The origins of the project

The origins of this project date back to 1991, at the start of activity of the Association of the European FIAF Archives (ACCE). One of the aims of this association was to obtain as much help as possible from the European Community for film preservation, restoration and conservation. The participating archives had recognized that, together with financial help for restoration, training of staff was one major issue and need for all Archives.

This was a need shared both by small and big archives. The first are usually interested mostly in gathering knowledge and information about techniques and methods of film restoration, technical facilities, and to improve preparation of their staff, both concerning direct practical restoration work and quality checking of the works obtained by external laboratories.

On the other hand, the latter have the problem of establishing training techniques and procedures and having at disposal some training materials specially designed to train new staff or to improve their technicians' knowledge and abilities.

EPICAR, a non-profit institution for professional training based in Bologna having always had a special attention on restoration issues (it had organized the film restoration school in Bologna as well as many other courses in other arts restoration), proposed ACCE to use the recently EEC proposed FORCE project as a possible tool to solve this problem.

In fact, FORCE project has been created to finance the production of training materials. A Committee of partners was formed to that purpose and a project submitted to the European Community, which approved and financed it. The Committee was formed by the film archives having their own internal laboratory and some commercial laboratories which had special relationships of collaboration with FIAF archives.

In practice, these are the members of the Committee: Nederlands Filmmuseum (Amsterdam), CNC/Service des Archives du Film (Bois d'Arcy), Cineteca del Comune di Bologna (Bologna), Cinémathèque Royale (Bruxelles), Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv (Koblenz), National Film and Television Archive (London), Filmoteca Española (Madrid), Cinarchives (Paris), Haghefilm (Leiderdorp), Hendersons Film Laboratories (London) L'Immagine Ritrovata (Bologna), Studio Film and Video Communications (London).

So, technicians from film archives and laboratories could work together in true collaboration; in fact they all agreed that they shared similar needs in training, and that knowledge about film restoration techniques did not belong to one person or institution only, or to one type of body only, but that experiences had to be compared, knowledges and informations diffused as much as posible, also in order to help comprehension and to find a common language.

The work of the Committee

After checking the situation, organization, characteristics and training needs of film restoration labs, the Committee decided that the training materials had to match some characteristics.

First of all they must cover the complete process of film restoration. So, the Committee designed a structure to train technicians in the following phases of the process, each of them considered as separate, from a training point of view:

1. Identification and cataloguing. 2. Reconstruction. 3. Physical repair and preparation. 4. Cleaning-washing and Scratch treatments. 5. Grading. 6. Printing. 7. Processing. 8. Sound Remastering. 9. Quality control. 10. Quality checking.

Secondly, it is evident that both workers and bodies want to save as much time as posssible; in other words, the structure has to be highly flexible: it must allow the employing institution or the worker to design the training routes according to specific needs. Actually, the whole course gives all information needed in the field of film restoration, but each module composing the course does teach just what is needed to train a technician in a specific work. Each module being independent, if a printer must be trained, the candidate must follow only the Printing module; while, if wider preparation in more than one work is necessary, the student can follow several modules. At the same time, the Committee thought that not only strictly operational and technical jobs must be included but that all archives and some laboratories too, needed materials to train their staff in scholar works as identification and reconstruction.

Also, a major issue is to give all workers a general view of the film restoration process, aims and principles.

The Committee recognized that Open-Learning is the training method that could better match those needs, because it is devised to train people on-the-job and not necessarily in the presence of a teacher; the method is devised to have the student practice and study each subject and each part of the training course at his own pace, having the possibility to design his own training route and schedule.

Finally, in order to make the materials as useful as possible, a multimedia format was chosen. Each module includes a written text, but also photographs, diagrams and videos.

Presentation of the results

The Committee has always thought that a public discussion and evaluation of the results is necessary. Therefore, it decided to organize a public presentation of the course during a Seminar which all technicians, experts and archivists are invited to attend.

In this Seminar, the structure and the way of using these materials will be discussed, and people attending will have the opportunity to give the Committee their opinions, advice, and suggestions and to evaluate the possibility of using these materials within their organizations.

The Committee will take advantage of the yearly Festival "Il Cinema Ritrovato" - which is already a meeting point for archives and people interested in film restoration - to organize the Seminar, which has been scheduled on November the 27th

Gian Luca Farinelli
Nicola Mazzanti