“From 1966, the Cinémathèque Française began restoring some of Etienne-Jules Marey’s chrono-photographic tracks that had been conserved in his collection. The operation deals with about 400 little rolls of thin nitrate film recorded between 1890 and 1895, mostly negatives, 9 centimeters wide and one meter long, each containing about fifteen images. They are all mostly negatives with a very fragile backing, in an unreproducible format, these mythic images are practically untouchable and invisible in their current state.

The Cinémathèque Française’s decision to use the digital technique to restore this material should perhaps be rationalized, the process no longer implies a 35mm film transfer, but a special treatment and eventual transformation of the image itself. Paradoxically, the first operation consists of an attempt to immobilize part of the image, as though dealing with the reluctance of a very sick man. In effect, the digital process allows for the correction of camera unsteadiness, mitigating the viewing discomfort thus provoked. But this correction, if it is eccessive, can become equally displeasing to the spectator, involving the immobilization of the background in a fixed image for a matter of seconds. In this case, the horizon line freezes, the leaves on the trees stop trembling, the white tent loses its undulating reflection. The patient has healed, but has died in the process and even been embalmed. The subjects in motion (the man that runs, the horse that jumps) seem incongruous, like estraneous bodies transparently emblazoned onto a filmed décor. They disturb the perfection of the immobility. ‘I hate movement that moves the lines.’. Verlaine always used to say.

To integrate, by means of a simple cut and paste technique, gaps in the emulsion or to eliminate the scratches on the film’s backing can lead to the complete suppression of the signs left by time: the time of the film, like that of the spectator, testifies in anguish for the abolition of duration, and of the perverse effects of an eternal youth elixir. And yet, the digital technique also permits us to keep tabs on the different stages of the completed work: the actual state of the restoration of these chrono-photographic tracks is perhaps not definitive, and repentance is still possible.

The 35mm transfer and the 24 f/s projection implies a necessary repetition of the tracks and a multiplication of some of the images. In effect, the fifteen frames constituting each track would be illegible to our perception without this lengthening. Here lies the true betrayal without a doubt in comparison with Marey: to invest these hypnotically charged images generated by the repetition of the same object with an artificially prolonged period of time. If the subject effects a displacement in space (like the cat that walks, or the black horse that jumps), vanishing on the right side of the frame to immediately reappear on the left side restarting its brief trajectory. Time does not stop, it slides and falters. If the subject remains in the same place (one hand that opens and closes; Georges Demeny, with the expression of a somnambulist, eyes closed, repeating strange phrases like ‘Vous m’y poussez’, or ‘Le plus beau mur’) it fatigues us to trace the joint between the last images of the track and the first images of its repetition. The sensation of a litany persists almost enchantedly, it has a circulatory effect, of the closure of time upon itself. Thus, giving a ‘naturalist’ link back to the movement, the 35mm projection produces the magic of an irreal time and the fascination of an eternal return.

Two of the presented tracks are clearly longer than the others, and the studied movement seems less evident. These two ‘chrono-photographic rifles’ unfold before our eyes only once, perfectly legible due to their length. The man that collects his hat is free, after this unique gesture, to exit from the frame and to go wherever he pleases. By now fiction can impose itself…”. (Claudine Kaufmann)