"Cinema Revival: A Festival of Film Restoration" runs through this weekend at the Wexner Center for the Arts on the OSU campus. It features both restored films and experts talking about some of the changes in the field. Wexner Film Curator Dave Filipi tells Alison Holm it's a timely topic, because everyday, somewhere in the world, irreplaceable films are deteriorating...
...and there's only so many people that can work on these projects, and there's only so much money to work on these projects. And so then it's prioritizing all this stuff, you know; do you preserve "Lawrence of Arabia", or do you preserve what may be the only home movie of something that happened in Boston in 1932 or something like that.
Now, adding to that, and I think this is another reason why we wanted to do this festival, is digital technology is really changing the game. It's providing archivists with all of these wonderful new tools to restore films, in some cases films that it was almost impossible to do anything with them until digital technology came along. But then that introduces a whole other set of issues as far as preservation goes. We know film lasts a century or more. There are films from the late 1890's that still exist. We have no idea how long digital on a hard drive lasts. And through the people that we're bringing in, the experts that we're bringing in to talk about these issues, people are going to hear about those issues first hand.
With so many ways to watch movies now - streaming, Blu-Ray - it behooves the owners of these films to clean them up and make them look as presentable as possible for home consumption. And ideally what they would do is a digital restoration of it. They would go through and scan each image, frame by frame, and the person doing the restoration would get rid of the dirt, get rid of the scratches. But as one of our guests, Grover Crisp, is always quick to emphasize: 'do no harm'. And that means don't take anything out of the picture that was in the picture. Conversely though, what's starting to happen now, because there is this rush, the studios want to digitize their libraries, sometimes the films are being scanned and they're not being restored on a frame-by-frame basis. You can set the machines that do the scanning to remove the scratches, remove the dirt. But sometimes what happens when you do that... let's say there's a flock of birds: the reader might read some of those birds as dirt, and all of a sudden you might have 20 fewer birds than you had before. Or the snow, the snow might disappear from a scene. Things like that, if you're just kind of doing it quick, to digitize and get it up on a... or get it out Blu-Ray or on TV or whatever, things like that can happen."
You have some wonderful speakers who can address the technical and perhaps ethical issues of this, but you've also got some great examples of films that have been restored....
"Yeah, I'm really excited about the lineup that we were able to put together. it's a good cross-section of different types of films - documentary, animations, classics by some of our greatest directors.... On Thursday night we're going to be showing a new 4K restoration of Alfred Hitchcock's last film that he made in England before he came to Hollywood, called "Jamaica Inn". We always think of "Vertigo" and "Psycho" and "Rear Window" and things like that and "Jamaica Inn" always gets put to the side; it's not very Hitchcockian and things like that. And it's a terrific film, there's scenes of great suspense, and Charles Laughton is fantastic in it. And the film is going to be introduced by someone local - a lot of people know Tim Lanza of the Cohen Film Collection and they've really been stepping up their game and doing these high-profile restorations.
We're going to be showing another one of their films later in the weekend, "Syncopation". Which is a film from 1942 and it traces the origins of jazz as they moved into the swing era. It's a terrific film, it's very entertaining and what's also interesting about it, it's often cited as a film that - given the era in which it's made - it's an unusually positive portrayal of African-Americans. There are a number of characters that are real, well-rounded charactors, they're not just all caricatures and stereotypes. And we're showing a short with that called "Symphony in Black" which shows Duke Ellington composing a piece and then it cuts to the performance of that, back and forth. And that also includes some early rare footage of Billie Holiday. So, that's a program I would highly recommend as well. "
There's always an educational component to everything the Wexner does: what would the Wexner like people to take away from this - other than enjoying some good movies?
"Two things: I think people just assume everything is accessible: "I can just go on Netflix and watch this. I can just go on iTunes and watch this. I can just go buy the Blu-Ray and watch this." And people don;'t think that somewhere there is the original of that. And that has to be taken care of in order for future generations to watch it. To put in people's minds that it's important to take care of the original materials as much as possible.
But then also I think I put the talks by Lee Kline from the Criterion Collection is going to discuss restoring Satyajit Ray's "Apu Trilogy" , one of the great, great works of world cinema... He'll be talking at 5:00 on the Friday of the festival. And then following that Grover Crisp from Sony is going to do his presentation. I think people will be surprised how interesting and how inspiring and how, just almost griping sometimes, the stories of these restoration projects can be. How much work goes into it, how much thought goes into it, how much craftsmanship goes into doing some of these restorations. and I guarantee people will, if they come to those programs will be riveted by how interesting it is, and how the amount of work that goes into making these films look as good as they can again."
That's Wexner Center for the Arts film curator Dave Filipi. The "Cinema Revival" film festival runs through Sunday. More information is available at wexarts.org.
