Film Restoration Methods at Test: Scratches Cleaning - Text 6
Scratches cleaning and film integrity
If the duplication of photographic frames into digital images has major consequences in technical, curatorial, and conceptual terms, there is good value in this cross-pollination method. Making the best use of both worlds – analogue and digital – by combining them in the film preservation process has dramatically improved the look of silent cinema in duplicate form. Scratches are part of a print’s internal history, but it would be foolish not to try to remove at least the most glaring ones, if at all possible. There is no harm in using pixels to repair what cannot be fixed otherwise, even if they are not grains of silver bromide.
Nonetheless, the question of where film ‘integrity’ begins emerges in all its intricacy. When admiring a wooden table from the XVIIth century, scratches are so much a component of its “aura” that its owner likes them to be perceived as part of the object’s history, and would cringe at the prospect of someone smoothing its surface to perfection with sandpaper, thus significantly affecting the table’s value. When an ancient mural painting is found in fragmentary form, fine arts specialists restore what they can, and leave the rest alone. Many of Sappho’s poems, and the Aphrodite of Milos on display in the Louvre, are incomplete; much as it would be wonderful to read or see the rest, no one has a problem in admiring these works of art as they are now. The question of why film audiences cannot stand scratches and gaps in a silent film to the point of removing or filling them whenever possible is too complex to be shrugged off as an unnecessary philosophical musing, and will be addressed in the last part of this parcours.
