[-empyre-] Migration & Restoration and mutating aesthetics

["Clare Stewart" <cstewart@acmi.net.au>]

Furthering one (or maybe more) of the strands of our wildly tangential discussion (which threatens to join David in 'Runaway Bay'!), I was having an interesting chat with one of the 2004 artists, Daniel Crooks today. We were talking about the need not only to archive the works of art, texts, websites, films etc, but also the programs, applications, equipment etc. which 'deliver' the work. Most moving image museums that do this, treat the equipment as 'artefacts' rather than preserving them in order to be able to view forms that may be rendered 'redundant' by technological developments. Indeed, talking to another of the 2004 artists, Helen Grace, about a project she is doing with found Standard 8 footage (a format way more 'redundant' than Super 8), we discussed the difficulty of finding a. functional Standard 8 projectors and b. someone who could fix Standard 8 projectors.

Paul, I wonder if Pandora is also archiving the applications needed to run various aspects of websites (leading on from some of Melinda's comments about preservation)?

In the spirit of continuing our online discussion offline, I had another great conversation with one of ACMI's treasured projectionists Phillip Grace... Phil offered these as good examples of altered aesthetics in recent film restoration projects:

"The 70mm re-release of "Gone With the Wind" where the image aspects ratio was altered from 1.375:1 to 2.20:1 by a method of deliberate recomposition of every shot. I think the sound was also re-mixed from mono to 6-track stereo utilising existing pre-mix components. In various re-issues of the film the original colour palette was altered (probably unintentionally) as a result of the different colour processes available. The most recent restoration corrected the colour palette using an original 1939 technicolor dye transfer print as reference.

The "Directors Cut" of "Lawrence of Arabia".  Although legitimised by having been created by the original director of the work, some sound elements had been lost, and at least one actor was re-voiced for the restoration.

Those restorations are well documented in "American Cinematographer". In the case of "GWTW" there is a series of articles spanning many years.

There has also been extensive disussion on the various work done to restore "Metropolis" over the years as more material has been located and identitifed. The current black and white version is a very conscientious work of great merit, but even this has indications that in some parts of the world the film was seen in tinted colour, which has not been reproduced nor its absence contextualised."
-Phillip Grace

These examples are fascinating to me, scratching the surface of the many hundreds of issues that face people working on restoration projects. Bringing us back around to David's original post... I am now feeling the incredible weight of how exactly do you start preserving Keith Haring's mural on the wall at Collingwood Tech? David, are you aware if anyone is actually attempting to doing this? 

Respect, Clare













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