Inside the magic lab with film archivist Elise Schierbeek

Yeah, I think that the digital tools emerged as soon as other post-production tools and special effects emerged in the digital space at the turn of the 2000s.

The digital stage, I want to say, is where a lot of ethical conundrums come in because of how far you can go.

Cleaning film is a lot less And maybe someone who has more expertise on the actual cleaning and scanning side of things would have a different opinion.

But I think there's a little bit lower ethical stakes and you start to get into weird territory once you're borrowing from nearby pixels, basically, to cover up errors.

You have to make decisions about what's an original defect and what is introduced through wear and tear or through duplication processes.

I'm curious about that because I was wondering where restoration starts to be interpretation or rather maybe they are always present and you kind of frame by frame, movie by movie, you decide what is the balance with this particular work.

Yeah, it's always interpretive and there's always loss.

One of the interesting things about film compared to other mediums like in art conservation is that you're always creating an entirely new object in order to preserve or restore.

So you're making a duplicate in order to then do this work of restoration.

making a higher quality print.

But yeah, there's always interpretation and there has to be some pragmatism.

You have to move forward and you have to sometimes make compromises, but try not to erase the materiality as possible.

Can you maybe give us an example? I'm just curious if there is any kind of debate or maybe controversial cases of where restoration becomes a little bit too interpretive.

Just curious how you think about

it.

Even though there's been plenty of, I think, milestone moments where there was heated debate, I can't really call to mind a specific one recently that wasn't in this extreme category, which for me is AI upscaling.

I don't know if you're familiar with this process, but it's a way to take something that's of a lower resolution and algorithmically scale it up.

And there can be very liberal applications of what is ostensibly a pretty strong technology for emulating what something would look like if there were to be information where there wasn't before.

And I think you see this applied more so in commercial projects where there isn't an ethical imperative and there's a lot more corner cutting and a desire to meet these pixel count standards of contemporary distribution.

But maybe you've seen articles about this, like Jaws was restored.

You could call it restored.

And it was originally shot in some kind of 3D film technology and it It led to a really soft image because of the way the 3D gets normalized to 2D.

And AI upscaling was used, but careful viewers noticed that there were these, I guess we call them hallucinations, or just strange.

If you really zoomed in on the image, there was a lot of interpretation.

At that point, you really lose the original.