From: db (email suppressed)
Date: Sat Jun 18 2005 - 15:26:22 PDT
On Jun 17, 2005, at 12:59 AM, david tetzlaff wrote:
> The situation is only going to get worse, and a lot of wonderful
> films are going to be lost to future viewers because all the prints
> will be shot, non-one will have a 16mm projector that works, and the
> stuff won't have been transfered to a high quality electronic format
> from whence it might move forward into the Brave New all-pixel World.
I am reminded of the tragedy of lost nitrate prints about which
William Everson and many others have spoken so eloquently. I mention
Everson in particular because he seemed less interested in "grading"
films as A or B movies to prioritize restoration than he was in
preserving everything not yet decayed (The White Gorilla being only
one such example).
The flip side of this obsession with restoration is demonstrated by
an experience I had screening a print for him. It was a version of
Cinderella, from 1915 if I remember correctly. He spoke at great
length about the history of the print, its near loss, and the damage
that destroyed a key part of the film. It was all rather sad, but at
the same time, got me fired up about the importance of restoration.
Then we screened the film. It was a beautiful print with hardly any
damage at all until the timeline arrived at the moment where
Cinderella finally dances with the Prince at the Ball. This is an
absolutely amazing scene, btw, filmed on a turntable with the camera
mounted on the edge of the turntable, Cinderella and the Prince
dancing in the center while the camera circles around them (a move
much repeated by Fassbinder toward the end of his career), and a
crowd dancing outside the turntable but moving in the opposite
direction of the turntable. All incredibly visceral. Right at the
crescendo of the moment the film started to display the more extreme
decay, eventually blowing completely to white when all of the image
had deteriorated completely. There is no other way to describe this
cinematic moment than orgasmic. Especially since the decay then
gradually starts to disappear, slowly returning to the beautiful
nitrate B&W footage. At this point of the movie Cinderella is just
coming out of her swoon. It was amazing to me that the greatest
moment of decay coincided completely with the crescendo of the film,
in essence adding a layer of meaning not necessarily intended by the
original (at least this explicitly) and throwing me into confusion
about the benefits of restoration.
I guess, in short, I sometimes wonder about the benefits of trying to
hold on to or "capture" everything. Certainly there is loss
associated with the disappearance of something known or heard about
but, at the same time, I wonder if absolute preservation is a goal
worth pursuing. And that doesn't even get into the complications
expressed in the recent Tartaglia/Jordan exchange about Jack Smith.
db
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