(For the original Italian version, see here)
By Diego Cavallotti – Laboratory La Camera Ottica, University of Udine
It is now public knowledge: the preservation of amateur cinema – and of small gauge films in general – is a growing field, concerned with the discovery and valorisation of local cinema heritage. Any venture in this field cannot fail to refer to the great pioneers, and, first of all to the Cinémathèque de Bretagne and the activities that have been organized there since 1986. Although the historical-cultural value of non-standard materials has now been ascertained, it is not the case of the theoretical (and, more generally, epistemological) questions that the development of such archives poses. These are issues concerning the “nature” of the objects themselves and their distinct structures. Have we ever reflected, for example, on the question of the grain and its visibility in amateur films?
One of the most interesting contributions to this topic came from Giuseppina Sapio, who, in her essay “Homesick for Aged Home Movies: Why Do We Shoot Contemporary Family Videos in Old-Fashioned Ways?”, considers the visibility of the grain as a true stylistic code of amateur communication. It is no coincidence that today when we shoot a short video with a smartphone, we can use a filter that adds “grain” to the image: the purpose is to exploit the grain not as a material feature, but as a kind of enunciative indicator capable of endowing what we have shot with nostalgic character. From this perspective, the grain becomes a simple (and superficial) instrument of enunciation, but whose profound meanings can be understood by archivists, if they reflect on how the grain is configured, in an amateur film deposited in an archive.
If in fact, at the enunciative level, the grain indicates to us the “style” of a material structure (the amateur film), at the archival level the grain presents us with a double temporality. On the one hand, an “inner temporality”, a temporal distance separates us from the moment and from the context in which the film was produced – a separation sanctioned by its entry into the archive and that refers to the “aging” of the film. On the other hand, lies an “outer temporality” involving the temporal process of the different chemical reactions that allow the image to form and become intelligible – its “inner temporality.” These two temporalities hold the mystery of films that even when lacking in cohesiveness and consistency, have their strength in the ability to fashion themselves as “filmic memory.”
Regarding the “outer temporality”, the grain above all comes to signify an absence, or rather an obsolescence. It reminds us that the era when small gauge films were used to capture our surroundings or to give free rein to the creativity of amateurs is in fact, now over: the splicers and portable moviola have been replaced by digital videos edited in camera or on expensive editing suites. The basic unit of film-matter, the grain, and its analogue imprint – that is it being part of a sequential and linear information system opposed to the digital, discrete and non-linear – are the symbolic elements that characterize objects “no longer in step with time” and, therefore, can be archived away from contemporaneity. In other words, the visibility of the grain brings us back to another, now obsolete, scopic regime that has characterized a considerable part of the production and dissemination of images in the 20th century: the texture of what we see is thus symbolically charged, configuring itself as one possible form of memory of the past century.
With regard to “inner temporality”, we enter a field of reflection much closer to media archaeology and, in particular, to the concept of archaeography devised by the German scholar Wolfgang Ernst. In discussing digital hardware, Ernst proposes that it possesses a profound temporality of its own, linked to electronic (and, more generally, engineering) processes through which information is created and displayed. These are structures in which a chronologically linear conception of time is replaced by the micro-temporalities connected to the operational dynamics of digital media. In short, these micro-temporalities determine the “profound” temporality of digital, which appears to be very distant from the “narrative” sequencing of analogue technologies. At this point, however, a question emerges: are we sure that other forms of “profound” temporality do not occur in the analogue sphere?
In this sense, the question of grain is once again central. In fact, its process of formation can be considered analogous to the micro-temporalities of digital media. Here, instead of the electronic operational horizon, we have a chemical process: the formation of the image depends on a multiplicity of factors, among which, for example, the correct application of the film development protocol and timings. Because such steps are the result of a precise technique – an encounter between human practice and objects – in which every small change produces not an error of the system but a variation, the grain will always form according to an idiosyncratic process.
The dynamics of image formation refer to a developing process in which the sensitometric values are never the same, even when we use the same raw stock: the same form, generated in identical conditions, can never get the same tonality because the temperature of the developing bath may slightly change. The analogue film microtemporality, then, refers to a process characterized by specific steps (the developing bath), whose outcome is always idiosyncratic.
The filmic grain, in short, behaves as if its formation (or, to use a term taken from Gilbert Simondon, its individuation) proceeds like that of a crystal, or better still, a piece of coral: their structural elements are shaped by the environment in which they are formed, generating unexpected excrescences and unique configurations. Because, after all, the grain, just like crystals or coral, does what it wants…
Diego Cavallotti (1983) is a post-doc researcher and professor of Audio-visual Media Semiotics and Restoration and Digital Archiving for Films and Videos at University of Udine. He is a member of the steering committee of Gorizia MAGIS Spring School and co-founder of the Media Archaeology Section. Since 2017 he is one of the coordinators of Udine-Gorizia International Film Studies Conference and the director of the film section at La Camera Ottica – Film and Video Restoration.
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