A LEARNING LABORATORY
Film laboratory technicians and media educators speak distinctive languages, reflecting the specificity of their own principles and methods. Finding a shared ground for dialogue is vital for the healthy future of film preservation as an art and a science. Just as the old-fashioned view of laboratory work as a purely mechanical task is no longer sustainable, it is also clear that film scholarship cannot afford to ignore how the world moving-image heritage is preserved and presented to the public.
Film archives and museums are committed to ensure the highest quality in film preservation, and demand that film laboratories keep up their standards. They require that their collections are exhibited in proper technical conditions, but they also need to explain to their audiences the difference between the look of a 35mm print and its reincarnation in digital form. Furthermore, the role of curatorship in the restoration and exhibition of archival films has emerged as a crucial matter of debate.
The Haghefilm Foundation addresses these challenges in three strategic directions:
• giving students, educators, archivists, curators, and film and media technicians at the beginning of their
career an opportunity for in-depth learning of the most advanced film preservation techniques;
• forging a new alliance between the scholarly community and technical experts in the film preservation field;
• promoting film curatorship across these areas, from the analog and digital lab to festivals where the
achievements of film archives, museums, and laboratories can be appreciated by a wider public.
By taking up these challenges, the Haghefilm Foundation would like to encourage the concept of “best practice” supporting education, and vice versa. The Foundation is not another school, nor a funding agency for actual film preservation projects. Many educational and collecting institutions are already doing this, with outstanding results. The Foundation’s role is to serve as a “learning laboratory”, a cultural and technical resource for all. This can be achieved at the Haghefilm Laboratories in Amsterdam, a place where some of the best analog and digital preservation work available today can be fully experienced in practice.
Parallel to this is the admittedly more ambitious goal, to explain the technology of film preservation in curatorial terms; that is, to demonstrate that film scholarship should begin in a processing lab and find its fulfillment in a superior viewing experience on the big screen. We believe that these goals are within the reach of the technical and scholarly communities, as both are committed to cultivate and promote cinema as a vital art form and a cultural resource.
Paolo Cherchi Usai, Director
Haghefilm Foundation
