The technologies involved in the projection and, more generally, the showing of motion picture films have the reputation to be of negligible importance in the transmission process they are part of.Likewise, and because their fundamental principles haven't changed much in more than a century, these technologies can encourage us to believe that they haven't changed at all. Thinking that would be a mistake. Indeed, they play a key part in that showing and transmitting process. What's more, these technologies are at the core of the process that rules the evolution of cultural and technological contexts, and, in consequence, that of the motion pictore films they involve. Whenever their originl technology becomes obsolete, motion pictures film are then copied onto more modern carriers. Those operations always imply complex and subtle changes in the original work. The nature, principles and the consequences of these barely predictable and permanent changes are so complex that most of them still remain to understand and explain. The purpose of this thesis is to study the evidence and clues the processes discussed above have left behind for us to find, hoping that that evidence might help us understand that legacy, and, also, how that legacy process works, through which motion pictures are being handed down from generation to generation.
