The Film Library of Bologna
There are only two laboratories in Europe that restore and preserve film. One one of them is in Bologna: the “Cineteca”. This is the journey WhatItalyIs took to discover how to restore and revive a historical film. A story of love, passion and Italian excellence.
The Film Library of Bologna has two elements that recall a movie theater: the darkness that wraps around each laboratory (except the one in which the new “ancient” films shall be inspected) and films, of course.
Here these items are treated with special care, the meticulous and loving care reserves to very old and delicate things with dozens and dozens of years.
The oldest film in the world was patented in 1888 by Hannibal Goodwin. George Eastman stole the idea and put it into production.
The films can be very old things. They were projected so many times to be torn in several points. Not to mention the quality loss that they suffered with the passage of time and copy after copy.
Each one of these copies is always a bit less similar to its original: the gap is the quality lost every time we do that.
When a film is included into the restoration process of the Film Library, first of all it’s analyzed, then repaired, reintegrated in the missing parts and then digitized. From this moment its recovery becomes a matter of binary codes and patience, a painstaking and very slow patience.
Once the film is scanning, a copy is finally saved, the original unchangeable: every printed copy from now on it will be exactly the same as the original because digital doesn’t lose quality.
The philology of a film
The film scan collects all the information, including dust and scratches. All the signs of aging and degradation. The restorers work is to bring back in time the material they have in their hands: they have to clean, scrape, remove the deposited skin of the years until the moment the film was printed. To do so they must know how that film was produced: with what cameras and on what medium, and yet what were the conditions, how it was preserved, with what kinds of acids it was developed.
This set of information allows them to trace back the path that will lead them to the origin of the translucent strip, at the moment zero, the first frame.
For these reasons, the work of the restorer is almost philological: in fact he must know the most widespread shooting techniques at the time the film was produced, which the tools to get it, even what the mood was prevailing at the time, what kind of toning and contrast was popular, which details the director wanted to emphasize.
They work on a still living body and establish with it a relationship that often goes on for weeks ( digital restoration — requires 1,200 hours of work, divided into two shifts: from 9am to 17pm and from 17pm to 1am).
Each frame is analyzed, cleaned, balanced, compared with the original, compared to other similar of the time, calibrated. And so for thousands and thousands of frames, using dedicated software and above all the patience, that seems pure alienation to an outsider.
The workshops are dark: there are long tables against the walls and on top these monitors that illuminate the faces of the restorers. There is silence and peace. Someone gets up to prepare a coffee or disconnecting a bit. The others are focused on the faces of actors who are back to life on the screens. A silent dialogue flows between the present and the past: the past comes back to life in digital form and the restorers seem to talk to these characters.
In an age where the present and the contemporary seem to extend endlessly, where everything is instantly consumed and quickly forgotten, their work seems quite heroic: recovering what the time threatens to cancel, regaining a precise point that is old for decades to conserve and deliver it to the future. To give to it a kind of eternal present.
Preserve books, scripts, movie posters, hundreds of thousands of photos of Bologna and its history in the library of the “Cineteca” has a specific purpose: to freeze an image of memory to remember who we were and who we are.
