Film Reconstruction and the Forensic Imagination in The Case of “Spedizione Franchetti nella Dancalia”

Early on 2020, University of Udine signed a collaboration with Instituto LUCE, aimed to a digital restoration of a supposedly lost expedition film: Spedizione Franchetti nella Dancalia (Mario Craveri, 1929, b/w, silent). LUCE and University of Udine brought to light a large amount of film materials that included 35mm original negatives, DupPos Lavanders, Positives, and a 9.5mm reduction print but no trace of an edited version of the 35mm film. The pandemic forced the project to shift remote and forbid working on the original film materials, thus a long time was dedicated to an inspection of edge-to-edge digital scanned copy of every element: a “digital fac-simile” (Rosenthaler 2001) through continuous scanning. While planning the philo-genetics of each digital element, as a crucial stage of recensio and collatio, on one hand we could assume that digital environment supports and sustains an “ideal allographic environment” (Goodman 1976), as to say “a premeditated material environment built and engineered to propagate an illusion of immateriality” (Kirschenbaum 2008) – a premise that helps us to legitimate any philological enterprise led on digital witnesses of analog films; on the other hand, digital technology tends to and “must produce perfect outputs from imperfect inputs, nipping small errors in the bud. This is the essence of digital technology, which restores signals to near perfection at every stage” (Kirschenbaum 2008, 133). Given this premise and the pivotal role that errors and innovations play in the stage of recensio and collatio, this proposal intends to reframe the “digital witness” by stressing the materiality of film (in digital film preservation) as an ongoing process of interpretation (rather than a given characteristics of the object), where digital philology is always digital hermeneutics. In fact, in this digital environment we are forced to constantly find a balance between a “Formal materiality” and a “Forensic materiality” (Kirschenbaum 2008) of film. The first refers to the evidence perceived “at the junctions” between the analog and digital states of the film, or the “differences” the restorers perceive while shifting from the state of the analog film in their mind (a state of “forensic imagination”), to the state of the film appearing in the digital witness (i.e. a digital stressed instability that correspond to a change of film element). The second pertains to the evidence of practices that impacted on the “hardware”, as to say something that is happening only in the digital object (i.e. digital artifacts produced by the digitization conditions or the technical characteristics of the digital file). To this end, we will discuss the “digital witness” characterized as a “physical object” (signs and traces inscribed in the digital medium), as a “logical object” (data extracted through the digital processes of inspection), as a “conceptual object” (the digital image as it appears on the screen), and as a physical data “storage”.