light-weight technical equipment, designed to be held (the camera only requires a fragile tripod). It is also the signature of an artistic and militant practice that was indifferent to the ideal of a flawless technique. Thus we are now reaching the limits of what is relevant to correct during restoration. The goal is to get closer to the work’s original state — through hypotheses and trail and error — not to “perfect” it.

The second type of intervention concerned the texture of the images: image noise, contrasts, outlines, shadows. Early black and white video image should rather be called grey, in the words of Jean-Paul Fargier. Grey, not dull or hazy: the levels of grey found on the reference tape were varied. They must have been relatively accentuated, without, however, covering the entire black to white gamut. The restoring work aims at improving the presence of the bodies, faces and objects.

The third — and most tedious — type of intervention con-cerned the numerous isolated defects. Like all early videotapes, which were the victims of repeated viewings and of aging due to variable storing conditions, the image of SCUM Manifesto was pep-pered with hundreds of tears. While the restoration tool has filters enabling the automation of these corrections, the restoration work remains in part manual for more precision. Some very degraded images were thus individually treated using Photoshop.

The opening credits presented a folded-tape defect, character-ised by a grouping of black lines, unreeling on the picture. It was impossible to remove them without proceeding to the artificial and tedious reconstruction of the image. A solution would have been to freeze the image in its “cleanest” state, but on the contrary, we felt it was essential that the vibration of the analogue picture man-ifested itself in this introduction. The image provides little infor-mation and its value today is, above all, to announce the texture