A new documentary acts as a cautionary tale urging us to be more aware of how we store and preserve what we film and watch
here’s a widely taken-for-granted consensus that in film lies immortality; in Damien Chazelle’s recent drama Babylon, a Tinseltown gossip columnist waxes rhapsodic about how actors captured on celluloid effectively live forever in posterity, her general sentiment reiterated in higher-minded terms by reams of film theory scholarship.
“Though everyone knows film culture, knows what a film is, we don’t really know about the effort that’s behind film history,” Toharia says. “It’s easy to watch films now – with the cloud, they’re right there whenever you want them. But so much labor goes into that. It is often due to the work of perhaps one or two people that we are able to enjoy a film. This isn’t recognized enough! It’s not always the best-paid job, but they do it anyway, because they believe in their work.
In broaching the topic, Toharia had to thread a delicate needle between an explanation accessible to the layperson and a level of analysis engaging to those already knowledgable. “The topic is huge, and the first problem I encountered was people worrying our approach would be too specialized for a niche audience,” she says.
“Digital is a tricky thing,” she says. “In preservation, and especially in restoration projects, you can do beautiful, amazing stuff on a computer that would’ve been impossible with photochemical processes only. Digital advances have made a much wider array of cinema available much more quickly, but it’s far from perfect. It doesn’t last either, it’s just different issues of preservation.”As much as this calling demands from those who heed it, the sweat and tears all go toward a worthy cause.
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