The Archival Impermanence Project

How do classic films remain alive and authentic amidst the shifting sands of time, societal upheaval, and technological advance? The Archival Impermanence Project is a unique work integrating detailed film restoration case studies from the dawn of cinema to present day, in the framework of an organic theory of practice. Growing from the multi-decade career of award-winning restorationist/filmmaker Ross Lipman, it compiles a diverse assembly of essays, lectures, and rare archival documents. Accompanied by copious illustrations and in-depth appendices, it is destined to be an invaluable resource to a wide range of scholars and archivists. An additional section of historical essays on classic films restored by the author illuminates the ways in which archival work enables new understandings of canonical titles, inviting a wide range of cinephiles and movie lovers to the fruits of this specialized field. Together, the book’s diverse components propose a new way of looking at the act of film restoration within a context of the only known condition of life:  impermanence itself.

Ross Lipman, Senior Film Restorationist at UCLA Film & Television Archive for seventeen years, now runs his own company, Corpus Fluxus. He has restored films from the dawn of cinema to the present era. A 2008 recipient of Anthology Film Archives’ Preservation Honors, he is a three-time winner of the National Society of Film Critics’ Heritage Award. His feature documentary Notfilm was named one of the 10 best films of the year by Artforum, Slate and many others. His writings on film history, technology and aesthetics have been published in Artforum, Sight and Sound and numerous academic books and journals. For more information: www.corpusfluxus.org.

^{The Archival Impermanence Project (2025)
Paperback ISBN 978-1-942782-91-9 464pp 7×9.4 inches, with colour images
Hardback ISBN 978-1-942782-90-2 464pp 7×9.4 inches, with colour images}