Exploring Past Images in a Digital Age is an outstanding new publication in Amsterdam University Press’s “Framing Film” series, for many years a goldmine for all those interested in film culture in the broadest sense of the word. The book is the result of an international pre-COVID conference in Istanbul, a circumstance that explains both the (still reasonable) delay of its publication and the ever-increasing importance of its topic.
As the title and subtitle of the book announce, the emphasis is less on the shift from analog to digital (this collection is not a user’s manual by trained archivists for younger colleagues or interested outsiders) than on the various uses of already digitized materials—a difference perfectly summarized by the late Thomas Elsaesser, whose contribution addresses the ethics of appropriation: “While analogue filmmaking seeks to capture reality in order to harness it into a representation, digital filmmaking, conceived from post-production, proceeds...