ABSTRACT
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.
