The Silent Watchdog: Winter 2013

The exception is The Thief of Bagdad, which the Cohen Film Collection, current steward of the Rohauer Library, has put at the vanguard of its effort to systematically exploit its holdings digitally.

The three Buster Keaton shorts also hail from the Rohauer horde but the prints themselves predate the current ownership and its digitization push. No information is available as to how far removed these prints are from the camera negative, but I'm told they "should be fine". As for the non-pictorial elements of the films, One Week features a new opening title card and The Playhouse new intertitles throughout (hopefully with the original text; Raymond Rohauer was a notorious meddler), while The Scarecrow retains its original titles.

Shattered mirror!

Snow White will also feature newly-created titles, photographed on film and spliced into an entirely photochemically produced preservation print from Amsterdam's Haghefilm (recently bankrupted and relaunched as Haghefilm Digitaal) to replace the Dutch titles inherited from the source material. This print is on color stock, in order to incorporate a Desmet simulation of the original tinting.

My Best Girl is a 2001 all-photochemical restoration from UCLA based on an acetate finegrain, with footage from a 1940's 16mm print used to cover for some problematic or missing sections in this master positive. Once again, the intertitles have been re-created.

I will boil down the as-always copious German-language restoration notes found on the Murnau-Stiftung site regarding their work on Faust.

As was usual before the development of quality duplicate film stock, international versions of the film were printed from alternate negatives, comprising sometimes alternate angles on the same takes as the German, having been photographed simultaneously with two cameras, and sometimes alternate takes altogether. Over the years, these inferior versions, which might be considered distinct films in their own right, have been viewed much more widely than what one today would call the Director's Cut: the original German version. Only the American cut, supervised by Murnau himself, rivals the German in quality.

The German negative is currently represented only by a 1926 cut nitrate print with Danish intertitles and a (now) more complete 1948 nitrate dupe negative of this print, so this 1996 reconstruction utilizes also the Murnau-approved American version, in camera-negative and dupe positive, as well as French and other cobbled-together international versions, the tedious work of comparing prints shot-for-shot carried out by L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna. As only the French version held Murnau's preferred title card backgrounds, but in poor condition, their reconstruction comprises the only digital work done on this project.

Thanks to Jared Case, Tim Lanza, Anita Monga, Gary Palmucci, Daniel Wagner, and Todd Wiener for their help in nailing down the facts.