Recomendados
Mais conteúdo relacionado
Semelhante a While There’S Still Time
While There’S Still Time
- 1. Saving & Restoring Films From The Silent Era
- 4. “We taught the world new ways to dream.”
- 11. World wide search for inventory—often includes accidental discoveries Safely & legally bring elements from multiple locations to same agreed-upon location for basic examination. Detailed examination & comparison of film for approval of artistic continuity. Selection of those films that can be scanned to fill in the missing gaps of existing film stock
- 12. Selection of which facility can best handle the elements for film selection & the problems that go along with this. Finding work-arounds for problems such as missing footage. Examination of scanned footage. Digital clean up. Hand done, frame-by-frame clean up.
- 13. Use of original paperwork left behind by directors, producers, and even the theatre owners across the world who kept journals about the films they projected. Daily production reports. Camera reports. …all of this information, when found aid in helping the restoration process.
Notas do Editor
- The infancy of Silent Films begins in 1895--
- The exact time start date of motion pictures is debatable, Thomas Edision on this side of the Atlantic claimed to have invented motion pictures in 1894, but the Lumiere Brothers in France did a better job, and were putting out more film footage starting in 1895. It did not take long for the advancement in film technology to move from 2 – 3 minutes worth of street shots, to comedic short subjects, to entire theatrical productions based not upon a mere imitation of the historically established theater that had been around for centuries, but film making became an art of it’s own unique kind. In less than a decade, it had come into it’s own. Full length feature scale productions competed with “legitimate” theatre, and gave it a run for it’s money!
- This was a new concept. Instead of paying money to see actual people act out parts on stage—people now paid money to go to a theatre, often converted from one that staged former live shows, to seeing moving images of people who may have actually made the film the audience was watching from a location that was thousands of miles away from where they actually lived. Live entertainment did not go away, but it did have new form of entertainment competition. This media allowed for a group of actors to become known on an international level, and to have an audience-base that spanned the globe. Actors such as PolaNegri & Rudolph Valentino became “household words.”
- New ways to dream that were not possible on stage included actual street scenes, cars & other various modes of transportation in motion—buildings on fire, floods, earthquakes—a whole new world of special effects that improved as ideas of camera crews became reality on film. Among one of the most important innovations was the simple concept of the “close-up” of the film actor. Nearly impossible to achieve on stage, the “close-up” brought the audience into the inner-most thinking & reactive emotional process of the individual actor in their interpretation of a role. Suddenly, we were able as a theatre going public, to enter the minds, hearts, and souls, as it were, of others. In a very real sense, the cult of the personality took on a new life of it’s own, as people started going to see productions based upon their preferences of star personality.
- Technology had got to the point where all manner of human experience could be filmed in the making, without any concern that somehow it would nearly all disappear. One of the earlier forms of recycling had to do with adaptive re-use by the Silent Film industry. Nearly 80% of the films that were produced during this time period 1900-1929, were INTENTIONALLY destroyed. The film makers melted down the films in order to recycle the silver nitrate, at that time, a critical component of film making—and highly flammable. Storage of film stock, new & used, had to be handled with extreme care—that is why films were encased in metal containers, and projection booths in theatres were lined with metal, in order to contain fire, should combustion start.
- The chair design may be before 1950, but the idea is that once talking pictures (as they were called in the early days) came on board, they just sort of took over. It was as revolutionary as the automobile was to the horse drawn carriage.
- Then, Sunset Boulevard, a story that deals with the pathos of careers & fame that suddenly ended due to revolutions in technology, slowly spearheaded a small but steadily growing interest in the culture of fame, of personality, of over-the-top lifestyles that started before the First World War as a result of the growth of the film industry…in the film Sunset Boulevard, there is a scene showing the lead character having friends over to her nearly empty mansion (located, as the film title implies, on Sunset Boulevard) over to her home to play cards. It was a scene that brilliantly showed the plight of people who used to be house-hold names, without work, without hope, still living on their past glory, in a world that had passed them by…
- In less than a life time, what films that had NOT been intentionally destroyed, deteriorated. The worse the storage conditions, the worse the deterioration. Oftentimes, the old film stock would be so badly deteriorated that it was nearly impossible to use even for purposes of film restoration. And, certainly, it was not playable. So, the history that had been made in the early part of the 20th Century, was by the time the 1950s rolled around, starting to disappear before our very eyes.
- I don’t mean to imply that all Silent Era films ended up quite as bad as these examples, but many did.—
- Each one is on a case by case basis. But you do have some commonalities. First, you know that these films were international in nature. So, someone who inherits a farm in Sweden may be searching through a barn that has served the family animals for generations, and stumble upon a metal box containing film stock from the Silent Era.
- In the restoration process, it is not uncommon to hear about huge political & legal arguments dealing with such issues as what the director’s intention was, who has the rights to the Estate, the production studios, or the heirs of the producers or the directors? Some regard any change at all as “cultural graffiti” and will not tolerate any changes, even if it means a better quality of viewing. Others welcome such additions as more interesting musical scores, going even so far as to have “contemporary” (translate rock music) as the background music going for the background of a newly restored film’s premiere showing.