Reviving Gestures and Insect Life in the Films of Sara Gómez: Ethical and Aesthetic Issues of Digital Restoration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: From 2022–2024, the Vulnerable Media Lab (VML) at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario digitally restored several documentaries made between 1962 and 1973 at the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) by the revolutionary Black Cuban filmmaker, Sara Gómez. Save for her one posthumously released feature, De cierta manera (dir. Sara Gómez, 1977, Cuba) , Gómez's films were rarely seen outside Cuba. In the intervening decades, the actual 35mm elements had fallen into disrepair in storage in Havana; when they arrived in Canada they showed everything from mild humidity stains to significant, and irremediable, mold damage. This paper traces the digital restoration of Mi aporte / My Contribution ( dir. Sara Gómez, 1972, Cuba ), the first film completed during the VML's Sara Gómez project, recounting the ethical concerns that arose and the decisions we made in the process of restoring the films.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".