The Ethics of Film Restoration - Text 2
Preserving all the individual components of a film reconstruction in their unaltered form and internal sequence guarantees at least that everybody in the future – curators, scholars, technicians, as well as the general public – can extrapolate individual pieces of the puzzle and deconstruct or reconstruct it in its reproductions (the reversibility principle) without erasing the original evidence (the non-alteration principle). In this sense, the most passive approach to film preservation – not as paradoxical as it seems – is the best guarantee of its longevity. Film restorations come and go. With or without them, the original structure of the film object (and, yes, its visual content, should the work be digitally born) must be left unchanged.
Optical incompleteness
New complications arise as soon as the above principle is applied to the print to be preserved from the perspective of its optical appearance. The copy in our possession may not be missing any footage and yet be incomplete in a different sense: degraded emulsion, cropped frame, lack of original tinting or toning, exacerbated contrast, loss of sharpness... The body of the film has been physically damaged, or it has been photographically reduced to a ghost of itself. These “qualitative” lacunae are no less significant than the missing footage, as they profoundly affect our rational and emotional response to the film. They are also painful to watch, as we are mourning their withered or devastated beauty, rather than their sheer absence.
Observing a decayed image on the big screen is harder to forget than a missing shot, sequence, or reel.
