Giovanna Fossati

On the Role of AMIA in Reshaping the Field of the Moving Image

In these pages, I would like to address the unique role of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) within the field of moving image archives in relation to the ongoing transition from analogue to digital. In recent years, I have investigated the interplay between film and media theory and film archival practice in this time of transition. I have come to believe that film and moving image media in general are transitional in nature.1 The current transition is characterized by a high degree of hybridization between analogue and digital technol ogy. The transitional nature of film is deeply related to the notion of film as the site of interpre tive contestation. From this perspective, film is not only transitional as it changes over time but is also subject to various interpretations at the same time. This has been the case in various instances in film history. In the case of color in silent cinema, for exam ple, once black-and-white film became dominant in the 1930s, coloring techniques such as tinting, toning, and stenciling were abandoned by mainstream film production. Early colored films even risked disappearing retrospectively because they were often duplicated onto black-and-white film. In the 1980s, however, archives and film scholars rediscovered color in silent cinema; the practice of duplicating colored films to black-and-white film stock was challenged, and new techniques for restoring the original colors were developed.2 Something similar is likely to occur in the transition from analogue to digital. Once digital film becomes dominant and replaces photochemical film, reducing it to a niche technology, new criteria will emerge that will retrospectively redefine the role of photochemical film and reinterpret some of its technological and aesthetical characteristics. The characteristics of film, as we had known them before the digital came about, may even be temporarily neglected, as has been the case before, Film frame from La Dette (Pathé, France, 1910; stencil color). The film was digitally restored by EYE Film Institute Netherlands at Haghefilm Conservation in Amsterdam. The restoration was presented at the Film Biennale 2010 in Amsterdam during The Reel Thing, held in conjunction with the AMIA seminar. Courtesy EYE Film Institute Netherlands.