Notes on the digital ecdotic of film

Abstract

The article aims to reflect on the theoretical and critical implications of producing digital artefacts through scanners during the so-called “digital intermediate” process for film pres-ervation. As already pointed out by Barbara Flueckiger (2018), the scanner and its setting set for the remediation (Bolter-Grusin 2003) and digital transfer of an analog image, do not guarantee a neutral transmission of data from the original analogue media; the scanning, on the contrary, and the associated software, determine continuous innovations, adjustments abstracts 195 and corrections to the transmitted data. As pointed out by Matthew Kirshenbaum (2008), in fact, it is inscribed in the very nature of the digital to formatting "perfect” outputs from imperfect inputs, "normalising" if not just automatically "restoring" the signal at each stage of the operation. Moving from such premises, this article further questions the weight of what we could define as the scanner’s “authority.” The scanner’s actions impact – before any human in-tervention – the appearance of the film in its digital form and change its formal character. To what extent can we qualify the active instance – or the “authority” – of the scanner? How to critically qualify the innovations introduced by the scanner in the remedied image? Under what conditions could we discuss a reliable digital copy of an analogue film? Far from being an excessively technical contribution, the article will reflect on the critical and aesthetic implications of considering the scanner as an “innovative” infrastructure that has not yet received sufficient theoretical and speculative attention.