Ten years on in the transition from analog to digital, the film archival field is still in search of a balance between digital technology, which, while becoming ever more diffused is yet to be fully standardized, and photochemical means and services, which are growing increasingly scarce but are often still part of restoration and presentation workflows. Following the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) theory, the methodological approach to this chapter still offers a valid method to look at the current situation in the film archival field. Its key concepts of “relevant social groups,” “technological frame,” and “interpretive flexibility,” as described in the following sections, will once more help analyze the field and its changing relationship with tools, practices, and (analog, digital, and hybrid) artifacts, namely films.

Despite the new dynamics in the field after the digital rollout, the relevant social groups in the last decade have remained the same and, as we will see in the updates, the film archives and (most of) the laboratories that were previously discussed are still among the major players. As reported in Chapter One, after the digital rollout many laboratories have gone out of business. As for the three laboratories discussed in the earlier editions of From Grain to Pixel, one has indeed ceased its operation while the other two have managed to adapt and survive. Interestingly enough, those are the ones that still offer a full range of (analog, digital, and hybrid) film restoration services.

While the “technological frame” is progressively changing, it still follows the same cycle of stabilization and closure in which the established analog film artifact is gradually being replaced (in a number of practices such as restoration and projection) by the new digital film artifact. As argued a decade ago, film, being a complex technological artifact, is still the site of “interpretive flexibility,” and as such is described differently by different relevant social groups (from filmmakers and archivists to film producers and scholars) as each group attaches a different meaning to it.

In this chapter, brief updates have been added to the original sections describing the film archives and film laboratory. The updates are mainly based on recent interviews that have been carried out with the same people (e.g. curators, heads of archives, and laboratory professionals) that were interviewed for the 2009 edition, or with their replacements.