I AM HOLDING a slimy piece of 35mm film unceremoniously clipped from the fourth — and only remaining — reel of Street Justice, a film that has been housed in the Moving Image Archive in the USC School of Cinematic Arts for years. It’s wet because I’ve been soaking it in water out in the back yard in a big jar. It stinks, like old vinegar. The optical sound track along the edge has dissolved into yellow goo and images once neatly boxed in their tidy frames are oozing, in blue and green rivulets, one into the next. After this wilted mess dries a bit in the sun, I will scratch it with a wire brush, paint it with some bleach, and maybe sew a seam down the middle with a sewing machine. Then I will digitize it by taking a picture of each remnant of a frame, sequence the boxes back together, and allow the traces of these processes to reveal themselves as a film…
Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/scratching-the-surface-handmade-cinema-in-the-digital-age/