You Shouldn't Have Been That Sentimental: Film Restoration Ethics in Hitchcock's Vertigo

Abstract

The intricacies of motion picture restoration tend to mystify the greater public. Indeed, it is not uncommon for individuals to register outright surprise that there remains any point to preserving motion picture film, as we move inexorably toward some vague digital utopia. Already we have come to covet our moving images on a small disk, a tangible commercial good to own and consume on a relatively small screen, at our convenience, in the company of our choice. We also appreciate these products for their ability to add layers to the film experience, to supplement our understanding and enjoyment with materials such as alternative endings, international versions, audio commentary tracks, and exclusive interviews. Many promise to be the definitive edition of a given film, returning the original artistic vision of the director who may have been victimized by censors, studios, or producers, with inferior or incomplete results masquerading as the final version for years. Arguments over what is the authentic version tend to play themselves out in this scenario. In other instances, the film was released as planned, but decades of travel, projection, or inadequate storage have decimated footage, leaving modern audiences to interpret a mangled text.Film restoration and preservation can encompass all of these issues and many others. It must also be noted that movies allegedly "restored" for DVD release may not have undergone any physical restoration or preservation of the original film elements, but were instead scanned onto a hard drive and digitally corrected. This is not simple or cheap, but it is outside the scope of this paper, which will focus exclusively on film restoration as a process ultimately acted out upon celluloid through either analog or digital techniques (Koeber, 2003).1 Practice is complex, and so is the language. Before discussing the issues we will visit the problem of terminology, so that we have a proper mapping of the terrain when considering the ethical challenges of practice, which will be the subsequent undertaking. Finally we will explore one of the more physically and ethically difficult examples in film history: the James C. Katz and Robert A. Harris 1996 restoration of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.Although we are principally concerned with restoration, preservation is a good concept to begin with, since the process of restoring a film often results in de facto preservation. Karen F. Gracy observes that "in the film archives community, the meaning of preservation is mutable and elusive" (Gracy, 2007, p. 141). Literature on the subject would indicate that she is absolutely correct, since definitions become difficult to fix when the agendas of various constituencies within the preservation community tend to overlap or compete with one another. Still, there are core practices which can be considered as preservation, and the definition supplied by the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) encompasses a range of meanings while still remaining focused: "the full continuum of activities necessary to protect the film and share the content with the public. Film preservation now embraces the concepts of film handling, duplication, storage, and access" (NFPF, 2004, pp. 3-4). In this sense, preservation involves storing the film properly and inspecting it regularly, but also taking the necessary steps to ensure that it is duplicated onto new, preferably polyester, film stock. If there is enough money available to the preserving institution, it is excellent practice to produce an additional film negative, so that the "preservation negative" remains untouched in the event that further prints of the film become necessary.The NFPF also provides an excellent definition of restoration as something that "goes beyond the physical copying of the surviving original materials and attempts to reconstruct a specific version of the film. Ideally this involves comparing all known surviving source materials, piecing together footage from these disparate sources into the order suggested by production records and exhibition history, and in some cases, enhancing image and sound to compensate for past damage" (NFPF, 2004, pp. …