From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition (review)

The rapidly encroaching shift to digital in motion picture production, archiving, and projection increasingly inspires rhetoric focused on either the overwhelming problems that technological changes create or the magnificent opportunities they provide. From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition, Giovanna Fossati's cool-headed study of films and how we watch and take care of them at this moment in technological history, manages to balance these reactions. An archival perspective on the film-to-digital transition has thus far largely been tackled in journal and technical magazine articles, blog posts, and symposia, but with the exception of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences report The Digital Dilemma, ¹ this is the first book-length consideration of the topic. It is a thorough and perceptive examination that leaves few theoretical and practical stones unturned. Fossati endeavors early and often to remind her reader that technology changes rapidly enough to require a constant revision of the discussion points addressed here. The nexus of the transitional period under examination is the decade preceding the book's 2009 publication date, and a year out, it does not yet feel dated, though one can imagine that reading it ten years from now would be a different experience.

From Grain to Pixel's relatively spare and slightly perplexing table of contents becomes more useful once the book's structure has been explained, and luckily this happens in the first pages. The book is organized into four chapters that are split between two parts. Part 1 offers a well-studied discussion of how the current transition to digital is shaping the techniques used both in film production and in archiving and enumerates parallels in the two worlds. Within Part 1, chapter 1 looks at the practical impact this transition is having on how we create and use motion pictures, while chapter 2 gives an overview of some theoretical perspectives that the reader can use to help understand the transition and how it affects the way we view film (literally and figuratively). Part 2 takes a deeper look at the ideas explored in Part 1 by considering real-world examples of archives and restorers grappling with the digital transition. The first chapter of Part 2, chapter 3, associates specific archives and restoration labs with frameworks and concepts introduced in the first half of the book by analyzing each institution's general approach to dealing with archival film. Chapter 4 uses restoration case studies to break down the ethical, artistic, and technological decisions made by these institutions. This last section is the most concrete and specific but continues to make use of the theoretical work introduced in chapter 2.

Fossati begins by looking at how the current digital mania might affect the day-to-day and larger choices made in film archives. She illustrates how, historically and currently, archival practice is influenced by, parallels, and diverges from film production and post-production practice. Developments in digital technology may first affect the way new motion pictures are made and presented, but the influence quickly trickles down to the archives. For example, advances in digital effects and the strong trend toward the use of digital intermediates in feature film postproduction have facilitated the development of tools that allow restorers of older films to repair the ravages of time and neglect to a degree that was barely imaginable in an analog past. An excellent overview of the digital restoration process provides the necessary background to understand the case studies described later on. Though issues surrounding digital restoration increasingly dominate the conversation as the book progresses, the discussion of various modes of digital access in chapter 1 will be more relevant to staff of institutions holding smaller film collections, as they may find this to be the area where digital technology most affects their work, at least for the moment.

Chapter 2 explores how film and new media theory can be used to shape thinking about motion pictures in the...