You Shouldn't Have Been That Sentimental:Film Restoration Ethics in Hitchcock's Vertigo

摘要

This essay is an attempt to demonstrate that the seemingly innocuous phe-nomenon of bringing a film to a restored version is fraught with ethicaldilemmas that equal or rival the more commonly acknowledged technicalchallenges. The case of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo exemplifies both categoriesof difficulty; they are, in fact, deeply related. The 1958 film had seriously dete-riorated by the time that James C. Katz and Robert A. Harris completedrestoration in 1996. Among the more controversial aspects of this processwere changes to the original sound track, approximations of colors due tofaded negatives, and the necessity of choosing an entirely new film gauge tocompensate for the obsolete, widescreen VistaVision format.