The Exacting Magic of Film Restoration
The healing of these diseases is a delicate task, with a set of tools and potions to correspond. Of Sanctis was armed with Q-tips, glue, isopropylic alcohol, lemon oil and eucalyptus oil (practical to eliminate any adhesive residue from the surface of a film); A separate piece, devoted to the slowdown or the deterioration of chemicals, gave me a strange feeling of having wandered in the kitchen of a witch. Small film rolls, no bigger than the hockey rings, sat in a large glass pot, under a lid, with a silica gel. A label on the forehead said “desiccation treatment”. Different threats – Dample, humidity, warmth, old age, etc. – Call for various defenses, and another pot has been labeled “softening treatment (camphor)”. I was frankly disappointed not to meet a brain in a pot.
After collage, recording and lesson in chemistry, it was time for washing – or, to be exact, for an introduction to the BSF Hydra. It is a magnificent beast, made by a British company, Cinetech, and its work is to clean the film. With a reduced eye in the cinema, it looks like one of these machines you see in the background of a link film, in the heart of a naughty lair, exploited by a random scientist in white coat. (Needless to say, the poor sap can expect to be sprayed, thanks to 007, in a giant fire ball.) Cleaning is done with a non -combustible solvent, as well as a complex range of Capstans, rolls and “Dacron Soft Nap stamps”, by crossing up to a hundred feet of film per minute. At the Immagine Ritrovata, the Hydra also represents a border: the line to which the care of the film as physical stuff, by hand, approaches its end. Beyond alchemy, because the film is transmuted in digital form.
The first of the digital tasks is digitization. Enter a room imbued with dark blue luminescence, as if you dive into a cave, and you are welcomed by Ariscan, another benevolent monster, which emits regular light impulses. Up to five images per second can be scanned, and there is an exciting option called “Wetgate”, which looks like a scandal involving a member of the congress in a whirlpool. In fact, as Cenciarelli explained to me, it has a salutary effect: “The emulsion is so striped, and the lines are so deep, that it is scanned very slowly under a liquid that fills these wrinkles, like wrinkles on human skin.” Botox for movies!
The comparison is the comparison (which involves a framework analysis by frame of sources, in digital files with low resolution), followed by cleaning and digital retouching. The latter, instead of solvents and sweet stamps, deploys expensive software that sounds like cheap – Phoenix, diamond and “revival by blackmagic” scents. Always to come: correction of 2K and 4K colors, control, subtitling, sound catering and a glass of sweet wine to accompany your dessert. And do not forget the Arrilasers, the machines that save digital images on 35 mm. Film, allowing you, in style, to complete the loop.
From all these steps in the process, the correction of colors is that most likely to confuse the secular intruder – the innocent innocent who does not understand, let’s say, what the colors of hell have to do with a black and white film, and why they may need to correct. The truth is that the subtleties of the tonal range, including brightness and contrast, can be adjusted by the chief corrector. In the laboratory, I watched Simone Castelli, who was seated in a large console, facing a screen on which appeared a scene of “All that is not worth love” (1931), a comedy produced by Jacques Tourneur. (Eleven years later, in Hollywood, he made “cat people”. A jump.) In the center of the console were three dome -shaped buttons; While Castelli has turned them, still so slowly, with the finesse of a safecracker, the impact of the images has been modified. The black of a man’s jacket has become funerably dark. This brief modification was sufficient to rush into awareness of a film critic. When we rent a film to be visually rich and, to make good measure, to savor this wealth for its deliberate emotional intention, do we do something other than to react to an adjustment? What does he say about the strength of a film that he can literally be composed from top to bottom? As Cenciarelli said about the restoration process, “after all these years, there are so many philosophical bells that sound.”
For expert advice on these subtleties, I assumed, no authority would be more help than the director of the film who is restored, if he is still alive. Fake. Céline Pozzi, a director of the Immagine Ritrovata, laughed with my naivety. Directors, apparently, can be a problem. “For example, Wong Kar-Wai. He had this special neon look on his films, and he wanted to change it and move away from this cold light,” said Pozzi. “He said,” I’m not the person I was at the time. I changed. I have the right to change the film. “” The shades of Chaplin in 1942. All reason, Pozzi added, to have a film scan: “Preservation is always the basis of everything. clear In your goal on catering, this is the most important thing. »»
A person who thought about these puzzles as much as anyone who is Ross Lipman, who was the curator of senior cinema of the Cinema and television archives for the seventeen years. He now directs his own business, Corpus Fluxus, and recently wrote a book, “The Archival impermanence Project”, on the methods and implications of the restoration of the film. The title can have the flavor of a Prog -rock album, but the book is full of mind, meticulously detailed and prepared by common sense – a welcome gift in an often obsessive environment. The funniest song is a footnote, in which Lipman directs us to a small corner of professional dissent. “At a fundamental level, even the light crossing the spotlights has changed, because modern 35 mm spotlights use xenon bulbs with different characteristics of traditional carbon arches,” he writes. “Carbon arc lovers actually represent a highly specialized subgroup within the enlarged archive films community.” I like to think that the fights burst into projection stands like rival gangs, xenons and arcs, come to bitter blows.
Cartoon by Joline Jourdain
The moral of these quarrels is that the past East Another country, and that we can never live there. At best, we can pay a courtesy call. This is why, if you have an interest in the collision of the old and the new, in any field of effort – architecture, archeology, sexuality, table ways – I recommend “the gray zone”, a particular chapter of the book of Lipman. He defines the area as “this unexplored territory where a curator must make decisions when there is no final guide left by the filmmakers.” In such circumstances, he adds, authenticity is impossible. He prefers to ask if a restoration is faithful.
