Possibilities of Application of the Principles of Documentation of Conservation-restoration of Arts and Crafts to the Documentation of Film Restoration

Conservation of works of fine and applied art is based on an existing legislative and methodological framework in documentation, while the documentation of film restoration interventions is often based only on partial recommendations or practices of individual film archives. This may be due to the fact that the film restoration as an accredited scientific discipline has only been established in recent decades, but also to the fact that the film medium is so specific that established practices and conservation approaches of cultural heritage cannot always be simply applied to it. In addition, film restoration is undergoing a major transformation due to the advent of digital technologies. These fundamentally change not only the possibilities for intervening in restored films, but also the way they are shown, making it necessary to rethink or even extend existing approaches, including ways of documenting the whole process. In this essay, we question the extent to which it is possible to apply the methodological framework underlying the documentation of the conservation of fine and applied art to the documentation of the film restoration. We focus not only on principles that can be applied without significant changes to the documentation of the film restoration, but also on more problematic aspects that require rethinking or even completely new formulations given the specifics of the field.

Keywords: film restoration, documentation, conservation-restoration, digital restoration