Beyond Theory – Interview with Rūdolfs Henčels by Natālija Lāce

The path to working in an archive often begins quite unexpectedly – through personal interests and chance encounters. How did you end up at the Latvian State Archive of Audiovisual Documents and what lead you to film digitization?

Before working at the archive, my only contact with this field was when my friends and I were filming skateboarding videos. At that time, we worked with mini DV cassettes, and by editing various videos, I gained some understanding of editing programs and cassette digitization.

Then, quite by chance, through a friend of friends, I learned that the archive was looking for someone who knew how to edit and work with video cassettes. I applied. At first, I had absolutely no knowledge in this field, complete zero. I basically only knew how to press this and that button on a specific camera, and then press this and that in the program to achieve the desired result. But I had no real knowledge in this field.

When I started working at the archive as a video cassette digitizer, later also with film, the colleagues working there at the time simply showed me where, how and what to press to perform necessary processes. And most importantly – not to touch anything that shouldn’t be touched. But I still had no in-depth understanding. I learned everything through self-study by reading a lot of literature and approaching other people who had done something similar.

I started working at the archive 12 years ago. I worked for about three years and then enrolled at the Latvian Academy of Culture, at the film school, studying cinematography. That, of course, gave me a lot – understanding of film history, digital image, and the technical purity of analogue film.

Archive director Dace Bušante encouraged me to take this step. She would always say that I needed to study somewhere, because I didn’t have higher education and I couldn’t actually work at a state institution without it. From year to year, she would ask me: “Well, don’t you want to study something?” Before I never had anything that truly interested me, so I had postponed it. But then this opportunity appeared, studies in cinematography that only opened enrolment once every four years. That one year I had this opportunity. It interested me, I applied and completed my studies. When I started work, I was the senior archivist in digitization, then deputy head of the Technical and Digitization Department, but when a separate digitization department was created, I was made the department head. It’s been more than two years since that.

The Document Digitization Department at the Latvian State Archive of Audiovisual Documents is relatively new. Less than 5 years ago, the archive had neither appropriate equipment nor a unified approach to film digitization and restoration. What principles or best practice examples you chose to adopt from other countries’ archives, and when was it clear that we had to go our own way?

Of course, it was a huge responsibility – to develop completely new film digitization infrastructure from scratch. At that time, we did not have much experience or proper understanding. We had some knowledge, but also a thousand and one questions.

Therefore, we engaged Krišs Roziņš from Latvian production company VFS Films. He works there on colour grading and mastering films and has excellent technical knowledge. He developed our film digitization infrastructure, naturally consulting with others about what equipment was needed for it to be compatible with other devices and on various aspects, such as where we would store data, how fast data arrays we needed, how quickly this space would fill up, and many, many other questions.

A lot was learned from the period when we worked with Lokomotīve film studio that digitized our films as an outsourced service within the European Union project Digitization of Cultural Heritage Content. They already had a developed workflow, as well as equipment – scanners, servers, data arrays, etc. This had already been tested in practice, and we already knew it worked, so we adopted some things from them as well.

International practices were also considered, of course. It was difficult because there were several points where decisions had to be made and compromises reached. For example, in what format to save the film files? We cannot afford to save the best possible format because we simply don’t have that much space on servers. We don’t have the resources.

At the same time, we also must follow international standards that specify certain formats. If the digitization equipment doesn’t save the file in a non-commercial format that meets the guidelines, then you must copy and convert it to the recommended format for archives. In many cases information is lost that way.

For example, there are films with very severe colour degradation – the red channel is very degraded. The whole film is basically completely red. If we don’t perform post-processing on the original scan and save it in the recommended format, then later it won’t be possible to do the restoration on this material as well as if it had been saved in the original format.

This is the big problem – how do we follow these recommended standardized formats. I understand that these formats are recommended because they won’t become commercial, you won’t suddenly have to pay for them. But it’s not always the best solution.

We can’t save everything in the scanner’s original format because the files are terribly large. We simply can’t do it because we don’t have space to store them, but also just to create these recommended formats from the original file, temporary space on servers is needed, which we also don’t have.

The digitization process is not only technological – the quality of this work is also impacted by the person doing it – their knowledge and attitude toward archive documents. A properly assembled team can be as crucial as appropriate equipment. How do you manage team building? What is more important – technical skills or personal motivation and interest in the field?

I can say that I’ve been very fortunate. Currently, my team has two people who already had prior knowledge specifically in working with archive documents, film strip digitization and post-processing. The other employees were so interested that they were easy to train. Everyone in this department has education in cinematography. That’s the closest to archive specifics, because for someone with training in cinematography it’s not difficult to learn this workflow.

Yes, indeed, personal motivation is the main driving force. I would say that if I had to choose between two candidates when hiring someone – one with a higher score but less enthusiastic, the other with a lower score but very interested in the job I would choose the second one. It has been proven that you can train a person if they have the desire and are truly excited about it. Then you can be sure they will also stay working longer.

It’s worth investing time in training. It’s also important that the person likes the work processes themselves because it can also be very monotonous work. It can’t be that you only like the result, then you will get exhausted very quickly. If you can’t find joy in the processes themselves, then it can become depressing.

Digitization of film documents is not just physical conversion of the document, it is also, in a way, a very personal encounter with the time and place that is trapped in the image and created in a specific political or social context. How is the workflow formed, how do you determine what to digitize and what not, what takes priority over something else? How important is it to know the archive’s purpose?

In my department, we sometimes don’t know either and ask these questions ourselves – what is the purpose? How to form workflow and how to determine what to digitize and what not, what to digitize first and what – later? Or in general – how important is it to know the specific archival purpose?

Our archive’s overarching goal is to popularize documents, make them accessible to the public. If our goal was only to preserve documents, then we would also digitize considerably less. And in such case, we would probably also go the other way, where we would take those best formats recommended by international standards for storing document copies that are larger, and would simply have less of those.

What is most important – in principle, the most important thing regarding films is to scan the right material. To scan it correctly and save. Because that is where we stand at the moment – we don’t know what will happen, perhaps in fifty years artificial intelligence will be able to restore everything better than we do. People will only need to perform quality control.

When we talk about ethics in the context of film digitization, how far do you think film post-processing should go for the digital copy to still be original?

You can talk about this a lot. I don’t have my own concrete position, because I could agree with three different viewpoints, all of which are very well arguable.

First, you view the digitized image on a digital screen. That’s already basically an intervention, because the film is meant to be shown through a projector on a screen. When you look at a digital screen, that’s already basically an intervention and you don’t see the film equivalent to the original.

The only option where you can judge this is in the case of full film restoration. In such cases, the final result is printed back onto 35mm film or in the format the film was originally created. Then you can put it on a projector and see it restored, but exactly from the device for which it was intended.

Most often, when performing a full film restoration, in practice, two versions are made. One is the archive version, where guidelines are closely followed to achieve a direct 1:1 equivalent – nothing is improved, just enough is done to get as close as possible to the original. Even with all the cinematographer’s errors not being corrected.

In full film projects where both archive and commercial versions are made, sometimes it’s possible to invite the cinematographer who filmed it. Often, they will say: “You can do this. This is better – at that time I didn’t have this and that, and I couldn’t film it that way. I like how this looks,” even though it’s not how it looked on film.

There will always be some subjectivity. There’s nothing to measure it by. Basically, the reference would be how the film looked at the first screening, when it was first put in a projector. But each film had copies, each copy is already different. Each copy will have different scratches.

Are you restoring the film itself or this specific copy, considering exactly this source material’s condition?

Basically, if we wanted a truly authentic document copy, it would have to be not only on the original medium with original devices, which is generally impossible to obtain nowadays. I have been to several restored film screenings, for example, “Jaws” – where they show the restoration variants from a 35mm projector. Then you can see that indeed a lot is intentionally left as it is, not improved. Some scratches are left, or dust is left. Obviously, correcting something else would be too much intervention.

In full restoration projects, they restore the film. Which means that at first you collect information: newspaper articles, any written information about the film, where you can find out what copies existed at all, where they were shown, what the film looked like.

Then you can start thinking about where to get source material. You need to collect as many different copies as possible. Then you watch everything and decide which will be the base copy. Most often, if the negative has been preserved, then the negative is used. But there might be a case that at that time when the film was shown, there was censorship. The director had completely different ideas, they had filmed other scenes that simply weren’t included in the film due to political censorship. In these cases, if you get those scenes that weren’t included, you include them and perform a kind of restoration of the film’s original idea. There have been such cases. If the director is still alive, you contact them, coordinate the film restoration and inclusion of censored fragments, and they are happy that they can show the film as they had intended.

How long is the film digitization and post-processing process, can it take several days?

Certainly yes, it all depends on how far we go and how masterfully we want to do it. Here at the Latvian State Archive of Audiovisual Documents we have a simplified post-processing for everything, which we designate as specific things that definitely don’t count as restoration. These things count more as preparation of the material for display after the digitization process.

Time consumption varies greatly. If we know that this film will be shown in cinemas or on television, then we also do more than the simplified post-processing. Then the film is digitally cleaned from dust and scratches. Stabilization problems or flickering is corrected. If there are colour fluctuations – lighter in one frame, darker in another, or the colour palette is different in each frame – it will look like the colour temperature changes within three seconds. Every three seconds you have green, purple, green, purple. This is visually very disturbing and needs to be corrected, otherwise the viewer cannot normally perceive the content.

Could artificial intelligence speed up this process and give a better result? How will this affect work processes?

I don’t even know. If the result is truly better – more authentic, more corresponding, more equivalent to what it should look like visually on a projector – then it would be illogical for me to argue that no, I’ll keep doing it this way – the old way. If artificial intelligence can do it better, then it should be used.

I generally also like all those restoration technical processes. Not just the final result, but really just doing it. If it turns out that artificial intelligence will be able to do it better, then this part will disappear for me. Then my work might become more boring in the sense that I will only perform quality control, only check and say something to that artificial intelligence.

I think specifically in these processes – it could simply be better also in the sense that the same result I achieve, it simply achieves faster. But the question is whether it will be able to make those creative and ethically complex decisions that are necessary in the restoration process.

In your short film “Poem about Film Digitization” you give the viewer insight into your work process using the approach of poetic documentary cinema: from film preparation to digital copy demonstration. The film not only shows the archive’s work process but also makes it understandable and accessible to a wider audience. How essential is communication with the public for the archive, so that people understand all those processes that are performed before they get to a quality film?

It seems to me that it’s like with anything – when a process is foreign to someone, then they have less understanding of it. But if they understand how it happens, then they can better appreciate the work that has been invested in, and they don’t take it so for granted. When they watch the final result, they can appreciate our contribution – what it took to achieve such a result.

Is it important? I really don’t know. On the one hand – yes, why wouldn’t it be? For me as the doer of this work, it’s pleasant if someone knows what I do, if someone appreciates that work has been invested here. But that is in a way egotism, self-centredness. What concerns me more and what I would want – is to talk with the public so that the public sees more, educates itself. So that viewers have higher demands for image, for audiovisual work, both for image and for sound. Because currently, it seems to me, the bar is terribly low.

These low demands have also been promoted by the fact that on the phone’s small screen absolutely everything looks more or less good. On that small screen, you don’t see smaller details. On a large screen, if there were any errors, you would notice one hundred percent of them, but on a smaller screen, you don’t notice them.

It seems to me that people have very low demands – not in terms of content, but specifically in terms of image quality and sound quality. People are content to watch on YouTube films pirated from somewhere, in terribly poor quality that don’t reflect the real work at all. Yes, I would very much like people to have a higher bar. This would also help so that maybe not so much meaningless content would be created, low quality content in my opinion – content with few or very low visual values and visual expression tools. It would be good if people had those demands, and consequently, higher quality content would be created. There would be less of it, but it would be more qualitative.

As a film industry professional, your demands for image are also higher than the viewers. Isn’t this contradictory to the need to digitize large volumes with limited resources?

Yes, I indeed have higher demands for what I see. When I digitize and perform film post-processing, I follow some internal higher standard. There really is all that decision-making and all those grey areas.

But I think that what we currently achieve is a very good result. Since we have the new infrastructure, everything, except for those few films that have had restoration projects, is considerably better than what was digitized before the Digitization Centre at the Archive was established. All other material, any Latvian films digitized earlier are of manifestly worse quality than anything we currently digitize with this infrastructure. People are seeing it in such good quality for the first time, with exception of those cases when special cinema screenings were organized.

As in many other areas, also in the audiovisual archive field, considering historical context, experience, technical possibilities, and legal regulation, we are closest to the other Baltic states – Lithuania and Estonia. What differences do you see between Latvia’s, Lithuania’s, and Estonia’s approaches to film digitization?

Unfortunately, I can’t say much about Lithuania, but basically the difference is in the defined overarching goal. For us, it’s popularization, but at the Estonian National Archive, they are more inclined toward preservation.

Estonians also have all sorts of cool things in terms of popularization. They have a platform similar to Netflix called Arkaader – that’s cool. But they don’t have mass digitization. They have a workflow where they use a relatively low-quality solution to digitize documents very quickly simply to be able to evaluate content, but there’s no equivalent quality to the original.

To be able to do something with that scanned material afterward, they have another workflow. Some files they keep purely to add documents to the database or use elsewhere for content. But if there’s some specific digitization project – probably then by some principle they select which documents to create preservation copies for.

Where does Latvia stand on the world map in the field of film digitization?

I would say that we are definitely one of the most developed archives currently in the film field. In the summer of 2024, I participated in the FIAF Film Restoration Summer School in Bologna, where classes took place in a film laboratory, and I concluded that overall, we do many things in very similar ways, I mean the infrastructure both in restoration and digitization terms. There is a big overlap with what we also have. This also convinced me that we have made many correct choices in creating this infrastructure.

We benefited because we did it only five years ago, not in the 1990s. I spoke with a colleague from Bulgarian archive which had just recently gotten money in one of the European Union projects to create a film digitization centre. Last November, they did it, and they had even greater advantage because they already knew a lot about what doesn’t work in other archives, what problems there have been, what devices break down faster, etc. I mean, all this information was already available to them. Now the later you start doing it, the better you will be able to do it.

What would be the next steps we should take to develop film digitization – technologically, professionally, and in terms of collaboration?

That’s such a broad question. It also needs to be defined what the main goal would be. If we stayed with the same goal – continue to make this material accessible, then we could simply wish for more resources, both infrastructure resources, respectively, more post-processing workstations, and more employees. That would be something to improve.

We did one project this year – we did basically 90 percent restoration for the 1980 feature film “Ja nebūtu šī skuķa” (“All Because of That Girl”) directed by Rihards Pīks. We did this almost full restoration in part also because we wanted to experiment – what would it require, what is possible for us, how much time it would take, where we might need some additional resources. So far, it seems to me that with the existing infrastructure, we can do about that much.

For us to be able to do it regularly, we would just need additional resource – additional workstations, additional human resources, to be able to do it in reasonable time while also continuing to simply digitize in parallel.

For example, in a commercial laboratory that performs film restoration, the workflow is set up so that each person does only one thing. One person does colour correction, another does digital restoration, each person does only one thing. Here everyone does several things. Basically, almost all things can be done by any one person, which might not be so good in terms of overall quality, because it’s harder for one person to fully know and focus on several things.

But on the other hand, if we had the setup where each person performs only one thing, firstly, we would need more people. And, secondly, the employees would change twice as often, because you can’t endure doing the same thing over and over again. Not everyone can do that, and there are some processes that after a month, if you just do it as a job that has to be done – you simply can’t stand it. Then the quality starts to disappear from your work.

If this conversation was like the last frame of a film – how would you like to end it? What would you like to say to those who will read this interview?

I already touched on this question a bit, but it seems to me that doing this work, you can’t think only what you will get out of it… if I thought about whether my work is appreciated, this would be the worst job – one of the worst jobs, because there would be so many hours invested, but no one really sees it like that. But that has never been an obstacle for me. And I think it’s the same for anyone, if what you do is meaningful to yourself, then other stuff doesn’t matter.

Or well, also if you have one more person, even just your colleague, for whom it also means something. That’s enough.

It seems to me that everyone needs to find such a thing to do where you have this feeling that it’s satisfaction for yourself and you don’t need appreciation from outside to do it. You simply need to do things that you care for yourself.

Rūdolfs Henčels started working at the Latvian State Archive of Audiovisual Documents in 2013, focusing on the digitization of video documents. In 2016, he began studying for a degree in cinematography at the Culture Academy of Latvia, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 2019. From 2020 to 2022, Rūdolfs worked as the Deputy Manager of the Audiovisual Documents Digitization Department, and since 2022, he has been the Head of the department. In 2024, he attended a film restoration course at the FIAF Film Restoration Summer School in Bologna.