The Material History of a Nitrate Film, Part 2: Preservation - Text 5
Producers of “digital restoration” projects are very keen to do the scanning work from original elements (even when they have already been copied onto new photochemical elements, or have not yet been preserved) because they belong to an earlier printing generation, thus ensuring a more accurate reproduction of the source image (if the nitrate material has not started to decompose). This, however, does not fulfil the minimum requirements of film preservation (as detailed in the part on the ethics of restoration), particularly if the source is decaying and no photochemical duplicate has been made. Digital scanning from unpreserved nitrate can be of great help in film preservation if its final outcome is a new set of negative and positive film elements; otherwise, this approach only satisfies the needs for immediate access, to the detriment of the film’s availability in the long term. The original material may never be preserved at all, in the belief that a set of digital files is enough to guarantee its permanence for posterity.
And what about dyes?
So far, we have deliberately ignored the fact that some of the prints in the genealogical tree of Diagram 1 were tinted, toned, stencilled, or hand-coloured. Archives and museums have ignored it, too, for many years, as they did not have the money or the technology required to imitate their colours with sufficient accuracy. Film curators reached the conclusion that reproducing silent films in black and white, regardless of their chromatic palette, was better than nothing. Many of the nitrate prints they copied have vanished for ever. Much as we regret the permanent loss of their often beautiful colours, we must be grateful to all those who preserved so many films to the best of their ability under such difficult circumstances. The following images, taken from a nitrate positive and from a black and white duplicate, offer ample evidence of how heavy was the compromise they had to accept, and of how much has become invisible in thousands of titles now surviving as monochrome shadows of what they once were.
