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The Moving Image 5.1 (2005) 156-159


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Preserve Then Show. Edited by Dan Nissen, Lisbeth Richter Larsen, Thomas C. Christensen, and Jesper Stub Johnsen. Danish Film Institute, 2002.

Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française, purportedly once said, "to show is to preserve." Langlois's statement stands in opposition to the basic principles held by most trained archivists, who tend to adhere to the mantra of this book's title, "preserve, then show." But, who is correct, the "preservationists" or the "showmen"? Is a motion picture really preserved if it is never shown? And if shown, does that mean it can still be preserved? Preserve Then Show does not answer this question, but presents seventeen papers from a seminar held in November 2001 at the Danish Film Institute to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Denmark's Film Museum. The book is divided into four approaches to the archival moving image world, philosophy, preservation, restoration, and presentation, and in what follows, I offer a sketch of some of the key essays in this extensive collection.


Click for larger view		 Figure 1

The questions raised throughout this book ask us to ponder the nature of the film object. What constitutes "the film"? What should be saved, the art or the object? How do we keep the art and object functional over time? How do we return the artistry to the object? How do we make the art and the object available to the public? While the book's title, then, offers a seemingly polar view, the collection of essays actually offers a more holistic approach.

The first section entitled "Philosophy" was the most thought-provoking and most absorbing part of the book. Paolo Cherchi Usai's essay "Film as an Art Object" makes comparisons between film and one-of-a-kind museum pieces such as painting and sculpture. Cherchi Usai's driving point is that film archives do not treat their holdings with the same care and respect that museums do their objects. This is certainly true, and Cherchi Usai illustrates his argument with examples familiar to every film archivist: damage due to improper storage, handling, shipping, and projection. Motion picture prints are not packed and shipped like precious museum objects, and very few projectionists have been trained in archival procedures. In the ideal museum world, the actual museum objects are never touched by ungloved, untrained hands, and they are certainly never altered with scissors or marking pens, as films can be in the instances of adding redundant cue marks or resplicing for platter projection.

Film archives are moving closer to museum standards and practices. Why the gap? Cherchi Usai blames tradition and ignorance but fails to flesh out his analogy in the area of physical property. Is a ten-reel, 35mm print equivalent to a single museum artifact or to ten? Does each film frame constitute a museum object, since each frame can be viewed as a different and distinct photograph? What about the negative or the fine grain? Of course these distinctions may seem ridiculous, especially considering film's status as a commercial, [End Page 156] mass-produced piece of plastic available in large numbers, and assumed to be years from extinction. Here, cost and impracticality become serious issues. If film archives are to become "museum quality," they need to continue to advance in conservation technology as well as in restoration technology. This would mean the development of costly but essential "museum quality" equipment, such as archival projectors and shipping cases.

The book's second section, "Preservation," begins with an essay by the Image Permanence Institute's Jean-Louis Bigourdan entitled "Film Storage Studies Recent Findings." Bigourdan's study was part of a three-year research project to further clarify the importance of environmental conditions in relation to the physical stability of 35mm motion picture film. This essay reaffirms the importance of cold storage with low humidity for optimum film-base stability, while specifying the extent of damage incurred by frequent removal and return as opposed to uninterrupted cold storage. Bigourdan concludes that there is no evidence that deterioration is accelerated...

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