The Ethics of Film Restoration - Text 1
The previous part described how to preserve silent films as they have been found, regardless of their material condition, without any so-called “restoration”. To continue with the example of print 36 as part of our genealogical tree, nothing has yet been said about the physical state of the imaginary film element. We don’t know whether it had been well maintained or carelessly projected, kept intact or savagely cut by censors, stored in a relatively cool and dry warehouse or left at the mercy of humidity and mould in the corner of a basement. Nitrate prints are very rarely found in the same shape as they were at the beginning of their commercial life; in those rare instances when this has happened, the most frequent reason is that the prints had been forgotten more by accident than design, early enough to spare them the perilous nomadic life of their siblings.
What is missing from all these objects, and which ethical issues are raised by the restoration approaches aimed at compensating for these gaps, is the theme of this part.
Coping with “incompleteness”
A film may be defined as ‘complete’ or ‘incomplete’ in material, narrative, and optical terms.
Material incompleteness
The criterion most commonly used is of purely quantitative nature: the length of the surviving element is measured against that of the finished film, as announced by producers and distributors at the time of its first release. But the numbers almost never match: the vast majority of extant nitrate prints and negatives are shorter than they were originally. Film curators are so accustomed to this discrepancy that they call a 5,000-foot (1,524-metre) film “complete” even if the surviving copy is 4,960 feet, or 1,512 metres, long. If they do not worry too much about it, it is because they are aware of all the alterations that may have affected negatives and projection copies even before the film’s release: manually assemblage of the prints, censors’ cuts, footage counts rounded to whole reels...
Narrative incompleteness
The only other numerical count applied to an original film element is related to the splices detected on the material, as some of them may indicate that the print or negative suffered a break at some point, and had to be repaired (with the probable loss of one or more frames). The five-reel print is indeed qualified as incomplete if one reel is missing, but also when the absence of a section, however short, affects the comprehension or flow of the events registered on film. Should the brief shot of the rocket in the eye of the moon be missing from a copy of A Trip to the Moon, the print would certainly not be called complete (and it would be hard to justify its exhibition in this form), even though the shot’s length is less than 6 metres, or 20 feet, of the total. To be “complete” in narrative terms, a nitrate print should also be free of spurious elements, such as images or title cards unrelated to the original work.
This proviso highlights a major dilemma in film preservation, as it is well known that film exhibitors of the early years had total freedom to add, subtract, interpolate, and substitute titles and shots as they pleased, often taking pieces of films and inserting them in other prints for a variety of reasons. As creative works expressing the intention of their makers, these edited films are very much incomplete and are not authentic; nevertheless, they may be coherent and authentic “complete” works in another sense, in that they represent the intentions of someone other than the director or the producers. We have no right to ignore, let alone suppress, the evidence of their decisions. These films should be preserved – therefore also seen, if so desired – exactly as they have been found. Not doing so would be equal to distorting or obliterating a piece of history.
A great advantage of preserving and making accessible a silent film in its original state is that it satisfies all at once the three principles of film restoration, as outlined by Eileen Bowser – a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art – in her short but fundamental essay Some Principles of Film Restoration (1990): reversibility, non-alteration and documentation (see the addendum fr further details on Bowser’s principles).
Those principles also apply to film reconstruction projects, in which the creation of a new archival element implies some curatorial licence. The least that can be done is to insert a marker of some kind – preferably the full name of the institution and a date – at the margins of the image, to indicate that this section of the film does not belong to the source material. The same rule should also apply when missing footage is highlighted.
