Curing these maladies is a delicate task, with a set of tools and potions to match. De Sanctis was armed with Q-tips, glue, isopropyl alcohol, lemon oil, and eucalyptus oil (handy for removing any adhesive residue from the surface of a film); a separate room, devoted to slowing or reversing chemical deterioration, gave me an odd sense of having wandered into a witch’s kitchen. Little rolls of film, no bigger than hockey pucks, sat inside a large glass pot, under a lid, together with silica gel. A label on the front read “Desiccation treatment.” Different threats—damp, humidity, heat, old age, and so on—call for different defenses, and another pot was labelled “Softening treatment (camphor).” I was frankly disappointed not to come across a brain in a jar.
After the gluing, the taping, and the chemistry lesson, it was time for the washing—or, to be exact, for an introduction to the BSF Hydra. This is a magnificent beast, made by a British company, Cinetech, and its job is to clean film. To the movie-maddened eye, it resembles one of those machines that you see in the background of a Bond film, at the core of a villain’s lair, being operated by a random scientist in a white coat. (Needless to say, the poor sap can expect to be vaporized, thanks to 007, in a giant fireball.) The cleaning is done with a noncombustible solvent, plus a complex array of capstans, rollers, and “soft nap Dacron buffers,” zipping through as much as a hundred feet of film per minute. At L’Immagine Ritrovata, the Hydra also represents a border: the line at which the care of film as physical stuff, by hand, approaches its end. Beyond lies further alchemy, as film is transmuted into digital form.
The first of the digital chores is scanning. Enter a room suffused with dark-blue luminescence, as if you were diving in a grotto, and you are greeted by the Arriscan, another benevolent monster, which emits regular pulses of light. Up to five frames per second can be scanned, and there is an exciting option called “wetgate,” which sounds like a scandal involving a congressman in a hot tub. In fact, as Cenciarelli explained to me, it has a salutary effect: “The emulsion is so scratched, and the lines are so deep, that basically it’s scanned very slowly under liquid that fills in those wrinkles, like wrinkles on human skin.” Botox for movies!
Next up is comparison (which entails a frame-by-frame analysis of the sources, in low-resolution digital files), followed by digital cleaning and retouching. The latter, in place of solvents and soft buffers, deploys costly software programs that sound like cheap perfumes—Phoenix, Diamant, and “Revival by Blackmagic.” Still to come: 2K and 4K color correction, mastering, subtitling, sound restoration, and a glass of sweet wine to go with your dessert. And don’t forget the Arrilasers, machines that allow digital images to be recorded onto 35-mm. film, thus allowing you, in style, to come full circle.
Of all these stages in the process, color correction is the one most likely to baffle the lay intruder—the untutored innocent who doesn’t understand, say, what the hell colors have to do with a black-and-white movie, and why they may need correcting. The truth is that subtleties of tonal range, not least brightness and contrast, can be adjusted by the corrector-in-chief. At the laboratory, I watched Simone Castelli, who sat at a wide console, facing a screen on which appeared a scene from “Tout Ça Ne Vaut Pas l’Amour” (1931), a comedy directed by Jacques Tourneur. (Eleven years later, in Hollywood, he made “Cat People.” Quite a jump.) In the center of the console were three domed knobs; as Castelli turned these, ever so gently, with the finesse of a safecracker, the impact of the images was altered. The black of a man’s jacket grew funereally dark. This brief modification was enough to ruffle the conscience of a film critic. When we praise a movie for being visually rich and, for good measure, savor that richness for its deliberate emotional intent, are we doing anything more than reacting to a tweak? What does it say about the force of a film that it can literally be dialled up and down? As Cenciarelli said of the restorative process, “After all those years, there are so many philosophical bells that ring.”
For expert advice on these niceties, I assumed, no authority would be of greater assistance than the director of the film that is being restored, if he or she is still alive. Wrong. Céline Pozzi, a manager at L’Immagine Ritrovata, laughed at my naïveté. Directors, apparently, can be a problem. “For example, Wong Kar-wai. He had this special neon look on his films, and he wanted to change it and get away from that cold light,” Pozzi told me. “He said, ‘I’m not the person I was at the time. I’ve changed. I have the right to change the film.’ ” Shades of Chaplin in 1942. All the more reason, Pozzi added, to get a movie scanned: “Preservation is always the base of everything. Then you can have discussions. If you are clear in your aim about the restoration, that’s the most important thing.”
One person who has pondered these conundrums as much as anybody is Ross Lipman, who was the senior film preservationist at the U.C.L.A. Film & Television Archive for seventeen years. He now runs his own company, Corpus Fluxus, and has recently written a book, “The Archival Impermanence Project,” about the methods and the implications of restoring film. The title may have the tang of a prog-rock album, but the book is witty, minutely detailed, and braced by common sense—a welcome gift in an often obsessive environment. The funniest bit is a footnote, in which Lipman directs us to a tiny corner of professional dissent. “At a fundamental level, even the light passing through the projectors has changed, as modern 35mm projectors use xenon bulbs with different characteristics than traditional carbon arcs,” he writes. “Carbon arc enthusiasts in fact represent a highly specialized subgroup within the extended archival film community.” I like to think of fights breaking out in projection booths as rival gangs, the Xenons and the Arcs, come to bitter blows.
Cartoon by Joline Jourdain
The moral of these quarrels is that the past really is another country, and that we can never live there. At best, we can pay a courtesy call. That is why, if you have any interest in the collision of old and new, in any field of endeavor—architecture, archeology, sexuality, table manners—I recommend “The Gray Zone,” a particular chapter of Lipman’s book. He defines the zone as “that uncharted territory where a preservationist needs to make decisions when there is no definitive guide left by the filmmakers.” In such circumstances, he adds, authenticity is impossible. He prefers to ask if a restoration is faithful.
