American Cinematographer - January 2008 - (Page 98) Post Focus While supervising the grading of Criterion’s recent DVD of Days of Heaven, John Bailey, ASC and director Terrence Malick sought to downplay the golden, nostalgic hues that characterized previous video incarnations. Revisiting Days of Heaven by Jim Hemphill In the years since its 1978 theatrical release, Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven has attained mythic status for film lovers, and the poetic images achieved by the late Néstor Almendros, ASC (with additional photography by Haskell Wexler, ASC) are considered a landmark of motion-picture photography. When Paramount Pictures and The Criterion Collection undertook a restoration of the picture, they were therefore keen to bring a cinematographer’s eye to their work. John Bailey, ASC, who operated for Almendros on the film and considered him a mentor, joined the Criterion team in the telecine suite. “Over the years, in different transfers, Days of Heaven took on an overly nostalgic, golden look,” says Bailey. “My principal mandate was to return the film as closely as I could to what I felt Néstor 98 January 2008 would have wanted. Néstor didn’t like an overly sentimentalized look, nor, I think, did Haskell.” When Paramount agreed to license the title to Criterion, Lee Kline, Criterion’s technical director, and Gregg Garvin, a colorist at Modern Videofilm, evaluated the two existing interpositives (IPs) and found flaws on both. One had gorgeous color but was marred by chemical stains on the left side of the frame that became more pronounced as the film progressed, and the other was soft and muddy and “had no life,” Kline recalls. Kline proposed that a new 35mm element be struck, and Paramount agreed to share the expense with Criterion. Barry Allen, Paramount’s executive director of film preservation, examined all of the studio’s materials, including dailies, test prints and answer prints, and ultimately decided to strike an IP from the original negative. “The negative was in A and B reels, so certain things, like dissolves and the title sequence, had to be printed through an optical printer,” says Kline. The new IP was created at Triage Motion Picture Services, a boutique lab in Hollywood. “Triage does a good job with these older titles that need a little more TLC,” says Kline. “Finding people who still have the experience to print the old-fashioned way is a little hard to do.” After verifying the new IP was acceptable for transfer, Garvin and Criterion’s Transfer Supervisor Maria Palazzola did an initial color correction at Modern VideoFilm, using Paramount’s most recent NTSC master as a reference. (The IP was graded on a Spirit Datacine using a da Vinci 2K, and the master was recorded to Panasonic D5.) After Garvin’s first pass, Bailey came in to review the results. His initial suggestion was to mute the golden warmth that had come to characterize previous video incarnations of the picture. “Except for the obvious magic- Photos courtesy of The Criterion Collection.
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