The Ethics of Film Restoration - Text 5
Had this version been presented as a variation on a Méliès theme – another film, in line with the fifth section in Eileen Bowser’s charter of film preservation – its appearance would not have raised any controversy. It would have been indexed as Le voyage dans la lune (2011), a free adaptation from the 1902 film by Georges Méliès. The public would have enjoyed it anyway, just as it does the many other versions available in digital formats. But if described this way, the remake would have hardly warranted its phenomenal budget, and it would probably not have earned a premiere at Cannes, as it is neither a restoration nor a preservation project, let alone a reconstruction. Another word, “recreation”, is a more appropriate definition of the 2011 video: a plagiarized second-generation copy of A Trip to the Moon with non-Méliès hand-colouring, digitally improved and applied to sections of black and white film stock. The most extraordinary aspect of this process is that film preservation is here largely performed as an art of camouflage: its success is measured by the viewer’s ignorance of how it was achieved.
An organic process inherent to cinema?
What happened to A Trip to the Moon is not very different from what has occurred to many other silent films, except for the fanfare that surrounded the pseudo-Méliès operation. Media outlets are well accustomed to altering the chromatic balance, framing, and projection speed of documentary and newsreel footage borrowed from collecting institutions in order to make it look more appealing to their audiences, as seen in Apocalypse: Verdun (Isabelle Clarke and Daniel Costelle, 2016).