Towards a New Dispositif of the Digital Restoration of Reversal Films
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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. 2 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 3 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 4 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. 5 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. 6 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. 7 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.