Why Do Films Need to Be Restored?

Abstract

Film restoration is a controversial practice. And it isn’t. In May 2010, the British national newspaper the Daily Mail carried a report of the broadcast of an archive-based historical TV documentary series on the Second World War, claiming that ‘Germans have been able to watch the war that changed their world forever in full colour’, and that ‘film footage and photographs restored and colourised using the very latest technology … allow people now to see the war as people then did’.1 A year earlier and in a similar vein, another press report stated that recently discovered amateur film of Churchill and Eisenhower would be ‘transformed into high definition footage using a state-of-the-art digital film format.’2 In both cases, the archival footage being repurposed for contemporary access was processed in such a way as to add significant image information that was not captured at the original point of photography. Nowhere was it implied that this practice was curatorially problematic or ethically debatable as a general rule: it was mentioned towards the end of the former article that the producers of Der Krieg had refrained from colourising footage of Holocaust atrocities on the grounds that doing so would have been ‘tasteless’,3 but the tone of the article was that in overall terms, the practice enhances the film’s perceived authenticity as opposed to compromising it.KeywordsColour InformationRestoration ProjectRestoration ActivityRestoration WorkCopying ProcessThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.