At the foot of the screen: on critical editions of film

Editio denotes 1) the action of publishing, and 2) the result of that action, a published book . In the humanistic era, the term was frequently (perhaps exemplarily) used to refer to the classics. Therefore, edere is understood as intentionally distributing, disseminating, transmitting a work. The act of writing is not sufficient for edere; it entails the production of copies (from an archetypum; i.e., the definitive draft of a work, or, more precisely, the version of a work prepared by the author to be distributed). These can be hand-written and/or printed manuscripts. During the ensuing copying (from the archetype or from a later copy), errors arise. By the second half of the fifteenth century, the term publico was less common than edo, but it was gaining in usage. With time, and the success of the printing press, “to publish” came to mean “to put into print”. At the start of the history of printing, the person who typeset and printed books was the printer and editor; in the modern industry, these two roles have become distinct. Another meaning of editor (from the Greek ékdotos, “I edit,” whence the term “ecdotics” arises) is as curator of a text, someone who stabilizes another’s (the author’s) text. In this sense, the editor recovers, renders, and restores the (authentic) text, making it, as much as is possible, conform to the (final, mature) wishes of the author, or reconstructing a certain edition. In the end, the editor is a critic, someone who puts together a critical edition. Clearly, we have been talking here about texts (in the philological sense) that are “implicated” materially (as pieces of evidence) and they are distributed, both horizontally (transmission) and vertically (tradition). Texts that are written and edited, that come to be published, circulated, and handed down as copies. Film denotes a “membrane,” and a large number of books are membraneous. A volume (volumen) of a film is a reel (a spool to be unwound). In English, the “editor” is the assembler of a film. The editor decides on the order and “closure” of a film text. Enough with analogies – since a film is not (only) a cinematic text (whatever that means), a film is not a book. What a discovery! And yet, for those involved in the cinema, terms such as a “print”, a “copy” (reproductions, serialized versions, master copies, etc.), are not foreign. Editing is a fundamental part of any cinematic undertaking. Now, among those who deal with “past” films (read: old, ruined; in short, silent films), there is no one who doesn’t find that for the same cinematographic work, there are never two identical copies. This is sometimes due to the deterioration of the material of the film, sometimes to differences in editing, and sometimes to both these reasons. From this situation arises the need to undertake restoration work, or rather to prepare a restored edition. When it comes to restoration, we have already had occasion to affirm the need for documentation, and have come up with the following aphorism: without adequate documentation, we do not have the right to summon the term nor the practice of restoration . Cinematic restoration faces both material and critical problems. Both problems, as can be guessed and immediately verified, are inseparable (think for example of voids in films). However, while being inseparable, they remain two distinct types of problems, just as in contemporary philology, codicology (the study of the physiognomy and external history of codes as books) is enucleated, differentiated from textual criticism, because their subjects of study are different (book/text). Again, let’s be clear – we are not suggesting absorbing a film into a text. Quite the opposite. We want to distinguish the text (of a film) from the (cinematographic) work, the material (structure and appearance) from the image in an attempt to avoid any undue confusion – and to avoid any type of abusive intervention of restoration. Let’s put it this way (another aphor...