Simone Appleby works as the Head of the Laboratory for Film and Digital Restoration at the French National Center for Cinema (CNC). She visited Ljubljana between September 11 and 14 to thoroughly evaluate the state of film heritage preservation in Slovenia. During her visit, she toured the main film heritage institutions and participated in a meeting between their representatives and the Minister of Culture, Asta Vrečko. Before she began her evaluations, I spoke with her on behalf of the Slovenian Cinematheque about the project of restoring The Sultan of Love (La Sultane de l’amour, 1919/23) and the key challenges facing film heritage preservation in Europe today.
Can you briefly summarize the process of restoring La Sultane de l’amour? What difficulties did you encounter?
Each film has its own history and unique restoration process. What’s interesting about La Sultane is the specific coloring technique that was used. First, the negative of the film disappeared, and nobody knows what happened to it. The film had two credited directors, Charles Burguet and René Le Somptier, but we believe it was actually directed by its producer, Louis Nalpas. It was shot on nitrate film, in black and white. When it was released in 1919, it remained black and white. It then took four years to re-colorize all the frames of the film, and in 1923, it was released on a color print.
Since the negative disappeared, only three prints of the film remain in France – one at the Cinémathèque de Toulouse and two at the Cinémathèque Française. None of these prints share the same editing. The first version of the film was 2,400 meters long, but it was re-cut for the color version down to 1,800 meters. Why? We don’t know. I suspect it was due to cost; paint was very expensive at the time. The coloring process required cutting a stencil for each frame – or for each part of the frame that needed to be colorized.
For example, if a dress, plants, trees, or the sky needed to be colored, a separate stencil would be created for each element. Then, individuals would paint directly onto the film using these stencils. I’ve counted around seven to nine different colors in the film, which was very unusual for the time. Typically, films would feature fewer colors. Each additional color added to the cost, making the process very expensive. That’s my assumption for the re-editing, though it might not be the only reason.
We restored La Sultane to mark the film’s 100th anniversary. For 15 years, we didn’t have access to the film due to rights issues. The director’s children were in conflict over whether they wanted money or something else, preventing the film from being screened. In 2019, it entered the public domain, allowing us to access the material.
Can you talk more about restoring the colors? Why did you stick with the shorter version?
We used all three prints. Interestingly, the Toulouse print was likely heavily censored at the time. Three scenes were completely cut: one of a kiss, one of a woman being beheaded, and one of Princess Daoulah being beaten. I believe this censorship was because Toulouse used the print for educational purposes. We used this print as a base but reinserted the missing scenes from the Cinémathèque Française prints.
For the colors, we scanned all three prints, compared them, and used the portions with the most vibrant color. The digital restoration you will see this week is a combination of the three prints.
But what served as the reference for the colors? Did you find any written documentation?
There is no reference for the colors at all.
Isn’t it then a sort of another interpretation? Usually, restoration projects are tied to the idea of a certain ‘original’ that we must faithfully preserve.
Yes, but we had the prints, and they contained the colors. The missing negative was in black and white, so the prints served as our reference. When we were color grading, we had the prints next to us on the table.
It was very important for us to scan the prints in HDR to capture all the colors possible. We didn’t change the colors of the film—we added contrast and adjusted the shots to match each other, but the colors themselves were not altered. As an archive, you simply can’t do that. Additionally, it’s impossible to reproduce the original dyes exactly as they would have appeared when projected because of scanner technology. Certain dyes and colors on film fall outside the spectrum that scanners can detect. Our goal was to stay as close as possible to the original, knowing that a digital version inherently differs. Over time, dyes fade and lose saturation, which is another factor to consider.
We scanned the film in HDR and 4K, something that had never been done before, and this approach truly brought out the film’s colors. Previous restorations didn’t use technology with the same level of precision.
You mentioned that colors degrade over time. Were the prints themselves degraded or damaged?
Yes, the prints had significant issues, including scratches, mold, and tears. We had to do a lot of stabilization and mechanical repairs to restore the film.
When restoring, the first step is to assess the physical condition of the film. The print from Toulouse had projection scratches—small marks caused by usage on one side of the perforations (where the projector claws grip the film). To address this, we had to scan it backward, from tail to head, then flip and reverse the image. Scanning it the ‘right’ way could have caused the film to tear in the scanner.
Large sections of the film were so decomposed that there was no image left. In those cases, we chose to remove the damaged parts entirely, resulting in jump cuts. We couldn’t restore those sections because the decomposition created strange phenomena on screen that the audience wouldn’t understand. When comparing the three prints, we consistently used the longest and most intact shots from each version, ensuring continuity in the sequence.
Another big part of the process was reconstructing the title cards.
Over time, the film was printed and distributed in various forms, leading to discrepancies in the title cards. We had to choose one version over another, often favoring the most elaborate cards. However, we also had to maintain continuity and visual homogeneity throughout the film.
You mentioned that audiences might interpret deformations or signs of deterioration as mistakes. Couldn’t cinephiles or enthusiasts appreciate these as part of the film’s character? When restoring, do you have a specific audience in mind?
No, we don’t restore films with a specific audience in mind. Our goal is to bring the film as close as possible to its original state. We don’t alter it unnecessarily. However, if a sequence is so deteriorated that it’s incomprehensible or doesn’t add anything to the story, we remove it.
For example, if the sound is impaired, there are various approaches to address it. In some cases, like with another film we restored, we left it as it was because it was the only surviving copy. But for La Sultane, keeping the deteriorated frames wouldn’t have added value. It’s also important to consider the fluidity of the viewer’s experience. Would a jump cut disrupt their engagement with the film?
That reminds me of watching an exhausted copy of The French Connection at the Slovene Cinematheque. The big jump cuts between reels sometimes disrupted my understanding of the film. But this raises a debate—should scratches and holes always be avoided? Or can they become part of the movie over time?
Bill Morrison’s work is a good example. He uses deteriorated nitrate film to create new stories. Why not? We don’t adhere to a rigid rule about whether to keep or remove signs of deterioration. It depends on the context.
Our primary aim is not to create something new but to show the audience what the film was like when it was first released. We don’t remaster, re-edit, or even recolor-grade the film. We don’t remove all scratches, either. If removing them risks damaging the film or creating artifacts, we leave them in.
I often hear about the principle of “returning a film to its state at the first screening or premiere.” Is that a valid principle to always follow? Are there other principles you adhere to?
It’s impossible to fully replicate how a film was shown at its premiere. To do that, you’d need to screen the nitrate print on a carbon arc projector using period equipment. That’s not feasible today—it’s either unavailable or strictly regulated. Nitrate is highly flammable, making it risky to project. If we insisted on this principle alone, it would severely limit access to films from the past. Archivists hold varying opinions: some purists believe only nitrate should be screened, while others argue against projecting damaged nitrate because it risks further loss. The only practical way to screen films today is to digitize them. Modern cinemas are equipped with digital projectors, and digitization ensures accessibility while preserving the original film for future generations.
Is restoration then mostly access-oriented?
No, it’s threefold for me. Part of it is access. Restoration is also to preserve the film long-term, for future generations. It’s also your cultural heritage. It’s trying to piece together the film as it was, trying to understand the film historically, how it was made, and to reconstruct it as it was intended by the director at the time. But it is always a variant of the film, whether it’s digital or not. Even back in the day, they would make different prints. Not one print would be the same, the dyes between them would not necessarily be the same. Or maybe one would break in the projector, and they would then make new title cards… Or a projectionist would cut the print because it was damaged, and he would leave things out. And because they didn’t write it down, you wouldn’t know why they took something out. For me, the purpose of restoring is to preserve long-term and to give access digitally.
When dealing with restoration, especially while having limited resources available, you must prioritize one film over the other. Who should decide what films need restoring? Should the decision be made by theoreticians, historians, academics, researchers, or filmmakers?
I can’t give one answer, because it’s an open debate. I think it needs to be a college, a team of people. In France, we have what we call an expert group that is made up of distributors, archivists, film historians, and filmmakers. They make a list of the most important films in French heritage. There’s also the box office. You can read the press texts about the films that have come out, succeeded, have won prizes, etc. You see those are films that have marked a particular time. And then there’s the important directors, authors. Each country will have certain directors, or actors/actresses, even DPs that stand out.
We, in an archive, look at films around certain themes, the war, for example. We’re nearing 2025 next year, which will remind us of the end of World War II. Therefore, we know there’s going to be demand for documentation on the war, and we will have to look for materials that haven’t been restored and bring it out to the public. This year we had the Olympic Games in France. We looked at films that had sport as a theme. We restored two films that were very important and that opened the Olympic Games: one about the French boxer, world champion at the time, Carpentier, and The Great Passion (La Grande Passion, 1928), which deals with rugby. They were also shown on television.
It can also be a cultural decision – what are we going to restore? What do we have in our archive? We have over 150,000 titles. They won’t all be restored in my time. But we try to think of what is going on now, politically, socially, and environmentally, that we can organize a project about. Then there’s just the harsh, physical aspect of what state a film is in. If you don’t scan it now, it might be too late in two years’ time. Who decides what? There’s no right or wrong answer. And I don’t think one person should make the decision. It needs to be a group. We are an archive that restores, but we also give funding and subsidies, grants, to Pathé and Gaumont to restore. They must submit a file and explain why they want to restore it, what is the history of the film, and what is the distribution going to be once it’s restored. That is examined by a group of people who then vote.
But this group of people is a separate body to the CNC?
Yes, we bring them in. We call them the expert group, and it is constantly changing. It consists of historians, filmmakers, distributors, people from catalogues, cinematheques…
But they must decide some time in advance because you must catch all those anniversaries. What are the usual time frames between the decision and the anniversary year?
That’s a different commission that deals with the anniversaries. It’s something we do in-house. The commissions have a particular date. They are given a DVD to watch the film. Usually, there are around 70 films, and besides watching, they must read the whole file about the history of the film. Then we organize an at least four-hour-long discussion about their picks.
You mentioned various interests in the field, like the puritan archivist stance that says, ‘this movie is in bad shape, we need to restore it first,’ and there are other interests. What does in your experience then prevail in the end? Because here we also have this open debate, and it sometimes seems imbalanced in a way that we then restore movies that were picked by living authors, because it’s in their interest to restore their work or work by their friends, etc. And another strong opinion is that we need to restore movies that will attract big audiences today. There are clear interests that are stronger than just the archivist sense of saving the most deteriorated movies.
I think each of them is equally important, and you cannot prioritize one over another. It’s helpful if a filmmaker is living because they’re the history of the film. And I think it can be a form of satisfaction for them as well. Of course, if you have a film that’s in a very bad condition, you’re going to try to do all you can to restore it, but sometimes you don’t have the resources to do that, and that, unfortunately, is part of film history. How do you prioritize one over another? You don’t. For a particular film, I may be able just to save one or two sections of the film. When a film is almost totally degraded, very often you can’t even digitize it because it’s maybe shrunk so much that technology today will not accept it.
For me personally, when a nitrate is in good condition, I try to scan it straight away. When nitrate is severely deteriorating, there’s an urgency to do it because when trying to restore it, you can damage it even further. There’s a lot of processes that you need to do in between, like putting it into special chemical desiccators for it to become moist again if it was very dry. If it’s sticky, you need to be able to take the stickiness out. This process can last from one week to even nine months.
And you do all those processes at your laboratory?
Yes.
Can you name some of the changes that the mass digitalization in the film field brought to the film heritage preservation sector in the last 15, 20 years? Here I mostly mean changes relating to the complexity of the restoring process, the knowledge needed for the processes to be done, and the expenses related to it. While researching for my master’s thesis, I mostly read about the effects digitalization had on the storing of film heritage. I figured that even though the price of storing a single TB has dropped over the years, the amount of TBs film heritage institutions store has been rising with an even greater speed.
It’s the digital dilemma. We don’t have answers; we just know that it’s exponential. The more you digitize, the more TBs and PBs you’re going to have to store.
There’s lots of different problems with film restoration today. One is the knowledge around photochemical – how do you maintain the skill set needed? It’s an aging community, it’s becoming a niche market, and a lot of the people with the knowledge are close to retiring, and there isn’t the transmission of knowledge. The second problem we have is that our equipment is becoming obsolete, and sometimes there’s no replacement. There’s no replacement because there isn’t enough market for it. Regarding long-term preservation, the only medium today that can last 300 to 400 years is analogue film itself, polyester. But the only company that allows you to use it in this way today is ARRI. There are no companies today that want to take on that as a market because the R&D needed for that is so expensive. We’ve had discussions with Kodak about this. If there is no more Kodak film recorder for long-term preservation, that means that they will no longer make the film, and the whole workflow of film as a long-term preservation medium will end.
The problem with digital is that it’s not a long-term preservation medium – because of the constant migrations, and besides, you need to constantly check for the integrity of your files. You also need to make sure that you have doubled your files; that means twice the number of terabytes or petabytes. It’s the way the industry is going, but is it the right way? I don’t think it is, but then you need digital today because the world is digital, and you need digital for access. I think you need digital and analogue; you need film for long-term preservation.
Before I delved into the field of film heritage preservation, I had for years sensed that institutions were rushing towards digital, that there was an urgency to it. But now I see that shifting to digital means we’re migrating movies from a more stable medium, celluloid, which can last several centuries, to a less stable one, LTO tapes.
LTO is supposed to last 30 years. We’ve experienced it ourselves – we received some LTOs for a restoration project, and we couldn’t open them. The company that made them was closed. The solution might be to give it to another company to open. But if they cannot do it, your film is lost.
Was it because of the software being outdated?
Yes, the way it was written, the file was also corrupted. With digital, you need to be careful and use an industry standard that’s not proprietary. If you use a standard, there’s usually enough information available about it that someone can read your file in the future. That’s the beauty of film – you can take a film, unroll it, and identify it because it’s a physical image. With digital, you don’t know what it is until you decode it.
And you can somehow forget about analog film, and it can survive, while you have to constantly check digital and keep it alive…
You can’t forget about it per se because film needs to be stored in specific conditions; you can’t have variable conditions. You can’t be against digital – it’s necessary today. In France, we made a CPP (Cinema Preservation Package), which is now a standard for archiving in Europe. Now we’re working on how to implement this in labs and how to create the file with the software that’s available today, but you still don’t know what you’re going to put it on – is it LTO, is it a hard drive, etc.? We don’t know if in 100 years LTO will exist…
How do you at the laboratory store digitized and restored films?
We don’t store digital in-house because we don’t have the facilities for it. First, it’s very expensive. Secondly, it’s changing so rapidly that we don’t have the infrastructure to keep buying and being able to afford the new evolution. The third reason is that we don’t have the staff with the knowledge needed for this, so we outsource it; a company stores all our files for us digitally. Those files belong to us, so if they were to close, we would just take the LTOs back. It’s part of their job to check every year that all our files are fine.
And otherwise, you don’t have insight into the technical aspects in the sense of when they buy the new generation of LTO tapes?
No. They tell us, okay, we’ve had your files now for three years, it’s time to upgrade from LTO 9 to LTO 10, for example.
Did you encounter any other difficulties in the form of data loss?
No, it was just on the LTOs I mentioned. But those were from 2017, 2018. Luckily, we have a digital file, a DCP, but we cannot access the actual scans right now. We don’t know yet how we’re going to rescue that data.
How did it come to this situation, what went wrong?
We don’t know. We went from one vendor to another, and the second vendor said they couldn’t do anything with them.
How should a film heritage institution set its policy regarding digital equipment? Is it necessary to be as up-to-date as possible, or can a film heritage institution use slightly older equipment to be more economical?
If you’re constantly buying new things, you’re constantly racing, buying new equipment, and it’s not necessarily the equipment that’s going to help you. We have scanners that are more than 10 years old and still work. You don’t need to constantly update technology. What’s super important is that you have staff who are trained and know how to maintain the equipment, especially if it becomes obsolete. And you need to make sure you have a maintenance contract. If there is no maintenance contract because the material is obsolete, find people who you know can help you repair the machine when necessary. If you use old digital OSs, like an old Windows XP, for example, make sure you have a backup of that computer. Then, check the backup regularly to make sure you can still reboot it. Always mirror your equipment so you can use the backup as a spare part if anything goes wrong.
We could be fighting about resolution, but at the end of the day, the eye doesn’t really see the differences between 4K and 8K, etc. Restoring to 4K for me is sufficient. I think QC (Quality Control) is very important. A lot of archives cannot do it or don’t do it enough because they don’t have the resources or the people. That is why they think once it’s on the tape, it’s fine, but you need to constantly check what you’re doing, and this costs money. We have a backup 500 km apart, so if there ever was an explosion or a fire, we would know we’ve got our films elsewhere too.
Ideally, it should be like that, but in archives with much less privileged, poorer circumstances, they struggle to do that.
What you can do is separate negatives from prints, for example, or if you have intermediate stocks and positives, separate them.
You mentioned the importance of a trained staff. How should an institution take care of the transfer of knowledge between employees? The average age of people who deal with film heritage preservation in Slovenia is, to my knowledge, quite high, and there is no sure way to know how many young people in the next 10 years will be prepared to work in this sector. There is a big gap in the making…
For a start, you can bring analogue film back into film schools. We did that in France, and there is now a real desire among youngsters who want to film on analogue. Ordinary schools are also a good place to start, to get them interested in films. Regarding the transmission of knowledge, there are different programs that we are trying to create within Europe, including exchanges between cinematheques. We can also train at the CNC; we’ve had people from Taiwan, Morocco, Côte d’Ivoire… We also trained people from Bologna when they started – they spent two years at the CNC and then created the archive in Bologna. Internships with private companies that have film recorders are important. You need to find funds in the budget and dedicate them to staff training. Your staff needs to constantly learn. At the CNC, I also brought people in who are now retired, and they trained my staff – that’s been very successful.
But all that is mostly related to analogue film?
Mainly analogue, yes. You can find courses about digital. With my team, we go on one- or two-week courses to learn how to use a particular software or medium. We go to different symposiums, participate in panel discussions, and constantly meet people… I don’t know if Slovenia has training programs, but even if you do, you need to be careful that you can employ the person afterward. We did this with the CNC – we found a specific course for digital restoration. It worked very well for many years, but as the market is receding, the course is becoming less and less popular, especially because there is no employment afterward.
As I discovered in my thesis, maybe the biggest problem here is that most or maybe all film heritage institutions cannot employ new people. If someone decided today to be an archivist or an expert in restoring, it would be very hard to see stability – in the form of regular employment. I like that at the start of your answer, you proposed the involvement of film in the educational system, and this opens the question of film culture. Here lies a big difference between France and Slovenia. The former, as the birthplace of cinema, is a synonym for a living film culture. In Slovenia, film doesn’t have the same status. Regarding the possibility of pursuing a profession in the field of film heritage preservation, we rely on coincidences.
We also have programs for schools. As a public institution, we are there for the public. We organize screenings that are attended by whole classes… There can also be programs done in collaboration with libraries. You could have a special club for children on a particular day. School is a good place to start because it’s the next generation.
CNC is a public institution. Can you name the pros and cons of why restoring needs to be done in a public organization?
For example, we subsidize films that we know would be a commercial success. We help Pathé, Gaumont… As a public institution, we are going to restore films that have no commercial value. We restored La Sultane at our lab because we knew that, for a start, it didn’t have a distributor, and it’s a film that’s very difficult to sell. We’d also restore films where there are no right holders anymore. For example, we restored two of Heiny Srour’s films, Leila and the Wolves (Leila wa al ziap, 1984) and The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (Saat el tahrir dakkat, 1974). Those two films were very important to the Lebanese filmmaker, but since she’s retired, she had no money to be able to restore her films. If we didn’t do it, nobody would.
How does the laboratory at the CNC work? How many people work there?
We have six restorers, three dedicated to analogue, and three dedicated to digital restoration. It’s a small team. Two digital restorers worked on La Sultane together, and it took six months to restore, for example. Most of that time was dedicated to finding the right parts of the films to use, the scanning itself, and the physical restoration of it. The way we work is that when we have a film, we first analyse it, make documentation of it. There’s an editorial analysis made on if the film is complete, what sections are complete, and there’s physical documentation saying what needs to be done physically to the film. Those are then passed on to the person repairing the film, and the digital restorers who will scan, digitally repair, grade, and restore the film. We work as a team, but we’re not very big at all. We’re probably able to restore two feature films and maybe two or three short films a year.
But do you think it’s good that this department is a part of the bigger body of CNC?
Of course.
Or do you think it could work as a separate body? Here in Slovenia, the field of film heritage preservation is dispersed between multiple institutions. That means they each have their own storage facilities, their own circumstances and conditions (humidity, temperature), and so on. It’s an open debate whether this model, that works in Austria, is better than, let’s say, the Scandinavian one, with one institute covering everything in the film field.
The CNC as an archive was created in 1969 because the cultural minister at the time, André Malraux, noticed that the French Cinémathèque was not able to give an inventory of all the films they had, and films were stored inappropriately. And then CNC became part of the legal deposit in the 70s, where every film that was screened in France would have a copy at the archive. Then there was a nitrate restoration plan made under the archive, so a decision was made to make a lab capable of restoring films.
The Cinémathèque is separate from the CNC. We do not screen films, but we provide films for the Cinémathèque or for other institutions to screen, for example. That is the French model. I think the BFI in the UK has assembled their archives and the Cinémathèque together.
There have been discussions about whether the CNC and the Cinémathèque should become one body. It’s possible in the future that may happen. When and how, I don’t know. But I think each country is different. I don’t think you can necessarily apply one rule from one country to another, but you can inspire what works in one and try to see how to make it work in your country. Because some institutions don’t want to be together, they want to be separate.
Here there are at least two arguments for the unification of all institutions. One is money, and the other one is power in relation to politics, in the sense that the way it’s now so dispersed, it’s confusing, and the power is dispersed.
I don’t have an answer for that because it’s the same in France. The answer is there are political differences and power differences between, and of course, budget and finances are different. But I think you need to find common ground, and maybe that’s the starting block of working closer together.
Not just film heritage preservation, but also production and other processes in the film world rely on public funding here. As a film worker or an institution, to simplify it, you must always convince ‘someone up there’ to give you funding, and you must convince him/her in different terms. How do you communicate the value of film heritage to politicians and people in power? (Do you think you have to present projects in a certain way?)
It’s very difficult. Of course, you must continuously defend why you’re doing something. It depends on who your cultural minister is and what their program is. We’ve been very lucky in France with the cultural ministers we’ve had, whether it’s Jacques Lange, André Malraux, etc. They’ve all understood the importance of film heritage.
Big events are important. For example, there was a huge event for the re-release of Napoleon (Napoléon, 1927), accompanied by the orchestra. Many political figures came to that. Advertising is also very important. How are you going to advertise what you’re doing? Is there a TV channel that you can convince to have a program at a particular time where you can screen certain films and make a club around that?
I don’t think there’s one way you can influence the cultural minister. If there’s a place in the program for the heritage of theatre, for the heritage of music, of fine art, then you should remind them that film is part of art as well.
Each minister has its own preferences and areas that are closer to him or her. We’ve had ministers in the past who hated Slovene cinema. I am not sure about the current one, but a big part of her social media posts is about architectural heritage, so that seems a clear preference.
Maybe bringing in famous filmmakers like Scorsese could help. Is it possible that when you have the next festival, you bring in important figures like that and create a huge event around that, organize a discussion and then bring in young generations, the press? Maybe have discussions between different countries with the ministers. Of course, you can’t force the ministers…
Restored films have a second life. How do you organize the screenings, etc., and how do you advertise?
We at the CNC don’t do that. That’s the distributor’s work. But we can help the distributor by giving him access and materials.
Being present on social media and posting your website is important. You need to have a good social media page and constantly feed it with things that are happening to create a buzz.
We give films a second life at festivals, we present them in schools. We also do screenings in prisons, old people’s homes, give conferences… We’ve had conferences around a particular director, Robert Lapoujade, who’s a very alternative French film director. You like or don’t like his films – that’s not the question. He has a place in French history. The CNC collaborated with other institutes and universities, film students there, etc.
How does the CNC collaborate transnationally with other institutions from other countries? And how do you establish those connections?
We have international connections because of FIAF. Recently we restored a film called The Veil of Happiness (Le voile du bonheur, 1923) for the anniversary of Georges Clemenceau. The only print that existed of this film was in the Dutch archive, and they gave us access and sent us the film via the FIAF for free. We then restored the film and gave them a digital version.
As well, we did a restoration with the BFI and the Swiss Film Archive in Lausanne where we restored an animation by Bartosch, The Idea (L’Idee, 1932). We used a part of the print from the BFI, a part of the print from the Swiss Film Archive, and a part of our print to make a complete film. The Swiss Film Archive didn’t want to send us the negative, so they scanned it. And we scanned ours, and the BFI sent their print over and we scanned it. We gave the restored version of the film to each institution so that they can exploit the film as well in their archive.
There’s also training. We go to archives and help them, train them, give ideas of how they can improve their building, for example. If it’s a building, how to take care of health and safety, hygiene, storage. We also have collection databases. We’ve created this new national database in collaboration with all archives in France.
The purpose of your visit is also this kind of monitoring the state of film preservation in Slovenia.
I’ve been invited to come over to do an audit of the situation, technically, between the main three bodies here. We’ll discuss and elaborate a plan of action about what is available right now and what is needed so that you can restore films.
Will there be a specific report?
Yes. The goal is to evaluate the available knowledge, understand how each institution operates, etc. Then, we’ll work on raising awareness with the cultural minister. I understand that there is an urgent need in Slovenia to restore film. The idea is to develop a plan that enables your archive to be autonomous and independent – capable of restoring films in-house rather than outsourcing to different countries, which I think is unfortunate. It’s extremely important that each country can restore its own cultural heritage.
The concept of sustainability has already influenced the film industry. Have you noticed any signs of it appearing in film heritage preservation? Not just in terms of funding and staff, but also regarding the environment?
We have EcoPod, which has been introduced recently. It is essential to measure your carbon footprint. How much water are you using? Are the chemicals you use harmful to the environment? If so, what steps are you taking to minimize that impact? Additionally, when we issue tenders, we ask each company about their carbon footprint: What measures are they implementing to improve environmental sustainability? What steps are they taking to reduce their carbon footprint? How do they handle recycling? How much electricity do they consume? What is the carbon impact per terabyte of data they store? These are all questions we discuss constantly.
Digital technology has a carbon footprint – data centers consume vast amounts of energy. What is the next green technology? In analog preservation, we rely on specific chemicals for restoration processes, but some of them may become banned in the future due to their toxicity. For example, we use perchloroethylene to clean film. It’s the only solvent that effectively removes dirt from film, which is crucial for printing and wet scanning since it shares the same refractive index as film. However, its usage is now regulated – you can only use limited amounts in specific locations. In densely populated residential areas, for example, it is not allowed. These are key considerations when setting up a lab: What chemicals are being used? What are their environmental implications? What regulations must be followed? We also have strict guidelines on water consumption per meter of film during processing and development.
The issue of environmental sustainability ultimately comes down to the smallest details.
We face this challenge constantly because our vaults are old, and we rely on outdated technology. But change requires financial resources – it’s not something that can happen overnight.
There is a lot of discussion about how film preservation affects the environment, but I would be interested in finding a study on whether digital technologies are truly “green.” I haven’t seen one yet. When you consider all the components involved – filters, sensors, scanners, batteries—how sustainable is digital preservation?
At some point, you will need to restore films that were born digital.
We are currently discussing this. How do you restore digital-born films? What do you do about dead pixels? The earliest digital files were of relatively low resolution – should they be upgraded? That can only be done digitally, which means it’s not exactly restoration but rather remastering. At the CNC, we are actively exploring this issue, though I can’t yet say what the best approach is. We are considering different possibilities for handling digital files, as well as films shot on film but only finished digitally rather than on physical film stock.
This question becomes even more complex when you consider experimental and amateur cinema, including films shot on handheld cameras and phones.
Yes, this is an issue we are beginning to address – how to restore digital-born films from the year 2000 onward. A pixel is a pixel, so how do you modify it without fundamentally altering the film?
