Digital Super 8mm: Evaluating the Contribution of Digital Technologies to Film Archives in Latin America

This article evaluates the contribution of digital technologies to the accessibility and preservation of Latin American film heritage. More precisely, it focuses on Uruguay and uses for its case study the recent digitization of two short films made during the years of the last Uruguayan dictatorship (1973–85) to discuss the prospects for the archives' application of digital technologies.

The main archives and museums in Europe and the United States have steadily adopted digital technologies for providing access to their archival collections, despite some resistance. Film archivists still prefer to preserve films on film because, among others, digital technologies run the risk of quick obsolescence, and large-scale digitization has many associated high costs.¹ In Latin America, there is also widespread access to digital copies of films. In Chile, for example, both the Cineteca de la Universidad de Chile and the Cineteca Nacional de Chile have made available digital access copies of Chilean cinema on their websites.² An important collection of 1,501 Brazilian films is now available on YouTube through an initiative called Cinemateca Popular Brasileira.³ Cineteca Nacional de Mexico has taken a different approach and organized a digital video collection called Videoteca Digital "Carlos Monsiváis," where national and international productions can be watched on any of twenty-one on-site access points.⁴ Online availability might seem advanced, but a closer analysis of both the ways in which most of these copies have been made and the resulting quality shows that the possibility of using digital technologies in Latin America is anything but straightforward.

This article stems from the successful digitization of El honguito feliz (The happy little mushroom, CINECO, 1976) and 1^o de mayo de 1983 (May Day, Grupo Hacedor, 1983), part of a project carried out by the authors and Simone Venturi, thanks to the support of our institutions: Università degli Studi di Udine (Italy), Universidad Católica del Uruguay (Uruguay), and the University of St. Andrews (Scotland). Although this project had a positive outcome and has provided a stepping-stone to the study of Uruguay's recent past from a different perspective, it also made evident that certain digital technologies are not easily accessible everywhere and that their incorporation to improve the poor condition of film preservation and accessibility in Latin America is limited. In fact, most of the digital access copies available have been made utilizing telecine, a video recording process that, depending on the output, can generate good-quality magnetic or digital copies for access but that does not provide information suitable for restoration or long-term preservation. However, most of the digital copies available today have not been made from the film print. Rather, it is more often that digital copies have been made from the transfers that had first recorded the film onto analog videotape. Thus the digital copy is a copy of the magnetic version, not of the film print itself. This sequence of transfers generates what we will call palimpsestic digital copies, because it is possible to see the different layers (palimpsests) of material conversion. The concept has been used in connection with film preservation before. Giorgio Bertellini has discussed palimpsests in referring to the modifications made to the text of the film due to restoration. His major case study is the film Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926) and the several different versions that were made of it over time.⁵ In contrast, we propose this term focusing on the materiality of films and the different layers generated by subsequent technological transfers. In a palimpsestic digital copy, as we define it, the vertical scratches caused by the film projector would be as visible as the horizontal marks originating from the interlaced video image. Likewise, digital copies with many visible pixels can testify to a series of compressions intended to decrease the file size to facilitate online uploading or saving on storage devices. These copies, which can be practical for research and provide a short-term solution to access, are not useful for preservation...