The Brooklyn Rail

Restorationist and filmmaker Ross Lipman was a film school dropout when he began working at Berkeley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in 1996. Fresh off a stint as a student-at-large at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Lipman worked under venerable BAMPFA curator Edith Kramer as a cataloger, though his background in photochemical labs afforded him the rare chance to shadow preservation projects. In 2024, I was a Ph.D. dropout. Fresh off a three-year stint in UC Berkeley’s English department, I became a research fellow at BAMPFA. I was brought on part-time, with a cohort of other grad students, to produce a digital database that, upon completion, will make accessible detailed accounts of all PFA programming dating back to 1967. My contact with anything that could be called restoration work was limited to brief, though giddy, tours through cold storage. 

Still, reading Lipman’s new book, The Archival Impermanence Project, I was brought back to Berkeley, and to BAMPFA. Much of the familiarity was processual. For instance, a wonderful essay on the difficulty of restoring Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks—which has no authoritative version—recalled the difficulty I experienced when dating screenings of Anger’s films in an Excel spreadsheet. Where Lipman pored over 16mm A/B rolls, my research team bent over delicate fliers, reading between the lines of faded programming notes to infer whether BAMPFA had shown this iteration of Anger’s Rabbit’s Moon or that. 

While physical material is central to Lipman’s project, the difference between folio programs and original camera negatives matters less here than the methodology applied to them both. That methodology is as interpretive as it is technical. What I mean by that is perhaps best illustrated by an anecdote. Before leaving my Ph.D., I took a proseminar on the best practices and critical peculiarities of my field. Most graduate programs require some equivalent course to put their students on the same page. But in this instance, the page itself had become a site of anxiety. A distrust of formalism had given way to historicism, had given rise to materialism, and finally to what appeared to be a turn away from the written word entirely. A colleague put it best: “If we don’t read,” she finally asked, “what is it that we do?” 

I posed a similar question to film restorationists for the April 2025 issue of the Brooklyn Rail. As digital methods continue to dominate film restoration and preservation workflows and the availability of film stock declines, I wondered what the shift meant for a practice that is, by necessity, always reaching both forward and back. What was the field of film restoration, I asked, after film? What becomes of the method when the medium has fundamentally changed, and is still changing? 

The Archival Impermanence Project answers that question by taking change as a fundamental condition of film restoration practice, in the same way that time and motion are the fundamental conditions of cinema as an art form. In his introduction, Lipman adopts the subtitle of Giovanna Fossati’s The Archival Life of Film in Transition as a kind of grounding mantra: “It’s all moving.” (The title of Lipman’s website, “Corpus Fluxus,” expresses the same principle.) Made up of discrete essays collected under the umbrellas of “Poetics,” “Case Studies,” and “Histories,” Lipman’s triptych work manages to resist even the seeming fixity of the printed word, turning back on itself in reflexive asides and epigraphs as it moves chronologically through his inimitable career. 

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Though there is hardly a masterwork of American independent cinema Lipman hasn’t had a hand in restoring (his case studies encompass such giants as John Cassavetes’s Faces, Barbara Loden’s Wanda, and Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, among countless other experimental and studio works), these collected works hardly offer a highlights reel. Rather, as essays in the truest sense—to mean efforts, or attempts—each case study works to ground the field-defining ethical and aesthetic quandaries Lipman has been exploring for the better part of two decades in the practical terms of specialized labor. 

Chief among these is the role of the restorationist in our “post-medium” moment, by which Lipman, borrowing from Rosalind Krauss, does not mean the obsolescence of photochemical film material. Rather, Lipman’s sense of the term refers to the unavoidable fact that medium specificity must mean something different in a time in which restorationists most often “restore” films to digital interfaces, and artists make moving image work intended for the big screen only for it to be screened on laptops, or the other way around.

But “meaning something different” does not imply meaning nothing at all. Meaning, in Lipman’s text, is abundant—even and especially in the absence of precise definition. In an essay entitled “The Gray Zone,” which Lipman calls the “most articulated expression” of his thoughts on film restoration, the author offers up a slew of metaphors by which we might understand the choices made by restorationists in “that uncharted territory where … there is no definitive guide left by the filmmakers.” The topology of the “Gray Zone” as geographic space is one of those metaphors (the essay is written as a circuitous “travel guide”); the technical sense of the term as it pertains to photography’s density charts and film exposure is another; the image of the restorationist as Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, who guides a writer and a scientist into a place at once “precise and imprecise,” is another still. This montage of figurative registers reflects a principled commitment to motion as form. That commitment speaks not only to the ontological condition of cinema but to Lipman’s own restoration practice—read, by him, and also by me, as a ceaselessly interpretive one. 

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If the Gray Zone is what the restorationist traverses, then the realm of interpretation is, Lipman notes, “where the restorationist lives.” Later in the same essay, Lipman articulates the need for interpretation as a response to one of film archivists’ central conundrums: “The paradox,” he writes, “is that ‘preservation’ of a temporal existence, even a mechanized one, is impossible.” 

Far from a call for stasis, acceptance of this impossibility, suggests Lipman, is necessary in order for restorationists to move forward. Interpretation, practiced in the Barthesian mode as a series of interdependent choices rather than attempts to arrive at fixed destinations, is that forward motion. 

For Lipman, a “temporal existence” expresses both the time-based nature of cinema and shifts in technological, social, attentional, and sensorial qualities that comprise a work’s production and reception conditions as it travels through the years. In this latter sense, it might describe any number of art objects, written work included. Indeed, Lipman treats his own writing as one such object. A note before “In Search of Sight-Specific Cinema” alerts us to a “shift in [Lipman’s] theoretical work’s focus from restoration practice itself to cinematic perception”; such reflection—such re-reading—is featured before every essay. Notable sensitivity to a work’s earlier iterations and reception contexts (offered as a lecture, published in a journal) even suggest Lipman may be reading his essays the way he reads a film to be restored: references to conferences and earlier drafts echo the sorts of lineages drawn out in, for instance, a piece on the disparate exhibition history of Bruce Conner’s Crossroads. 

I don’t mean to carelessly collapse one medium into another—or maybe I do, carefully. One of the most intriguing aspects of The Archival Impermanence Project is how openly it presents not just the difficulty, but the boundless possibility offered up by attempts to translate one form into another: film material into digital, 1s and 0s into a viewing experience, either of these things into writing. The term “digital restoration,” Lipman notes early on, doesn’t often make any sense: you can’t restore something to a state it’s never been in before. He opts for a phrase at once more and less literal: “re-membering,” for the way a free-floating digital entity is reincarnated corporeally when viewed by an audience. All over, Lipman’s descriptions highlight the indeterminacies produced by such transubstantiations. Language of the ephemeral, the phantasmagorical, the flickering, and the nebulous abounds. And yet there’s no loss of clarity, only an invitation to look, to read and interpret, more closely. 

When we read—a book, a film—what is it that we do? Lipman suggests that restorationists join the ranks of the collaboratively authored films they work on, alongside the lab techs and producers who have had some hand in them along their way (the myth of the auteur is, of course, only that, and, not to mention, passé). Though he doesn’t call it by this name, Lipman’s model of the restorationist-as-reader offers some relief from the pressure to produce “authentic” restorations—a term Lipman both “carefully avoids” and carefully describes carefully avoiding—in favor of “faithful” ones, which rely upon allegiance to an “abstracted idea” of the film at hand, rather than a (re)incarnation of its original, physical form. Ambiguity is, here, again, constructive, not reductive. 

That’s not to say we should opt to see everything a little out of focus. Put in Lipman’s terms, “not all [film] grain is alike.” The distinction between an abstracted idea that leaves you with the glorious new iteration of Killer of Sheep that screened in theaters this spring and an abstracted idea that leaves you with a digital restoration effort that looks “nothing like” the Kodachrome it was meant to resemble is a subjective one—literally. While film restoration has not infrequently been conceived as an objective practice, Lipman is undaunted by a subjectivity others might prefer to let go unacknowledged. More than anything, The Archival Impermanence Project demands that we, as lay audiences or professional interpreters, attend to our own attending; that is, that we see our own seeing, for that’s what makes it clear.

“To reiterate my very subjective definition,” Lipman writes in an essay on the distractions of at-home viewing, “I use the word cinema to describe works that need dedicated attention.” Here, subjectivity and linguistic slippage (“I use the word cinema to describe” versus “cinema is defined”) conspire, perhaps, to produce a kind of medium specificity for the post-medium age: one in which the imprecision of one form only brings another more precisely into view. This piece—writing on writing on film restoring—might be seen as another such attempt, by which I don’t mean it falls short, but rather that, regardless of what it does, we’ll just have to keep on trying. “The final text on any work,” writes Lipman, “is the work itself.” Reading carefully, alive to the kineticism of Lipman’s project, one might have to wonder: is work a noun, or a verb?