Paper tensions: from flipbooks to scanners - the role of paper in moving image practices

Abstract

Concerning the materiality of reproduction and duplication in film, this chapter explores the overlap of moving image and paper technologies to examine aspects of film archiving. It presents an assemblage of paper-related moving image artefacts: paper prints, posters, flipbooks, optical printers, scanners, pre-cinematic, early and digital cinema technologies, to explore what we can understand about the moving image when viewed outside of the cinematic apparatus of screen and auditorium. By considering the moving image and its history in this way as overlapping mediums, we broaden our understanding of moving image technology in its material and immaterial aspects, exploring how subjects and technologies interact to produce what is permissible as film documents. Beginning with Elsaesser’s assertion that there is a need for a new mapping of the moving image in the wake of early cinema research to understand audiovisual media technologies better. This chapter utilises media archaeology and cultural techniques to explore the connections between print media, duplicating film and digital scanners, concluding that practices of archival film production and techniques of archival scanner operators in the process of duplication are dynamically co-created through spaces of exchange.