From Edge to Edge: The Restoration of La battaglia dall’Astico al Piave (1918) and the Search for a Digital Historical-Critical Infrastructure

Abstract

The restoration of La battaglia dall’Astico al Piave (Italy, 1918) has been funded by MiC (the Italian Ministry of Culture) and carried out by the University of Udine in collaboration with several film archives. Starting from a historical-philological and restoration framework, the case study offers some reflections and considerations between the fields of the digital humanities, film preservation, and cinema history. Furthermore, it provides a concrete opportunity to achieve the two goals of raising awareness about the status of digitized film artefacts, framing them as the result of modelling practices, and documenting the film preservation process as well as the surrounding historical and cultural network in a digital historical-critical infrastructure.