2nd Filmmuseum Biennale: Digital Techologies Meet Early Cinema

Alongside the two renowned annual festivals of film restoration in Bologna and Pordenone, Italy, the Filmmuseum in Amsterdam has established its own biennial festival, the Biennale. Drawing wide public and international attention in its second edition, the festival is beginning to reveal its specialty as recent restorations, newly rediscovered films and the accompaniment of silent films with contemporary music scores. The result was a most ambitious program comprising 35 films, almost all rediscovered film jewels, screened over 5 days and a sequence of presentations and discussion forums focusing on specific restoration issues such as digital restoration. This ambition and courage was to be expected, since the Netherlands Filmmuseum is well known for its openness to experiments with new (and digital) technologies and alternative treatments of the aesthetics and ethics of film preservation and presentation. In the late 1980s it was one of the first archives to experiment with the duplication of tinted, toned and stenciled early films on color stock, and also stood out with its famous "Bits & Pieces Collection" (compilations of remarkable early film fragments), as well as its experimental musical accompaniments to "silent" films.

One of the most memorable events of the 2005 Biennale was the screening of one of the many lost silent Hollywood films, a worthy topic as more than 80% of the nitrate film heritage made between 1895 and the mid-1950s is considered "lost." This discovery was Beyond the Rocks, a melodramatic star vehicle made by Sam Wood (U.S.A.) in 1922. The film features Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson, two of the most celebrated stars of the time, in their only film together. The six reels of the Dutch release of Beyond the Rocks were discovered in the conservation department of the Netherlands Filmmuseum between 2000 and 2004 during the registration work of a recently acquired private collection of about 2,000 rusty film cans. The tinted 35mm nitrate positive print was in relatively good condition, with some parts of greater damage and chemical decomposition (still visible in the restored copy), which coincidentally affected the most emotionally intense and dramatic scenes of the film. Because of the international interest in this remarkable film, extra funds for the restoration process became available, and the Filmmuseum found itself in the luxurious position of being able to restore a feature-length film digitally. To dispel the common misconception of digital restoration as a substitution process, curator Giovanna Fossati, responsible for the restoration of Beyond the Rocks and for digital restoration technologies within the conservation department, pointed out that for an archive, digital technology complements the photochemical duplication process but in no way replaces it. One reason for this is that digital technologies still change too quickly and do not yet offer reliable tools for archives to transfer their entire collection to digital formats for preservation. So far to date, good old celluloid is still the most reliable material for preserving film heritage under the best conditions.

Nonetheless, Fossati was very positive about the various new possibilities that digital restoration technologies offer for active film restoration. She showed some "before" and "after" examples from Beyond the Rocks and demonstrated the values of image manipulation using Diamant software (developed by HS-Art Graz in collaboration with the Filmmuseum; see <www.hs-art.com/>). Next to de-flickering, stabilization of the image and dust removal, digital intervention includes interpolation—one example of which is the restoration of an almost completely damaged frame by copying image fragments from the neighboring frames. The newly created frame is similar to the original, but has not existed before, and as a consequence raises ethical issues. On the one hand, there are more orthodox and "safe" approaches that avoid any elaborate image manipulation, but on the other hand, the experiment-friendly approaches resonate with the Filmmuseum's innovative spirit.

The addition of a musical score to Beyond the Rocks created technical, ethical and aesthetic problems for the restoration process. In order to duplicate a print for cinema distribution, the soundstripe...