TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

In her 1990 essay “Some Principles of Film Restoration”,^[1] Eileen Bowser – a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art – has outlined five main goals and objectives:

1. Preserving the negative or positive film element exactly as it was acquired, with minimal or no corrections, regardless of its completeness and internal structure.
2. Bringing the film to a condition as close as possible to how it was seen by its audience at the time of release.
3. Presenting a version of the film in which the original intentions of the artist or the commercial entity that produced it are fully achieved.
4. Ensuring access to the film in a form that can be appreciated by a contemporary audience.
5. Using the film as the source material of new creative works, adapted or derived from the original.

A sixth category – preserving the film as it has been experienced by later audiences – has been proposed by some authors, but this is actually a variation on the first and the fifth categories. In deciding that a print should be formally acquired, a collecting institution makes a commitment to preserve it regardless of the film’s version, generation, or material status; had it been otherwise, the print would not have been accepted as part of the archive’s or museum’s holdings.

There is a hierarchy in Bowser’s list of objectives: the first precedes all the others because it upholds the main imperative of all cultural repositories – safeguarding and making accessible the traces of history and culture as they have come to us, protected from any further interferences and distortions. Before altering the evidence of a film (as it has reached us in its material form) in order to achieve one or more of the other four objectives, the first one must be met.

Bowser articulates this ethical imperative in three overall principles:

1. All film preservation processes must be reversible.
2. No alteration should be made to the collection artefact after its acquisition.
3. The preservation work should be documented, so that others are allowed to evaluate the choices made and the procedures chosen, and take corrective action if necessary.

However, if there is consensus among curators and scholars that it is necessary also to keep a detailed record of the main actions taken during the preservation process in the film or digital laboratory, this promise has almost never been fulfilled. Film technicians are especially reluctant to document it in writing; as for curators, they are often unable or unwilling to go beyond generic or perfunctory reports.

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[1] Eileen Bowser, “Some Principles of Film Restoration,” Griffithiana 13, nos. 38-39 (October 1990): 172-173.