STABILITY: THE KEY TO A FILM ARCHIVE. Notes from a Film Archivist

Anyone who works with and appreciates photochemical cinema knows an essential truth: films must be preserved in the right conditions. A true film archive is not merely a place to store reels; it is a microclimate, a delicate atmosphere that must remain unaltered year after year so that time does not become the enemy of film materials.

Stability is, indeed, the cornerstone of every film archive. As important as keeping the temperature as low as possible is ensuring that it does not fluctuate—that it does not suffer sudden swings of heat or cold that might cause the material to expand, contract, or release compounds that eventually lead to the dreaded vinegar syndrome, color fading, or emulsion brittleness.

In our archive, we maintain a constant temperature throughout the year that never drops below 15°C nor exceeds 20°C seasonally (and the daily fluctuation never surpasses two degrees). It may seem like a generous margin, but achieving such a stable, seasonally immovable range is no small feat—especially in Galicia, where the seasons sometimes appear to compete to see which can introduce the most humidity into the air.

Today, for instance, the thermometer outside reads 9°C, and the hygrometer shoots up to 86% humidity. A perfectly ordinary day here. Yet upon entering the archive, the contrast is almost supernatural: a thermal and atmospheric calm entirely detached from the Galician squall, with a stable 53% humidity and a perfectly contained temperature.

To those who do not work with film, these figures may look like mere technical details. But anyone who studies photochemical cinema—especially those who must safeguard fragile cellulose triacetate materials more than half a century old—knows that the life of the images is quite literally at stake in those numbers.

For a film is not just a support. It is memory, light captured, time held still. Every frame preserved in its integrity is a victory against oblivion, a commitment to permanence. And such permanence can only be achieved through stability: the constancy of a climate that protects what was filmed, lived, and projected.

In a land like my beloved Galicia, naturally rich in humidity, maintaining an archive at 50% relative humidity and within a stable thermal range is almost an act of cultural resistance. But it is precisely that resistance—that tenacity with something both artisanal and romantic—that allows future generations to keep hearing the mechanical hum of a projector and to witness, as if newly developed, images born decades ago.

Film, ultimately, is a living organism. And like all living things, it needs stability in order to keep breathing.