In the widest sense, preservation assures that a movie will continue to exist in as close to its original form as possible.

[6][7] Although institutional practices of film preservation date back to the 1930s,[8] the field received an official status only in 1980, when UNESCO recognized "moving images" as an integral part of the world's cultural heritage.

[5] Most films made on nitrate stock were not preserved; over the years, their negatives and prints crumbled into powder or dust.

Cellulose acetate film, which was the initial replacement for nitrate, has been found to suffer from "vinegar syndrome".

Restorers sometimes create a composite negative (or composite dupe) by recombining duplicated sections of the best remaining material, sometimes on "a shot-to-shot, frame-by-frame basis" to approximate the original configuration of the original camera negative at some time in the film's release cycle.

The problem of having to transfer the data as new generations of equipment come along will continue, however, until true archival standards are put in place.

[14][30][31] The aesthetic and ethical implications of the use of digital technology for film preservation are major subjects of debate.

For instance, the senior curator of George Eastman House Paolo Cherchi Usai has decried the shift from analogue to digital preservation of film as ethically unacceptable, arguing, on philosophical terms, that the medium of film is an essential ontological precondition for the existence of cinema.

[32] In 2009, the senior curator of EYE Film Institute Netherlands Giovanna Fossati has discussed the use of digital technologies for the restoration and preservation of film in a more optimistic way as a form of remediation of the cinematic medium, and has positively reflected on digital technologies' ability to broaden restoration possibilities, improve quality, and reduce costs.

[33] According to the cinema scholar Leo Enticknap, the views held by Usai and Fossati could be seen as representative of the two poles of the digital debate in film preservation.

[35] The following year, Henri Langlois founded the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, which would become the world's largest international film collection.

[36] For thousands of early silent films stored in the Library of Congress, mostly between 1894 and 1912, the only existing copies were printed on rolls of paper submitted as copyright registrations.

[37] For these, an optical printer was used to copy these images onto safety film stock, a project that began in 1947 and continues today.

In 1978, Dawson City, Yukon Territory, Canada, a construction excavation inadvertently found a forgotten collection of more than 500 discarded films from the early 20th century that were buried in and preserved in the permafrost.

[43] However, to move such highly flammable material such a distance ultimately required assistance from the Canadian Armed Forces to make the delivery to Ottawa.

[45] Individual preservationists who have contributed to the cause include Robert A. Harris and James Katz (Lawrence of Arabia, My Fair Lady, and several Alfred Hitchcock films), Michael Thau (Superman), and Kevin Brownlow (Intolerance and Napoleon).

Other organizations, such as the UCLA Film and Television Archive, have also preserved and restored films; a major part of UCLA's work includes such projects as Becky Sharp and select Paramount/Famous Studios and Warner Bros. cartoons whose credits were once altered due to rights taken over by different entities.

[46] Beginning in the 1970s, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, aware that the original negatives to many of its Golden Age films had been destroyed in a fire, began a preservation program to restore and preserve all of its films by using whatever negatives survived, or, in many cases, the next best available elements (whether it be a fine-grain master positive or mint archival print).

He was joined in this effort by fellow film makers who served on the foundation's board of directors—Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Sydney Pollack, Robert Redford, and Steven Spielberg.

Meanwhile, the dominance of home video and ever-present need for television broadcasting content, especially on specialty channels, has meant that films have proven a source of long-term revenue to a degree that the original artists and studio management before the rise of these media never imagined.

Thus media companies have a strong financial incentive to carefully archive and preserve their complete library of films.

The recent years rapid incursion of digital technologies in the field has somewhat redefined the vocational scope of film preservation.