The Ethics of Film Restoration - Text 3
There is one area where film preservation must surrender to the status quo: in the photographic domain, print generation cannot be reverted (there is no way to make a 16mm print of fifth generation look as good as a first-generation copy).
From restoring to recreating: the cult of “completeness”
Yet, this more “passive” approach to film restoration put forward by Bowser doesn’t enjoy a consensus, and for a long time, art historians have dwelled upon the respective merits of conservative and integrative restoration. Judging by some of its most celebrated deeds, film preservation had aggressively pursued the integrative approach well before digital technology entered the debate. Many attempts have been made in the preservation of silent films to seek a compromise between “integration”, “conservation”, and the pleasure of viewing.
There is always an interesting reason for the incomplete status of archival prints, and their material evidence is in itself a product of history. The need to keep and preserve these sources of knowledge in unaltered form – which, in curatorial terms, is the only sound choice – should not discourage their application in reconstruction projects, as long as their rationale is explained with clarity and honesty.
Metropolis 2010 restoration
This kind of approach fully justifies the reconstruction work done on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis over many years, which was dramatically enriched by the discovery of a 16mm reduction copy at the Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken in Buenos Aires; the almost complete film was shown at the 2010 Berlin Film Festival under the auspices of the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation. There was no way to bridge the gap between the visual quality of the previous versions and that of the very mediocre 16mm print found in Argentina. Given the legendary status of the film, it didn’t really matter, but digital technicians did their best to ease the transitions from one film generation to the other as smoothly as they could, without falsifying the difference between the many archival sources of this new Metropolis restoration.
