CineSavant Column
Hello!
We certainly post too many links circulated by Joe Dante, and have been trying to behave ourselves. But this Mubi ‘Notebook Festival’ article by Forrest Cardamenis from just a few days ago calls out to be read:
The subject is the screening of rare film prints by special groups, archives, museums and collectors, with an eye to the reality that precious ancient film, especially nitrate prints, are fragile and unstable, and that even best projection wears them out and risks their permanent loss.
That’s of course a problem. Movies were meant to be seen, yet screening them puts them at risk. I remember that long ago the County Museum of Art held a D.W. Griffith series, showing a lot of very precious, very old film … some of which surely was nitrate. Was that wise, or appropriate? I’m not the one to judge. At UCLA in Melnitz Hall in the 1970s, the then-new Film Archive constantly screened the studio library prints on deposit from Fox and Paramount.
The generosity of the donation was likely an illusion — not only did the studios save a fortune in storage fees for the libraries, they probably negotiated a sweet tax break.
Melnitz 1409 was the ideal picture palace — 300 or so seats with better-than-ideal projection. ‘Scope movies looked enormous there, stretching wall-to-wall. We knew were were privileged, to be able to see all of the Marlene Dietrich – Von Sternberg pictures in flawless 35mm nitrate. Audiences were spellbound by The Scarlet Empress, which looked like a hallucination. The phrase, ‘the silver screen’ took on a real meaning.
On the other hand, the Archive’s perfect 35mm nitrate print of the pre-Code horror Island of Lost Souls apparently saw a lot of use, being shipped here and there to festivals. Although I think I saw it on TV in the ’60s, it was considered difficult to see. When Island of Lost Souls finally arrived on disc from Criterion, it looked good but not terrific — I have a terrible feeling that that one print may have been the best available source. That’s just a guess, but in 1973, before video and before what we now think of as systematic film preservation and ‘asset management,’ not too many experts had a pure preservation mindset.
The Cardamenis article is an excellent read — he touches on a number of important issues and talks about specific archival screenings in a way that assures me that a film élite somewhere is seeing all the great stuff I’ll never see. Recommended.
We’ll eagerly check out a new disc from Mario Bava any day. To my (faulty) knowledge, no Mario Bava film has been yet released on 4K … Riccardo Freda beat Mario to the punch last year with Vinegar Syndrome’s surprise 4K Ultra HD of The Horrible Dr. Hichcock. Does the legion of Bava completists extend to his son Lamberto, also a film director?
In August, Synapse will test that question with Lamberto Bava’s horror shows Demons and Demons 2 in 4K Ultra HD. Coming from the ‘gore splatter’ era of Euro-horror, these are pretty much after my time, but their fans are legion. The advertising stresses the rock music soundtracks. Whattaya going to do with fans of ’80s horror, anyway?
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson