In this book I focused on film restoration and presentation practices of restored films. At the time of researching and writing (2007-2009), I felt that the restoration practice was still too little understood by those who were not directly involved and too little “explained” by those who were. The first step in stimulating a renewed dialogue on archival practice was to make visible some of the possibilities and choices made by film restorers based on their interpretation of film and their use of technology. At the time, my sole focus was on film, more specifically, recognizable film titles (rather than other film-related objects and other archival activities) as I felt this was the most effective way to start.

We are further along in the process now, and I believe the time has come to shift the focus to a broader and more integral view on film heritage. I feel that film restoration and presentation, the most visible activities within film archival practice, cannot be isolated from the rest of the work concerning film heritage. As we move ahead, we need to search for a broader territory and theorization that will allow us to analyze, discuss, and influence film heritage practice in a more comprehensive way. The horizon needs to be expanded to include, in addition to restoration and presentation, acquisition, selection, digitization, access, innovative projects for data mining, and online and on-site forms of presentation. Moreover, in terms of objects and practices, film heritage should be considered as a comprehensive corpus that includes film-related collections, such as posters, movie theaters, or historical devices, as well as what can be broadly defined as “intangible heritage,” such as cinema-going practices and experiences or the knowledge of obsolete (post-) production practices, to name but a few examples.

A case in point is the renewed interest in the media apparatus, focusing on the artifacts as well as their related practices, and the inclusion of media archaeology as an integral part of media studies’ programs. Scholars such as Erkki Huhtamo, Jussi Parikka, Wanda Strauven, Benoît Turquety, Andreas Fickers, Annie van den Oever, Alexandra Schneider, and Thomas Elsaesser, among others, have led the way to new innovative research that bridges theory and archival practice and moves away from traditional film-centered approaches.

Ten years on in the transition from analog to digital, the film archival field is still in search of a balance between digital technology, which, while becoming ever more diffused is yet to be fully standardized, and photochemical means and services, which are growing increasingly scarce but are often still part of restoration and presentation workflows. Following the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) theory, the methodological approach to this chapter still offers a valid method to look at the current situation in the film archival field. Its key concepts of “relevant social groups,” “technological frame,” and “interpretive flexibility,” as described in the following sections, will once more help analyze the field and its changing relationship with tools, practices, and (analog, digital, and hybrid) artifacts, namely films.

Despite the new dynamics in the field after the digital rollout, the relevant social groups in the last decade have remained the same and, as we will see in the updates, the film archives and (most of) the laboratories that were previously discussed are still among the major players. As reported in Chapter One, after the digital rollout many laboratories have gone out of business. As for the three laboratories discussed in the earlier editions of From Grain to Pixel, one has indeed ceased its operation while the other two have managed to adapt and survive. Interestingly enough, those are the ones that still offer a full range of (analog, digital, and hybrid) film restoration services.

While the “technological frame” is progressively changing, it still follows the same cycle of stabilization and closure in which the established analog film artifact is gradually being replaced (in a number of practices such as restoration and projection) by the new digital film artifact. As argued a decade ago, film, being a complex technological artifact, is still the site of “interpretive flexibility,” and as such is described differently by different relevant social groups (from filmmakers and archivists to film producers and scholars) as each group attaches a different meaning to it.

In this chapter, brief updates have been added to the original sections describing the film archives and film laboratory. The updates are mainly based on recent interviews that have been carried out with the same people (e.g. curators, heads of archives, and laboratory professionals) that were interviewed for the 2009 edition, or with their replacements.

In the first part of this book I discuss the transition from analog to digital technology, firstly from the perspective of film (archival) practice and, secondly, from that of film and new media theory. Here I also introduce a new theorization of archival practice.

In Chapter One I provide a snapshot of some of the most relevant changes in film production and film archival practice that are occurring at this time of transition from analog to digital technology. Such a snapshot will show how the combination of the new digital tools and the well-established analog ones has led to a high level of hybridization in technology and practices, both in film production and in film archiving. In this chapter some of the tensions and questions regarding the nature of film will start to take shape through the debates around the new technology, the new tools and, especially, their application in everyday practice.

In Chapter Two I focus on the debates around the nature of film by looking at how film and new media theories are reflecting on this transitional moment and, in particular, how theoretical studies are addressing the question around film ontology in view of the digital. Here I identify relevant frameworks and concepts as a basis for a new theorization of film archival practice. Such frameworks and concepts can serve as tools to analyze the transition from analog to digital in current film archival practice. This analysis will be carried out in the second part of this work where the interplay between practice and theory will be further developed.

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.

Before moving to a concluding note, I will briefly sketch some of the steps that have brought us here.

My investigation of the changes occurring in film technology and practice and their influence on film archives has highlighted that archives are undergoing radical changes in their practices. This is due to the many technological, social and cultural transformations related to the transition to digital and, since such changes are ongoing and it is not clear yet where they will lead, archives have a unique chance to rethink their role and tasks in medias res.

The analysis of the interplay between film archival practice and film and (new) media theory has led me to identify a number of theoretical frameworks and concepts as relevant tools for both archivists and scholars to rethink their roles and to reshape the practice on a theoretical basis. Central to the theoretical discourse is the ontological question around film. For the purposes of defining those debates most relevant for the film archival practice, I have chosen to approach the existing lines of thought in film and new media theory by highlighting a tension between an indexical approach to photographic reproduction (the realistic approach) and an approach that places film's nature in movement or performance (the mind/film approach). Similarly, the discourse within the film archival field seems to move within the tension between the film as a material artifact and film as a conceptual artifact. In an oversimplification of these tensions, one could say that realism and material artifact are at one extreme and mind/film and conceptual artifact at the other, and that the latter does not recognize an ontological change from analog to digital while the former does. In fact, these extremes create an opposition that is only worthy of noticing because they actually frame a middle ground for reflection and dialogue. This middle ground is the conceptual basis and a starting point for the theorization of archival practice I propose. Within this discursive framing I have defined four relevant theoretical frameworks, i.e. “film as original,” “film as art,” “film as dispositif,” and “film as state of the art,” which function as the grid upon which a theorization of archival practice can be built.

This chapter focuses on the transition and changes in the practice of film production and film archiving. For the updates to this chapter, which are added to the earlier edition following each topic, I chose to be brief and concise in highlighting the changes that have most impacted current practices. In the first part, focusing on the consequences of digitization in current film production and distribution, I look at the main changes and new trends, addressing in particular those aspects that have directly influenced film archiving. In the second part, I offer a detailed recount of how archival practice has changed in the past ten years, partly as a consequence of the changes in production and distribution, and partly due to the mastering of practices and improvement of techniques that were still somewhat experimental a decade ago.

As argued in the earlier edition, the interplay between film production and archival practice is still paramount — not only for restoration and exhibition practices but also, and even more so, for all born-digital films which are made following the new technological and infrastructural practices and preserved by film archives.

Ten years ago, I pointed out the high degree of hybridity in technology and practice. But can we still talk of a vastly hybrid practice today? I think we can. While some changes have been quite dramatic, in particular in digital cinematography and digital distribution and exhibition, and have greatly reduced the use of analog film in today's practice, I argue that the practice is still hybrid as it relies on a long tradition and expertise in analog filmmaking. Indeed, even for those new films or film restorations in which the entire workflow from shooting (in the case of new films) and digitization (in the case of archival films) to exhibition is fully digital, the entire workflow still relies on tools and expertise that were typical of the analog film past.

As mentioned in the new introduction to this revised volume, I maintain that the dynamics illustrated in the snapshot taken a decade ago for the first edition of this book are still at work in current practice and are still shaping the workflows which are being adopted by filmmakers, producers, post-production technicians, and distributors as well as by film archivists, restorers, and laboratories specialized in film restoration today.

In the first part of this study I have discussed the most recent changes in film (archival) practice and in film theory in this time of transition and I have proposed theoretical frameworks and concepts as a basis for a new theorization of film archival practice.

In the second part, by measuring the proposed conceptual tools against a number of case studies from the current film archival field, I will show how they allow deeper dynamics and logics, between the social groups involved and, especially, between theory and practice, to be made visible.

In Chapter Three I focus on the different approaches to film archival practice of a number of relevant social players, such as film archives, laboratories and funding entities. The frameworks offer a tool for addressing different film archival policies, whereas the concepts are useful in assessing film laboratory practices. In Chapter Four, by means of a comparative analysis between a number of relevant film restoration case studies, the power of the proposed new analytical tools emerges in the analysis of everyday film archival practice. I will also show how these tools reflect the transitional nature of film.

The case studies discussed in this chapter are relevant for a number of reasons. As historical cases, they reflect on the restoration practice as it was carried out at the turn of the millennium when digital tools were being introduced. Alongside the traditional photochemical workflows, restorers could also resort to digital or hybrid workflows to restore these projects. Ten years on, it is interesting to note that these three workflows are still regularly adopted by film archives and laboratories. Indeed, although archives apply digital tools more frequently today than they would have ten years ago, film restoration is still very much a hybrid practice. Therefore, the cases analyzed here are still useful examples for bridging theory and practice through the frameworks and concepts introduced in this book.

Of course, in the last ten years, the number of restorations that have been carried out using digital tools far exceeds those included here. While these numbers would certainly show the significant progress digital archival practice has made in the last years – digital tools have increased the workflow efficiency and reduced collateral damages such as DIGITAL ARTIFACTS – they would also show that photochemical workflows are still adopted when possible, especially in case of experimental and silent films and films in which the original negative has remained in fairly good condition. A case in point is the recent restoration of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey under the auspices of Christopher Nolan, presented at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.

In Chapter Two, I discussed some of the benefits of adopting a new “film as performance” framework. Here, I would like to examine how this new framework bears on current archival practice by discussing one case study in particular. I have decided to include the restoration of Nicholas Ray's last long-feature film, We Can’t Go Home Again (1973), since it exemplifies how this new framework can productively accommodate the “performative” aspects of the film as a dynamic object in relation to the concept of remediation. Furthermore, as a number of photochemical and digital tests were made before proceeding, the restoration project of We Can't Go Home Again illustrates very effectively how the restoration could have led to different results depending on one's interpretation of what film, and specifically this film, essentially is.