Appunti di restauro digitale: sul concetto di “granulosità” nella ri-mediazione delle immagini cinematografiche

Both for its spatial and temporal aspects, the grain is one of the most difficult film material components to translate/transmit through the digitization process. As a “transparent” feature of the photochemical image directly tied to the emulsion’s silver grains, it is an integral part of the filmic matter which has been differently interpreted and controversially discussed (by archivists and restoration practitioners). On the one hand, the “disturbing” graininess of old films gets often digitally decreased (Robert Harris) as a price to pay to fulfill the current audience’s expectations and respect their sensibility (Cherchi Usai); on the other one, the graininess itself has been increasingly invested with an artistic/aesthetic value (see the cases of Nebraska or Nolan’s and Tarantino’s films). This tension between different points of views discloses a renewed intertwining of archival practices, film culture, epistemology of digital media and archaeology of analogue media. The present essay focuses on the texture/grain binomial to deal with the material transformation (re-mediation/metamorphosis) of the cinematographic medium as triggered by the digital turn. Following a backward path, we will start from the projection place – in which all the processes are finally synthesized on the screen surface giving the digitalized image a specific haptic and textural rendering/representation (Bruno) –, go through digital coding – in which the simulative gap seems to fall within the remediation strategies (Bolter and Grusin) – to focus as a last step on the “graininess” of film in its technical and historical aspects.