American Cinematographer - September 2008 - (Page 70) A Long-Awaited Redemption These frames show a scene in which Lola chats with composer Franz Liszt, one of her most famous lovers, in his carriage. The top shot is the final frame; the bottom shot shows the HD offline version of a different frame in the scene. and the portions of the negative that weren’t used in that version had been thrown away. Also used for the restoration were the YCM separation masters from the 1956 release and, for a few shots, a badly faded rough cut located at the Cinémathèque de la Ville in Luxembourg. (A fragile 1955 print of the original release held at the Cinémathèque Royale in Belgium was used as an editing reference.) To consult on the technical details, Braunberger asked filmmaker François Ede, who had participated in recent restorations of Jacques Tati’s Jour de Fête and Play Time, to join the team. “Laurence asked me to lend a hand mainly on the color grading of the film and to identify all the material,” says Ede. A number of different film 70 September 2008 stocks had to be dealt with during the restoration process. The original negative stock was Eastman 5248. The YCM elements were easy to identify because they had been printed on an unusual finegrain stock, 5216, which had a distinctive, blue-green tinted mask; the intermediate YCM records were then printed on Eastman 5245, which was falsesensitized (it incorporated a color-mask correction) to make release prints on Eastman 5382. The restoration team’s first challenge was to re-create the complex narrative structure of Ophüls’ original cut. Working from digitized negative, print and YCM-separation elements, Burton and a small team at Technicolor Digital Intermediates (TDI) created an offline high- definition (HD) version of the full cut to serve as a template. Based on that HD edit, Ede and the Cinémathèque Française created a database that included every shot, then listed all the various forms in which each shot existed. By using the database, the team could consider all the alternatives available for each shot, choose the best one for that particular instance (based on its general condition, splice integrity and perforation damage), and then insert it in the proper place in a 2K conformed version of the cut via Autodesk Fire. Another concern was how to restore the film’s original 2.55:1 CinemaScope aspect ratio and sound mix. The original sound mix was in stereo on four magnetic tracks, two on each side of the frame. To exhibit the film in 2.55:1, a special release print with smaller-than-usual perforations had to be made to accommodate the four tracks; these perfs were dubbed “Foxholes” because this was a 20th Century Fox process. Because exhibitors had to modify their projectors with a special sound piece, the process proved too expensive and too complicated and didn’t last more than two or three years.
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.