American Cinematographer - September 2008 - (Page 66) A Long-Awaited Redemption Above: In her carriage, Lola enjoys the company of a young student (Oskar Werner). This frame illustrates the subtle iris effect director Max Ophüls used in many shots throughout the CinemaScope production. Right: Lola sits for a portrait as her lover, King Ludwig I of Bavaria (Anton Walbrook, far left), chats with the artist (Werner Finck). Services in Burbank, who supervised Technicolor’s work on the project. Efforts to rescue Lola Montès can be traced to the mid1960s, when Gamma Film Paris, the company that owned the movie, went bankrupt, and its films were auctioned off. The rights to Lola Montès were purchased by producer Pierre Braunberger, and he began searching for material that would enable him to undo the radical edit done in 1957. “Initially, my father didn’t know there was a version that predated the 1956 version,” explains Laurence Braunberger, Pierre’s daughter, who now heads Films du Jeudi. “He looked all over the world for materials, and everyone told him [the 1956 version] was the good one.” After searching unsuccessfully for the material Ophüls had excised from the 1955 original, Braunberger restored the 1956 cut; this restoration was released in Paris in 1968. The new restoration was launched in 2007 when Hervé Pichard of the Cinémathèque Française asked Films du Jeudi for a print of the movie. “I told him it wasn’t possible because we only had an internegative from 1968, and we didn’t want to make prints from that,” says Braunberger. Along with Serge Toubiana, director of the Cinémathèque Française, the two began to discuss how they could go beyond merely preserving the movie to actually re-create Ophüls’ original cut. In search of both substantive funding and technical expertise, 66 September 2008
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