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2nd Filmmuseum Biennale

Digital Technologies Meet Early Cinema
Netherlands Filmmuseum
5—10 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 80’s 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 interpolation——one 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 Filmmuseum’s 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 Dulac’s La Coquille et le Clergyman from 1927 based on Antonin Artaud’s 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 Filmmuseum’s 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.

 

 

 




Updated 1st May 2005


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