Addressing the Equivocal Nature of Film Preservation - Text 2
An industry-driven discipline
No matter how carefully drawn and tested against other formulas, all the above definitions are confronted by the inescapable question of who cares about converting them into practice. No one is in control of film preservation terminology, but anybody can call a film ‘restored’ if there is a vested interest in saying so. Perhaps because of their inherent pliability, modest or negligible market value, and limited appeal to general audiences, the works of silent cinema lend themselves particularly well to this semantic anarchy. A significant percentage of these films are in the public domain. Many have been saved with governmental support, or through the generosity of private donors and foundations. Other silent films are legally owned by commercial entities, even when the film objects – prints and negatives – were saved and are preserved by others.
Most laboratories for the duplication of the moving image have been established with the goal of generating a financial profit; while some collecting institutions are capable of running their own technical facilities, all of them are reliant upon proprietary technology, which is also meant to earn dividends.
Some corporate companies collaborate with film museums and archives, with tangible benefits for both, and for their audiences. The imbalance of power between the players, however, has affected the growth of film preservation as a curatorial discipline. Born as an industry, cinema continues to be part of it even when it deals with its own history.
The selection process that derived from this hierarchy of commercial and promotional values is dictating which silent films we are allowed to see in digital formats on the big screen, and which ones must be confined to low-resolution replicas, or to those museums, archives, and festivals where silent films can still be exhibited in their original media. There are still a number of important titles that have not been preserved at all; they are more at risk than the others, because collecting institutions may decide not to go beyond a digital transfer from the original film elements. The short-term financial advantages of this approach come at a heavy price to the public, and to the ethics of film preservation. Silent films that had been previously restored by photochemical means are also sometimes repackaged as ‘digital restoration’ projects, thus bending terminology to marketplace-driven rhetoric.
Insofar as they are sold and bought, all artworks need a public or private forum in which to be displayed. Film preservation is unique only in that its marketplace is neither run by the artists (or their agents), nor influenced by curatorial authority (in museums and galleries), but is driven instead by its own infrastructure. There is a dangerous populist edge in the proclaimed belief that technology is a vehicle for a more democratic access to film history. This simplistic formula is, in fact, a rhetorical weapon to justify the very undemocratic imposition of one mode of spectatorship over another.
Towards an ethics of spectatorship
There is no such thing as the ‘ethics of film preservation’ if the owners of its tools are to dictate what constitutes ‘preservation’ and what doesn’t. There is, instead, an ethics of spectatorship; that, too, must be learned and protected. Rather than passively inheriting the history of cinema in whatever form it is being offered, its audiences have the right to question its modes of presentation, and should protect their freedom to pursue a film experience of their choice. The actions resulting from this stance are reflected in the following statement of intent:
Film spectatorship is the ultimate objective of film preservation: the art of observing the transformation of cinema over the course of time, and the discipline of coping with its consequences on culture and society. In monitoring the process, every reasonable effort will be made to cultivate, encourage, and participate in cinematic events for as long as possible; if they can no longer occur, their migration to another kind of visual experience will be interpreted and explained, so that the meaning of what has been lost can be fully understood by future generations. In doing so, the spectator takes a creative role that is comparable to what filmmakers did in the age of cinema.
