youhere is a widely accepted consensus that immortality resides in the cinema; in Damien Chazelle’s recent drama Babylon, a Tinseltown gossip columnist raves about how actors captured on celluloid effectively live forever in posterity, her general sentiment echoed in lofty terms by scores of film theory studies. Advertising jargon renamed cherished memories “Kodak moments” in response to our species’ innate desire to freeze a fleeting unit of time as a physical quantity that we can revisit over and over as we please. This line of thinking is understandable, since anyone can click on the internet and see 100-year-old images of everyday working-class life. But Inés Toharia needs everyone to know that she is also fundamentally wrong.
“We are going so fast as a society that we don’t always realize what we are leaving behind,” he tells The Guardian from his home in Spain. “We should take a moment to think about saving our digital materials, because they don’t last forever. And a lot of videos today aren’t even meant to last, things like security camera footage, a lot of it on YouTube. We are producing more than ever, but we are not taking care of it. A friend shows me a video of his son taking his first steps, I think, ‘Oh, that’s not going to last.’
His new documentary, Film, the Living Record of Our Memory, casts a wide net on the pressing issue of moving image preservation, from a condensed history of the film to a grim warning about its precarious future. The film strip lives and dies, as subject to deterioration as any of us. To continue indefinitely with access to the ever-expanding glut of content—not just a priceless artistic heritage, but a crucial account of what the world is and was like—requires a herculean ongoing restoration effort from a global network of passionate pundits and moviegoers. . Toharia’s uplifting visual essay gives these unsung heroes of the art house their due, setting the high stakes of their mission and celebrating the little miracle that happens every time they rescue another title from the brink of extinction.
“Even though everyone knows film culture, knows what a movie is, we don’t really know the effort behind film history,” says Toharia. “It’s easy to watch movies now – with the cloud, they’re there when you want them. But a lot of work goes into that. Often it is thanks to the work of perhaps one or two people that we are able to enjoy a movie. This is not recognized enough! It’s not always the highest paying job, but they do it anyway, because they believe in their work. It’s valuable, and if they don’t do it, no one will.”
She begins with a compact crash course in film technology: film as we know it was born on a thin flexible plastic tape called “stock,” and while many of today’s releases are shot on digital cameras with bank storage of data, the major Hollywood studios still stock a copy of each production using the original analog item. The many varieties of paper offer the most vivid richness and accurate color fidelity, but it’s far from a perfect system. Even with state-of-the-art facilities capable of keeping your archives climate-controlled to a fraction of a degree, the years take their toll on materials susceptible to warping, freezing, hardening, and discoloration.
In addressing the subject, Toharia had to thread a delicate needle between an explanation accessible to the layman and a level of analysis attractive to those in the know. “The topic is huge, and the first problem I ran into was that people were concerned that our approach was too specialized for a niche audience,” she says. “I realized this had to be really open… There were some great stories that I loved about technology, for example Technicolor – how the process was different, why it became invaluable, why it fades differently than other Actions. There are a lot of things that I would have liked to go deeper into, but we would have lost most of the audience. The idea was that this could be a foundation, and that if you like this, you will find that there is much more to investigate and learn. We wanted it to be engaging and show everyone that they are connected to this world.”
Restoration affects us all, even casual consumers who assume their diet of viewers has no connection to the work of Tunisian silent film pioneer Albert Samama Chikly. Giving due recognition to teachers lost in the dark is only part of the job; every film, however ubiquitous, requires attention and care. This invisible work hides in plain sight, from the Museum of Modern Art’s painstaking enhancement of Night of the Living Dead (a balancing act that required protecting the film’s original grime while cleaning up its appearance) to the canon of transmission. expansion led by the non-profit Martin Scorsese Film Foundation. “There is everything in the cinema!” Toharia says. “Anything you want to learn about: science, tradition, fashion, hairstyles, relationships between people, human stories, psychology, sociology. We live through the visual.”
That statement grows truer with each passing day, as the cameras that live in our pockets generate mosaic coverage of modernity from a billion perspectives. Prohibitively priced and requiring constant remigration of data off hard drives, which expire even faster than stock, digital storage technology has not fully answered the question of where to put all this raw data. “We’ve gone digital, there’s no going back,” Toharia says, but she has an eye on new frontiers within our current computerized paradigm. The final minutes of her film touch on intriguing developments in next-generation technology, including a tiny glass coin containing virtual memory stores and synthetic DNA capable of compressing video into a pill.
“Digital is a complicated thing,” she says. “In conservation, and especially restoration projects, wonderful and amazing things can be done on a computer that would have been impossible with photochemical processes alone. Digital advances have made a much wider range of cinema available much faster, but it’s far from perfect. It doesn’t last either, it’s just different conservation issues.”
As much as this call demands from those who hear it, the sweat and tears go to a worthy cause. In his grand montage of humanity, Toharia includes clips of Senegalese landmark Touki Bouki, Indonesian vérité curio Mother Dao, silent rescue ethnographies capturing the culture of Inuit tribes. They are documents of their time, testimony of political and social realities that can resist the revisionism of agents in bad faith. Although we may think of a trip to the movies as a luxury, the medium serves an indispensable purpose as a mosaic of overlapping truths from which we can piece together an idea of ourselves. Film is the sharpest mirror we have, and it is up to the species to keep it from cracking.
“We have to preserve this, because we don’t learn,” she says. “We are evolving, but in a commercial way, only for profit. We don’t always see how many valuable things are being destroyed by inaction. But we can correct ourselves.”
