Thursday, July 14
An exciting start to the festival is John Ford's long-lost backstage comedy Upstream, the first preservation to result from the recent identification of 75 American films at the New Zealand Film Archive. This informative article gives a great summation of the labwork involved, and I'll just point up the good news that no digital scanning was involved, just good-old fashioned elbow grease and photochemistry. A side note: the title of the film itself is an accident of history, being changed by Fox from The Public Idol, pre-release, to cover for another film that had been booked into theaters without actually being made. This re-christening has been enshrined in the new print and not subjected to revisionist Trumbo-izing. Accompanying short Why Husbands Flirt, also repatriated from the Kiwi cache, was similarly preserved and new prints made, stateside.
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Friday, July 15
In the 1970's George Eastman House received a nitrate print, with Danish intertitles, of Huckleberry Finn, on which the festival print is based. A safety print was made in 1980, and the intertitles subsequently translated back to English (an inexact process, obviously). Mocked up digitally and printed to 35mm, these titles then had color added via the Desmet process (described in the article on Upstream cited above), and were spliced into the 1980 print, the balance of which remains strictly photochemical in origin, from which new preservation negatives and prints were made.
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As for The Great White Silence, the festival blurb quotes the BFI restoration team as using "the latest photochemical and digital techniques". Unfortunately, this understates the extent of the digital work done in this restoration. In fact, a photochemical restoration was undertaken in the 1990's, for which the best existing elements were printed and a new black and white positive made, but the cost and complexity of chemically reproducing the tinting and toning scheme of Herbert Ponting's film evidently forestalled this venture's completion. While dying and chemical toning are certainly the most authentic ways to color silent-era films, the Desmet process is an economical analog alternative. Instead, the BFI scanned all the best elements previously identified and worked in the digital domain thereafter. The only photochemical aspect of the job was the ultimate creation of preservation elements and a print, not one frame of which escaped digital processing along the way.
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Saturday, July 16
Mauritz Stiller's Gunnar Hedes saga (The Blizzard) is the least complete film in the festival, missing a good third of its original footage. What there is derives from a tinted nitrate print duped to black-and-white negative by the Swedish Film Institute in the mid-70's. All that remain today of that nitrate print are isolated frames, but using these as a color reference, a Desmet-process tinted print was produced in 2009. Intertitles were compared with censor records and repositioned where necessary. Additionally, 26 intertitles missing from the incomplete film were reinstated in an effort to yield the most coherent narrative possible.
The Goose Woman is an all-photochemical preservation/restoration by UCLA based on two diacetate 16mm prints, one of them Kevin Brownlow's. (16mm nitrate was never produced as it would be too dangerous for the amateur market for which this gauge was intended. Diacetate is an early safety stock, a forebear of the more rugged triacetate which would eventually supplant 35mm nitrate in the 1950's.)
The restoration of Allan Dwan's Mr. Fix-It parallels almost exactly that of Huckleberry Finn above. A sole surviving tinted nitrate print was duped directly to safety stock, and then re-translations of the intertitles (from Italian this time) spliced back in. We will be treated to all-analog images here.
I just heard the word from the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, who assure me that Die Frau nach der man sich sehnt (The Woman Men Yearn For) is a copy, photochemically produced, by the Bundesarchiv in Berlin from unknown elements. Murnau-Stiftung, per their website, is certainly angling increasingly towards digital methods of restoration, but this is not a restoration at all.
Sunday, July 17
Lois Weber's Shoes, as intriguing a film as it sounds, will be shown in a print entirely the result of digital intervention, incorporating simulated tinting and re-translated (from Dutch) intertitles.
Lursmani cheqmashi (The Nail in the Boot) by Mikheil Kalatozishvili (Kalatozov, more familiarly) provides a fascinating case study of preservation and communication within the former Soviet Union. My contact, formerly of the Georgian National Film Center, describes having to use an intermediary outside the field in dealing with Gosfilmofond in Moscow, where the work was carried out. Apparently Moscow holds an original negative, and a new finegrain (interpositive), dupe neg, and screening print were struck, the last two sent to Georgia where further prints can be made in the future. This process was photochemical in its entirety--Gosfilmofond has the ability to scan digitally only at 2k resolution and without wet-gate (which would hide scratches). Unfortunately even their analog work suffers characteristic defects, as their printers evidently have only a sound aperture. This masks off the leftmost portion of the full silent frame, resulting in awkward compositions and off-center intertitles. Reputedly, prints from Gosfilmofond have for this reason become notorious at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. My contact describes other dealings during this period with the Moscow lab, in one instance being refused permission to send a colleague to supervise subtitling, in another requesting a copy of Georgian silent Gogi Ratiani and receiving instead Gogi Otvajni Letchik, which had been thought a lost film. Who knows what kind of New Zealand-like trove resides there? Accompanying this film is the short Chess Fever, described to me as "a standard 35mm positive print", i.e. not a digital job.
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So let's have a look at the tally: of the 13 features presented in 35mm, eleven are essentially fully photochemical in origin, and only two spat out of a digital pipeline. For the time being, it seems photochemistry reigns supreme at the Silent Film Festival.
Thanks to my correspondents, Brian Belovarac, Daniel Bish, Brian Block, Bryony Dixon, Nino Dzandzava, Eric Liknaitzky, Mark Standley, David Vashadze, Todd Wiener, and Anke Wilkening, for helping illuminate the behind-the-scenes work that went into these prints.