2nd
Filmmuseum Biennale
Digital Technologies Meet Early Cinema
Netherlands Filmmuseum
510 April 2005, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Event website: http://www.filmmuseum.nl/
Reviewed by Martha Blassnigg
University of Wales, Newport
lichtgestalten@hotmail.com
Alongside the two renowned annual festivals
of film restoration in Bologna and Pordenone,
Italy, the Filmmuseum in Amsterdam
has established its own biannual festival,
the Biennale. Drawing wide public
and international attention in its second
edition, the festival is beginning to
reveal its specialism as recent restorations,
newly discovered films and the accompaniment
of silent films with contemporary music
scores. The result was a most ambitious
program, comprising 35 films, almost all
rediscovered film jewels screened over
five days, and a sequence of presentations
and discussion forums focusing on restoration
specific issues such as digital restoration.
This ambition and courage was to be expected
since the Netherlands Filmmuseum
is well known for its openness for experiments
with new (and digital) technologies and
alternative treatments of the aesthetics
and ethics of film preservation and presentation.
In the late 80s it was one of the
first archives experimenting with the
duplication of tinted, toned, and stenciled
early films on color stock, and also stood
out with its famous "Bits & Pieces
Collection" (compilations of remarkable
early film fragments) as well as its experimental
musical accompaniments to silent
films.
One of the most memorable events of the
2005 Biennale was the screening
of one the many lost silent Hollywood
films. A worthy topic since more than
80% of the nitrate film heritage made
between 1895 and the mid 50s is
considered as lost. This discovery
was Beyond the Rocks, a melodramatic
star vehicle made by Sam Wood, US in 1922.
It featured two of the most celebrated
stars at the time in their only film together,
Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson.
The six reels of the Dutch release of
Beyond the Rocks was discovered
in the conservation department of the
Netherlands Filmmuseum between
2000 and 2004 during the registration
work of this recently acquired private
collection of about 2000 rusty film cans.
The tinted 35mm Nitrate Positive Print
was in relative good condition with some
parts of greater damage and chemical decomposition
(still visible in the restored copy),
which coincidentally affected the emotionally
most intense and dramatic scenes of the
film. Because of the international interest
in this remarkable film, extra funds for
the restoration process became available,
and the Filmmuseum found itself
in the luxurious position of being able
to restore a feature length film digitally.
To dispel the common misconception of
digital restoration as a substitution
process, curator Giovanna Fossati, responsible
for the restoration of Beyond the Rocks
and for digital restoration technologies
within the conservation department, pointed
out that for an archive, digital technology
compliments the photochemical duplication
process but does in no way replace it.
One reason for this is that digital technologies
still change too quickly and do not yet
offer reliable tools for archives to transfer
their entire collection on digital formats
for preservation. So far to date, the
good old celluloid is still the most reliable
material to preserve the film heritage
under the best conditions.
Nonetheless, Fossati was very positive
about the various new possibilities that
digital restoration technologies offer
for active film restoration and showed
some before and after
examples from Beyond the Rocks
and the values of the image manipulation
using Diamant software (developed
by HS-Art Graz in collaboration with the
Filmmuseum, see http://www.hs-art.com/).
Next to de-flickering, stabilization of
the image and dust-removal, digital intervention
includes interpolationone
example of which is the restoration of
an almost completely damaged frame by
copying image fragments from the neighboring
frames. The newly created frame is similar
to the original, but has not existed before
and as a consequence raises ethical issues.
On the one hand, there are the more orthodox
and "safe" approaches that avoid
any elaborate image manipulation, and
on the other, the experiment friendly
approaches chimes with the Filmmuseums
innovative spirit.
The addition of a musical score to Beyond
the Rocks created technical, ethical,
and aesthetic problems for the restoration
process. In order to duplicate a print
for cinema distribution, the soundstripe
had to be added to the film and the silent
35mm images had to be resized in order
to make space for the soundtrack without
loosing the original ratio. It was also
necessary to increase the frame rate from
the original 18fps to 24fps, the standard
speed in European cinema projection. To
achieve this effect, every third frame
in the film was repeated, a trick that
remains invisible for the general audience,
and only some of the archive specialists
claimed to have noticed it during the
screening. While the opinions on the ethics
and aesthetic decisions on the restoration
of Beyond the Rocks may have differed,
Fossati made very it clear on behalf of
the Filmmuseum, that in the first
instance, even before the public announcement
of the discovery of Beyond the Rocks,
the Filmmuseum has duplicated the
original Nitrate print via the photochemical
process in the laboratory to ensure the
immediate preservation of the decaying
material. In this preservation, the original
copy is duplicated one to one without
any manipulation, and the digital restoration
was made in addition to this copy in order
to gain a cleaner version of the film
with new soundtrack for worldwide distribution
in the cinemas and on DVD. And while the
Biennale was unfolding, the computers
in the laboratory of Haghefilm
at Cineco were running continuously
to create the English inter-titles for
the international distribution copy of
Beyond the Rocks, raising a further
ethical issue around the topic of authenticity.
The case of this new production, comprising
a digital restoration with a new soundtrack
opened up a substantial discussion around
digital technology for film preservation
and presentation, which were continuous
with issues that were also reflected in
other parts of the program of the Biennale.
For example, the additional value of digital
technology for film preservation and presentation
was a topic in the section "Archives
and Education" where the Filmmuseum
presented their collaborations with the
professionals Master program, "Preservation
and Presentation of the Moving Image"
at the University of Amsterdam (for more
information please visit www.hum.uva.nl/graduateschool).
For the early cinema connoisseur the Biennale
offered am ambitious program comprising
unique discoveries and recently restored
films, for example Germaine Dulacs
La Coquille et le Clergyman from
1927 based on Antonin Artauds screenplay;
and the 1941 version of Regen (Rain)
by Joris Ivens and M.H.K. Franken (Netherlands,
1929 and 1932) with the famous score by
Hans Eisler ("Fourteen ways to describe
rain"), which no longer existed in
its original. Elsewhere on offer there
was the most complete version of The
Robber Symphony (Friedrich Feher,
UK 1936) newly restored, and the most
recent restoration of Sunset Boulevard
(Billy Wilder, US 1950) presented and
introduced by Barry Allen, the head of
restoration of Paramount Pictures. The
Danish Film Institute also presented a
program showing such treasures as Afgrunden
from 1910 by Peter Urban Gad, staring
Asta Nielson in her debut, accompanied
amongst others by a documentary on Nielson
The Talking Muse by Torben Skjodt
Jensen from 2003. The "Danish Day"
concluded with another discussion around
the issue of restoration and digital technologies
with a particular emphasis on the approach
of the Danish Film Institute, which is
well known for its outstanding restorations
and its purist approach (in contrast to
the Netherlands Filmmuseum).
Music so essential to cinema constituted
another key focus of the Biennale,
featuring contemporary scores in some
most impressive musical evening performances,
such as the adventure film Le mystère
de la Tour Eiffel by Julien Duvivier
from 1927, one of the highlights of the
week, both in its unique restoration by
the Filmmuseum presented for the first
time and by its accompaniment by composer
Fay Lovsky together with an ensemble of
Dutch musicians; or the screening of Menschen
am Sonntag (Robert Siodmak and Edgar
G. Ulmer, Germany 1930) restored by Martin
Koerber in collaboration with the Netherlands
Filmmuseum, with a new soundtrack performed
live by the Alliage orchestra (available
on DVD). The performance of Spinvis,
by Erik de Jong and his ensemble, created
a true soundscape for the "Bits &
Pieces" compilation from the Filmmuseum,
as did DJ Aardvarck (Mike Kivits)
who turned the table until late on Saturday
night where half of one of the Cinerama
theatres was transformed into a dance
floor so that the Biennale audiences could
shake off their film festival stiffness,
again in an engagement with a "Bits
& Pieces" compilation named "Human
Bits".
Much more could be said about the rich
program of the Biennale, for a
complete overview please visit the Netherlands
Filmmuseums website at www.filmmuseum.nl.
Hardly ever has there been so much fresh
and new experimental breath in an early
cinema festival as at the Filmmuseum
Biennale, and it is a credit to the
team of innovative, engaging specialists
who were responsible for bringing it all
together. More significantly the Biennale
has successfully reached out for both
a broad audience and specialists from
the field of film archives and set a trend
with its innovative and experimental approach.
It has also set high expectations for
its next edition in 2007 where the audience
hopefully can share again some of the
excitement of the Filmmuseum staff
working in the cool vaults, opening rusty
film cans, which once in a while reveal
small or bigger jewels of film heritage.
The Biennale shows some of the
jewels of our film heritage in an excellent
festival created by a brilliant team of
the Filmmuseum in Amsterdam and
deserves all the credit for having created
a new forum where historical material
is approached with innovative ideas that
keep pace with contemporary technological
developments and anticipates visions of
the future.