With one cinephilic foot placed squarely in the San Francisco Bay Area and the other in Boise, Idaho, I'm feeling somewhat of a conduit today whereby the movies themselves—not geographical locations—prove where I truly am. As has probably always been the case and certainly continues through today, audiences worldwide constitute a broadened albeit dispersed community united in spectatorial delight. In this, there is no difference in desire; a desire that spans across the past century. There's no requirement to be roped into the regional when the global is at hand.
Filmbud Brian Darr's well-researched piece for Fandor (parts one and two) on Georges Méliès seems a perfect introduction to an upcoming event at Boise's The Flicks, which programmer Carole Skinner mentioned to me when we conversed last week. The Idaho Film Foundation (IFF) is hosting a Méliès Celebration, Sunday, March 4, 2012 from 3:00-5:00PM.
First up is A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune, 1902). This hand-painted color version of Méliès's legendary film, unseen for 109 years until its new restoration, will be followed by the documentary, The Extraordinary Voyage (Le voyage extraordinaire, 2011), directed by Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange and featuring Costa Gravas, Michel Gondry, Martin Scorsese, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and Michel Hazanavicius. The magical Georges Méliès—celebrated in Martin Scorsese's Academy Award®-winning film Hugo (2011)—was the creator of one of cinema's most enduring images. This fascinating documentary charts the film's voyage across the century and into the next millennium, from 1902 to the astonishing rediscovery of a nitrate print in color in 1993 to the premiere of the new restoration on the opening night of the Cannes Film Festival in 2011.
Interviews with some of contemporary cinema's most imaginative filmmakers attest to Méliès' enduring significance. The film will be introduced by Boise State University Assistant Professor of Modern Languages, Dr. Mariah Devereux Herbeck, who will lead a discussion and Q&A after the film. Tickets are $12 general admission and $9 for students in advance and at the door.
As interstitial coincidences go, perusing my in-flight magazine on my way to San Francisco I discovered a short write-up on the restoration of A Trip to the Moon. Two foundations spent a decade restoring the print, and then enlisted French electronic music pioneers Air (whose first album was entitled Moon Safari) to provide an original score. Air enjoyed the gig so much that they built a whole album from it, which they recently released along with the DVD of Méliès masterpiece. More on Air's involvement can be found at Fact, as well as an in-depth interview at The Guardian.
Kudos to the Idaho Film Foundation, Carole Skinner and The Flicks for offering Boiseans a rare in-cinema opportunity to experience these films, and to Brian Darr and Fandor for the historical context and the opportunity to stream A Trip to the Moon and many other Méliès titles. If not a Fandor member (what's keeping you?), the original B&W version of A Trip to the Moon with the Erich Wolfgang Korngold & Laurence Rosenthal score can be seen on YouTube.
Speaking as a member of Film Preservation Associates, the team that brought King Vidor's Bardelys the Magnificent (1926) "back to life" after it's having been believed lost for 70 years, David Shepard historicized that the film was based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini, a prolific author whose other work includes Scaramouche, The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood. MGM bought the story rights to Bardelys the Magnficent for 10 years and produced the successful filmic adaptation Bardelys the Magnificent.
By contract, in 1936 MGM had to either repurchase the rights "for an additional charm" or destroy the film. As nothing could have been deader than a silent film in 1936, MGM elected to duly destroy the negative (although MGM actually renewed the copyright for the movie in 1953). Except for a short fragment included in another Vidor film Show People (1928), nothing of Bardelys was thought to remain until 2007 when Shepard's French film partners—Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange—purchased a miscellaneous lot of nitrate film and found within it the source copy that was used for the restoration. It was a worn, skuzzy print but has since been cleaned up.
Bardelys was now complete except for reel three and that reel must have been missing for a long time because there was a homemade title at the end of reel two that contained a text describing the lost footage. To restore the film, the original print was first sent to film laboratories in the Netherlands, which produced a 35mm negative. Scratches were eliminated. From this negative they made a telecine, which was sent to Lobster Films where Eric Lange worked a long time to eliminate visible splices and to stabilize the image.
The film had French titles, which had very little to do with the original English title text obtained from the MGM collection at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. They reset the original English titles in the original 1895 type font and reinserted the English intertitles into the picture.
For the missing reel three, they were able to obtain more than 250 stills from the MGM Collection at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Using a selection of these stills and the titles, and some film footage found in the original trailer, they were able to create a reasonably smooth bridge over the gap.
Although Bardelys was preserved in 35mm, all the restoration work has been done digitally. The digital projection at the festival was from a Betacam tape due to the fact that there was no money to scan the tape back into motion picture film again.
In addition to USC and the Academy Library, Shepard wanted to publicly thank Warner Brothers—especially George Feldenstein—for making an absolutely unique exception to an otherwise firm policy by granting world rights in perpetuity to show the film. He also acknowledged Sony Pictures—especially Bob Osher—the current owners of the Sabatini rights, who granted permission to show Bardelys in Europe so they could recover the costs of preservation and restoration.
All of that is half the story. As King Vidor used to say, "The other half is told by the music." For that, Shepard indicated, the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra—the musicians for the evening's event—have likewise recorded the music for the DVD.
With one cinephilic foot placed squarely in the San Francisco Bay Area and the other in Boise, Idaho, I'm feeling somewhat of a conduit today whereby the movies themselves—not geographical locations—prove where I truly am. As has probably always been the case and certainly continues through today, audiences worldwide constitute a broadened albeit dispersed community united in spectatorial delight. In this, there is no difference in desire; a desire that spans across the past century. There's no requirement to be roped into the regional when the global is at hand.
Filmbud Brian Darr's well-researched piece for Fandor (parts one and two) on Georges Méliès seems a perfect introduction to an upcoming event at Boise's The Flicks, which programmer Carole Skinner mentioned to me when we conversed last week. The Idaho Film Foundation (IFF) is hosting a Méliès Celebration, Sunday, March 4, 2012 from 3:00-5:00PM.
Interviews with some of contemporary cinema's most imaginative filmmakers attest to Méliès' enduring significance. The film will be introduced by Boise State University Assistant Professor of Modern Languages, Dr. Mariah Devereux Herbeck, who will lead a discussion and Q&A after the film. Tickets are $12 general admission and $9 for students in advance and at the door.
As interstitial coincidences go, perusing my in-flight magazine on my way to San Francisco I discovered a short write-up on the restoration of A Trip to the Moon. Two foundations spent a decade restoring the print, and then enlisted French electronic music pioneers Air (whose first album was entitled Moon Safari) to provide an original score. Air enjoyed the gig so much that they built a whole album from it, which they recently released along with the DVD of Méliès masterpiece. More on Air's involvement can be found at Fact, as well as an in-depth interview at The Guardian.
