From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition by Giovanna Fossati, and: Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation by Caroline Frick, and: The Past is a Moving Picture: Preserving the Twentieth Century on Film by Jana Jones (review)

There is little doubt that the irreversible shift toward digital film production, distribution, and exhibition has had a huge impact on the collecting, restoration, and preservation practices of film archives. Three recent books take on the important task of historicizing and theorizing the film archive and make significant contributions to debates regarding the future of film, both as an object of study and as a collected artifact.

Giovanna Fossati’s From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition directly tackles the repercussions of digital technology on film archiving at a time when moving image production, and consequently archiving, straddles both film and digital technologies. The book is divided into two parts with the first half taking on the challenge of theorizing archival film while the second theorizes archival practice. Fossati, head curator at the Nederlands Filmmuseum, now known as EYE Filmmuseum, is well positioned for the task.

One of Fossati’s key aims is to set out a new theorization of archival practice. As a starting point in her first chapter she outlines digital film production practices from digital editing to CGI that have had repercussions on film preservation. She follows this with a very practical description of what is involved in the digital restoration of a film born film. Once the newly restored digital film is available for viewing, Fossati addresses issues of access and exhibition. In the age of the Internet, easy accessibility to digital content is often considered the obvious course, but Fossati advocates a middle ground, combining the archive’s role in contextualizing work or what she calls the “chaperone role” (96) alongside increased access to material on-line.

In the second chapter, Fossati considers a key question currently debated in film studies: the ontological status of film and specifically if a digital film is a film. As a means of engaging with this topic, she suggests four frameworks from which to consider film ontology within the context of what she calls “the archival life of film.” (23) These frameworks are: the “film as original” (158-160) which considers keeping the film’s original artifacts for as long as possible as the archive’s key role and is bound to the idea of the film as an authentic artifact; the “film as art” framework (165) relies on the argument that film as an art form is tied to its medium specificity and underpinned by auteurism; the “film as dispositif” (170-171) is primarily concerned with film exhibition and the importance of how films are viewed; and finally, the “film as state of the art” (178-179) pushes the limits of technology to introduce new ideas into moving images Fossati adds to these four frameworks a number of concepts that are important to the transition of film to digital including: convergence/divergence, which captures the push of media merging into one form and conversely the pulling apart into multiple media forms; remediation, referring to the repurposing of archival material; and simulation, based on the idea of digital technologies replicating analog media.

In the second half of the book, “Theorizing (Archival) Practice” Fossati sets out to apply her theoretical frameworks through the analysis of how specific archives and institutions adhere to the four models she has outlined. Thus, the Danish Film Institute demonstrates the “film as original” position, the Anthology film Archives is representative of “film as art” stance, the Nederlands Filmmuseum displays the “film as dispositif” and finally, Sony Pictures Entertainment provides evidence of the “film as a state of the art.” These frameworks are then conjoined with the aforementioned concepts (simulation, remediation, convergence/divergence...