Archival Effect, Found Footage, and Photographic Dichotomy. Truth and Truthfulness in Historical Documentaries

How do we recover and preserve memories through archived visual sources? This paper will address the use of archived footage in features and documentaries. Helped by digital technology, today we stress the lack of ontological structure of virtual support through its myriad visual declinations from the "original” source. Through documents, film footage, and photographs the historic validation is assumed by the viewer as a trustful proof or, to quote Michael Zry, ”[...] photographic images seem to carry the promise of the true and accurate representation of history” (2003, p. 47). The use of archived footage (motion picture and photographs) is compared in two different directorial approaches in order to exhibit the degree of interventions on each case study. Valuable film heritage is restored and preserved in archives around the globe: What if some ”excerpts from archived movies” are in fact reenactments or fake found footage marked as ”never seen before”? Is digital manipulations of historical footage justified enough for shifting to a ”trendy look” for modern viewers, even if the connection to historical reality is lost?