This book was originally published in 2009 as an attempt to lay the foundations for a new approach to film archival theory and practice. While addressing the questions “what is film?” and, by analogy, “what is film heritage?” in the technological and cultural shift to digital, I moved away from the unproductive opposition analog versus digital and proposed to look at film's nature from the perspective of transition. Considering that film as a medium had never existed in one distinctive form, I argued that its transitional character became even more evident because of the digital turn. Film archivists and curators have always made choices about what to preserve, what and how to restore, and what and how to exhibit, based on different interpretations and conceptualizations of film's nature and ways of approaching film archival practices. By analyzing the cultural, aesthetic, economic, and social factors behind these choices, we come to recognize different frameworks that have informed the archival practice (in a more or less conscious way). And by recognizing these frameworks, it is possible to start defining a theory of that practice.

Since its first publication, the book was reprinted with minor adjustments in 2011 and was made available online as an open-access resource. It has been regularly taught in the MA program Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image at the University of Amsterdam and has been adopted by several academic courses focusing on film archiving and preservation around the world. In many ways, with this book I have accomplished one of the main goals I had set for myself ten years ago: to provide guidance to researchers, professionals, and students alike in the relatively young discipline of film heritage studies.

Despite being a few years further along in the transition from analog to digital, I still consider From Grain to Pixel a valuable and topical tool for a number of reasons. Firstly, it still offers an accurate description of the development of film archival practice over the last decades (particularly in Chapter One and in the case studies in Chapter Four). Furthermore, it captures a snapshot of a specific moment in the transition to digital, namely the decade that saw new digital tools slowly emerge as sporadic experiments at the beginning of the 1990s, and then become regularly adopted, from 2005 onward.