The Slovenian Cinematheque is committed to preserving and exhibiting film heritage. Every film stock has a limited lifespan and begins to decay the moment it runs through the camera and is exposed to light or when it goes through the process of chemical development. The lifespan of a film stock and its condition depend on a number of factors – from the chemical composition of the base (the material carrying the thin layer of emulsion), the type of emulsion, mechanical stress it has been subjected to and the conditions in which it was kept when not used. At first, films were restored in an analogue way, but, with the emergence of digital technologies, new, even more powerful restoration tools were developed.
The Slovenian Cinematheque began its restoration activity in 1995 with its analogue restoration of When I Was Dead by Ernst Lubitsch. In the following years, it restored many other films in cooperation with Haghefilm from Amsterdam, L’Immagine Ritrovata from Bologna and Hungarolab from Budapest. At first, we conducted only the so-called technical restoration – the cleaning of oil traces, dust and other dirt on the film strip and manual repair of perforations. We used the wet-gate method of printing, in which the entire film gate with the original film and the one on which the film is being copied is submerged in a liquid with a suitably matched refractive index, which reduces the visibility of scratches on film. The new prints thus showed less traces of use. Due to safety and durability, we used polyester film stock, which is supposed to endure over five hundred years if kept in ideal storage conditions.
At the beginning of the new millennium, digital technologies began to emerge in the world of cinema. Digital tools opened a host of possibilities for image and sound restoration, while preserving the possibility of reversibility. The Slovenian Cinematheque first tackled the digitisation and digital restoration of films in the case of the Triptych of Agata Schwarzkobler by Matjaž Klopčič. In most cases, we transferred the digitally restored films to their original medium – film.