also one of the essentials aims of Saxby's imaging science tools.193 In coming back to the Gunning article discussed previously, one could say that through such means we can extract what it is that leads to the resemblance to the real of digital images, the iconography. There is the potential for the presenter of visual phenomena to render their characteristics into numerical data, in order to get 'behind' the picturesque. Even though the case referenced here is not a restoration project, I am still considering it a helpful illustration of how new scholarship facilitates a tailored application of a technology that intentionally was developed for a different use. The authors exploit a new range of options that at this point should function as an incentive for ideologically pertinent projects. In doing so, they suggest to the film restoration practitioner to look beyond the presumably inherently inscribed uses of their digital technologies and to facilitate a more investigative, empiric analysis.
192 See: Lipman, The Grey Zone. p. 15. This methodological need must be identified on both the materialistic and the conceptual levels. Lipman further argues that one must delve into the specific qualities of the film at hand, in order to decide how to preserve it. On the materialistic level, this could be done through either a reversal print, or through a negative/positive process, or through digital means. At any rate is the archivist left with his/her own ingenuity. See: Lipman, Problems of Independent Film Preservation. p. 53. 193 Saxby, The science of imaging. p. 281ff.
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6 Conclusion
In this thesis I have aimed to investigate the appropriateness of the current restoration dispositif of reversal films, considering the increase in its particular use of digital technology.
Due to reasons outlined in this paper, reversal films today are almost exclusively resorted digitally. I have tried to bring to the fore the complications film archivists encounter with the reversal film medium, in both its technical as well as contextual breath. I have formulated a critique of the current notions driving these restorations, in arguing that they do not exploit the core potentials, the unique features of digital imaging technology, due to its relative newness to the archival field. I argue that the specific case of the restoration of the colors of reversal films illustrate challenges the entire field is facing. I suggest extracting these inherent possibilities in fostering experimentation, which has a long tradition in archival practice.
Thus I consider the current dispositif of digital reversal film restoration inaccurate. What this paper promotes in order to achieve greater authenticity is a scientific approach within film restoration towards the object under investigation. I argue that the potentials of digital restoration technology include the extraction of data about the film original. In current practice this data is often mistakenly clouded by visual imperatives, leaving asides produced metadata. These imperatives stem from a discourse about technological progress, which is imposed by players outside the film heritage field. With analog film having left the realm of commercial commodity, after film production and distribution turned towards digital means, the inherent discrepancies between photochemical film and digital moving image formats become more apparent and this discursive argumentation circumnavigated.
As I have tried to show, this potential could be appropriated differently, and in a few ways. I have brought forward the example of preserving the historicity of an artifact, its markers and imprints of time. This practice foils a digital impetus, which dictates that images are timeless,
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ever present and do not age. In my experimental attempt, I have tried to set up a situation that allows the film artifact to inform and fuel its further preservation. In this case, the data extraction performed only in a second step creates a visual facsimile; before that it provides information about how to get to this image, about how the matrix resulting in a specific impression has to look like. In more general terms, this new potential allows for more informed restoration decisions, in providing additional reference to be taken into account, deriving from the source itself, and not from outside agencies.
The case studies are appropriated within my methodological framework to illustrate both the current situation as well as the proposed digital potential. They include a hypothetical experiment that employs strategies as formulated in the theoretical chapters of the paper. For the review function, the examples from current archival practice, it can be said that while
(still) being only a very few in numbers, they do make for a trend towards a more scientific discussion within the film restoration community. These efforts have revealed success in particular in the restoration of early color and applied color films. While I have not come across a restoration project of color reversal elements that follow a scientifically analytic approach comparable to my brought in model, the exploratory implementation of testing the theoretical feasibility thereof in practice has revealed some positive preliminary results.
These brought me to the position to believe that current archival technology is able to execute tasks required by this technological and conceptual repositioning, however not without the adaptation of current infrastructure. There is certainly much more additional research necessary, in particular into the scanning technology, which in this moment poses the most complex difficulties.
The contribution of theories springing from film archival scholarship to its subfield of film restoration was, throughout its rather short history, smaller than its contribution to other
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related fields (such as curating, for instance). This is because, as the conceptualization of film archival studies as an academic field is rather new, the craft of film restoration, a practice resulting from film makers copying their works for matters of (re)distribution, has had a longer history of developing practices outside the realm of academia, utilizing strategies of trial and error. In particular the study of reversal film needs greater critical attention, as the recent shift to amateur film study mostly only partially touches upon the intrinsic material necessities of the film stocks. It is the great potential of academic theory, to provide for a critical reflection of uses of ‘state-of-the-art’ technologies, promoting their utilization in contribution to and not against successfully established applications and best-practices. This potentials needs to be exhausted to greater extent.
I argue that the twofold conception of the restorer as auteur and the restorer as negotiator allows for a clearer delineation of the magnitude of the involvement of the practitioner in the restoration dispositif. This conception provides clarification about the role of the restorer within the discourse of digital film technology; a field of power that, because it is heavily fought for, is difficult to pinpoint for film archives. In ascribing the restorer creative qualities, and acknowledging his/her subjective position, a clearer thinking about the agencies of human, machine, film and reality, all contributing to the restoration dispositif, becomes possible, because this notion defines the tasks, responsibility and abilities of the human player more closely, thereby clarifying its relations to the other organs.
This opening up of a conceptual approach is in return posing new difficulties of technical but also ethical nature. It does not provide any imperatives for actual practices. In the end the decisions are very much, and even in an accelerated fashion in the special case of the restoration of reversal films, to be taken by the person applying this technology and carrying out the restoration projects. The restorer is the central figure to any restoration dispositif; this
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was true in the analog era and holds equally after the introduction of digital technologies for archival use. In fact, as this thesis opens up yet another possible application of these new tools, the restorer is even more so asked to apply his/her knowledge and experience, and to do so critically. There is no presupposed application and use of any archival technology, instead what the introduction of a new technology onto advanced institutional, social and political structures does, is it demands for (and allows) new ways of thinking. Thus, it in returns boosts the restorer’s creativity.
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