Mazzanti, a world-renowned film archive and restoration specialist, has been asked by the European Commission to produce a report on "the challenges of the digital era for film heritage". In 2005, the Commission produced recommendations for all EU member states for preservation, digitising and storage of film stock. The Commission now wants to update those recommendations, particularly as digitising in the 21st century isn't as black and white as it once seemed to be.
"The big question now is how do we make sure that digital files get preserved," says Mazzanti. There is a misconception that once something is digital, it lasts forever. It's the opposite, in fact. As people know from dealing with their own files, hard disks can fail, the next version of Windows might not open them."
This is a problem with digital storage of everything, in fact. A book might last 200 years before it crumbles, but a digital file could fail to open next week. "There is value in making it possible to show film from the 1930s, '40s and '50s," says Mazzanti. "What if in 50 years we can't show anything that was made it 2010?"
An example of Mazzanti's point is the fantastic story of Dawson City.
Located in the far northwest of Canada's Yukon territory, "Dawson City was at the end of the film trail," says Mazzanti. In the first half of the 20th century, it was too expensive to ship reels of films back from the remote location, so they just sat there. In the 1970s, excavation work on the town's Grand Hotel uncovered more than 500 reels of old nitrate film stock, which had been preserved in permafrost. "It was an old swimming pool filled with films," says Mazzanti. "Dawson City is never going to happen in digital. If you find hard drives in a pool after 50 years, they're not going to work anymore."
The meaning is clear: "The files on the hard drive will not last, while the film reels on the shelf will last."
Which is not to say that film stock should not be digitised. But the film industry has to realise that shooting films in digital does not come with a built-in preservation guarantee. And preservationists need to continuously monitor and update files. Preservation is, therefore, an ongoing process.
Mazzanti is on his way to Los Angeles this week, where the Italian previously lived and worked as a consultant before being brought to Brussels by Cinematek in 2009. He'll be discussing these issues with Hollywood film studios for a comparison of European and American preservation techniques, which the Commission specifically requested be part of his report, due at the end of this year.
Cinematek, says Mazzanti, not only began the discussions around digitising and storage back in 2002, it is also one of the five largest film archives in Europe. Bottom line, says Mazzanti, "you store everything twice, on two different media, so that if one goes obsolete, maybe the other one survives. That is what you should do with your photos of last year's holidays anyway. So we are doing what everyone should do."
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