ABSTRACT
‘The current discourse of film restorers is a model for history making because it makes transparent the ways that a history is spliced together’ (Jones, 2012: 138). This comment clearly summarises the focus of this chapter: the reconstruction of films and the consolidation of a film museum editing structure, literally ‘splicing’ the fragments of film history together. As with the activities of acquisition and collection, reconstruction is a matter of selection: the curator chooses which film clips will end up in the final restoration print. As a result, the reconstruction is generally aimed at ‘completing’ a film, making it into something that equates to what Meyer and Read (2000: 69) call the ‘original’. 93 This process, however, raises a number of problematic issues.
