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This chapter is an investigation of what film restorationists do and how they think and talk about their work. Current restoration discourse and practices literally assemble and help to shape cinema history and reveal how the moving image archive influences the ways that a film history is understood. Focusing on several film restoration case studies and in-depth interviews with some of the country's foremost film restorationists, and the analysis of restoration commentary on the DVD version of Lost Horizon, my aim is not to critique the current methods of film restoration, but to interpret the way restorationists and the archival community both conceptualize film restoration and practice the piecing together of history. This knowledge helps us to better understand how restorationists regard the cinematic object as historical artifact and how the contemporary culture of the archive engages its relationship with the past. The work of restorationists and their particular kind of film-remaking show us the trench work of (re) constructing cinematic history. The restored film should be understood as new type of film born from the cinematic and archival sensibilities at the turn of the twenty-first century.

The film archive that has sought to preserve the filmic world of the twentieth century is a project that is as nearly complicated as modernity itself. While critics and theorists have necessarily looked to cinema as a way to make sense of temporal and spatial shifting taking place in modernity, focusing on how and why archivists and film preservationists have attempted to save cinema sheds new light on how modern people imagined and then created a way to confront, reveal, confine and hold on to the recent past. In other words, this is a study of how modern people apprehended the past and conceptualized and enacted history making, by way of the film archive. It details archivists' and preservationists' perceptions and methodologies for securing artifacts that they deemed culturally and cinematically significant so to understand how they negotiated the present and imagined the future, while laying claim to the past.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, archivists work professionally and diligently to contain their collections, but the sheer amount of materials make containment nearly impossible. Today's curious researchers who access the film archive have the potential to have a far more adventurous and liberating archival experience than their predecessors. The massive amounts of material, the collections that represent nearly every facet of the twentieth century experience, and scanty documentation create practically perfect conditions for those bold researchers who desire to build their own corridors through the past. Certainly, there are practical problems. Too much material with too few guideposts can make archival wandering frustrating. But the frontier conditions of the contemporary film archive may quite possibly represent the future of history making, and if we stop resisting its somewhat chaotic nature, we might begin to better understand its capacity to reshape the way we make sense of the past. Put another way, to accept that the film archive doesn't resemble or function like any other sanctioned storehouse of cultural memory, we have a better chance of understanding how the film archive can better foster innovative methods of accessing and narrating the past.

This chapter focuses on the 1960s, which offered the Romanian film industry a unique opportunity to develop and diversify, thanks to the considerable increase in film production, the establishment of a National Film Archive, the issue of a monthly film journal, the generalization of professional training in all related areas and the possibility to team up with West European partners. Film production in the mid-1960s amounted to 15 fiction films, 25 cartoons, 76 newsreels, 150 documentaries, mostly stereotyped comedies, mysteries, antifascist tales about the unflinching heroism of Romanian soldiers. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, almost half the film production consisted of adaptations of established literary authors such as I. L. Caragiale, Liviu Rebreanu and Mihail Sadoveanu, as well as more recent ones such as Mihail Sebastian and Ion Ag â rbiceanu.