SAVING LOST FILMS AND MAKING THEM LOOK NEW

Cineric Inc. Surmounted Daunting Problems In Making Exhibition Prints For The Historic Film Retrospective
“UNSEEN CINEMA: EARLY AMERICAN AVANTGARDE FILM, 1893-1941”

By Robert A. Haller (Anthology Film Archives)

Since June 2001 an unusually large twenty program series of mostly 35mm films has been touring the world. “Unseen Cinema” has returned to the eyes of the public--scholars, film fans, filmmakers, and audiences at large--more than 150 films that were long deemed lost or inaccessible. “Unseen Cinema” premiered in Moscow in 2001 at its annual film festival, then moved to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Subsequently it has been presented at the National Gallery in Washington, at the National Film Theater in London, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, at three museums in Spain, and many more, including at its archive sponsors, Anthology Film Archives and the Deutsches Filmmuseum (Frankfurt-am-Main). In terms of the numbers of films presented and the numbers of sites where “Unseen Cinema” has been or will be seen, it is the largest touring film program in history. Curator Bruce Posner spent nearly ten years tracking down films that until now only existed as footnotes or titles in history books published generations ago. “Unseen Cinema” is the product of both a patient search and sophisticated laboratory conservation.

Many of the eighty films in the series that Cineric worked on required restoration--a major challenge for Cineric Inc., the corporate sponsor and primary laboratory for the project. While several other labs prepared prints for “Unseen Cinema” they were working with proper printing elements. Cineric had to restore (and in many cases also preserved) films that existed only as battered, old, faded, shrunken 16 mm or 35mm negatives or prints. In several cases films from private or public collections were already disintegrating when they came to Cineric. Most of the films had shrunk over the decades before the came to Cineric. They were copied onto new negative stock on an optical printer with adjustable registration pins. One of the films, the Loony Lens Movietone newsreel, was so extremely shrunken that Cineric staff had to manufacture a new set of registration pins and sprocket wheels to handle the original elements. In the cases of films that were black and white prints that had been tinted or toned to be color, Desmacolor prints were made from black and white film printed onto color stock to recreate the color of the original print.. The Soul of the Cyprus (1920) was made from a Library of Congress original that had been both tinted and toned. A color negative of Soul was made to carry both color effects. In Salome (1922) the replication of the original hand tinting was done shot to shot with color gels used as masks. (It is ironic that the processes of tinting and toning both yield emulsions which are more stable than regular, contemporary color film stocks.)Some of the films to be restored were on nitrate stock that was sticking to adjacent coils of film. These had to be carefully separated by hand. The “safety” films that were afflicted with vinegar syndrome had to be similarly handled. In the cases of 16 mm and 35mm films made by non-commercial or independent filmmakers there were special problems posed by the way different film stocks had been spliced together seventy or more years ago. Different shots made on different stocks would shrink at different rates--requiring shot to shot adjustments as the originals were duplicated. Prints and duplicate negatives that were several generations away from the originals, but which were the only source elements were often too flat, or too contrasty. Cineric corrected these problems by adjusting printing, processing, and the use of different print stocks to maximize the visual quality.

Mary Ellen Bute and Norman McLaren’s 1940 Spook Sport survived in 35mm in just one extremely faded color print (with an optical soundtrack). This film was restored through experimenting with non-standard film stocks to boost the contrast of the faded color. An additional problem was that some shots of the original Bute film were missing, and they had to be interpolated from a 16 mm print, which meant more color tone matching. Further, the soundtracks of the 35mm and 16 mm source films had to be made consistent. And as this was being done, the Trackwise sound lab was suppressing hiss and other noise on the tracks.

Balazs Nyari, the President of Cineric, decided to undertake this Unseen Cinema project because of his strong belief that such a traveling film program would stimulate greater interest in film preservation. Said Nyari: “Fortunately we have a staff of people who look at all of our projects as a personal and technological challenge. Believe me, there were great challenges here. We had to rely on almost every skill in optics, in processing, in film handling, and in film technology that we have learned in our thirty years of doing this kind of thing. I’m very pleased that Unseen Cinema is being so well received.” Some of the other participating archives and companies contributing films to Unseen Cinema are the Library of Congress, George Eastman House, Anthology Film Archives, the Danish Film Institute, the Munich Filmmuseum, the News Film Archive of the University of South Carolina, the UCLA Film Archive, the Jugoslovenska Kinoteka, Warner Brothers, Turner Entertainment, Gosfilmofond of Russia, YCM Laboratories in Los Angeles, the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Germany, and a score of private collections. return to HOMEPAGE