Yuku free message boards

Again, most of this discussion is based on guesswork, which would be unnecessary if the people preparing a restored edition of a film would provide notes, equivalent to those an editor would prepare for a written text, summarizing the history of the film's recutting and exhibition, specifying the version we're being given, etc.

And again, the only version of this I've ever seen has a music track, which to me suggests that it's less likely to have been cut about than a true silent film. Its relatively late date suggests the same; and so does the fact (if I'm remembering it right) mentioned in the notes at LACMA, where I saw it in the 70s, that it had been out of circulation since its first release. It looked new.

The film's having a soundtrack raises a point that's of paramount importance to me, though many fans seem not to care about it: the projection speed. I believe I've never seen it noted that when silent films began appearing on video, most people were seeing them for the first time at the speed they were meant to be seen at--or rather (to sidestep, for the moment, Walter Kerr's arguments), at the speed at which the films were originally performed. (Speaking only of L.A., by the 1980s only one venue for silent films had a silent-speed projector at its disposal; whether it still does, I don't know, since it's barely in operation.) Only when you see silent actors moving at a lifelike pace can you fairly judge their acting, and see how good many of them were. Since it's obvious that The Man Who Laughs was shot as a silent and the track added as an afterthought, the performances have never been shown at their natural speed. Which raises the question: should a restorer slow the film down to this speed (assuming that it can be done)? The music would of course have to be slowed down, too. The best argument for doing so would be that this was the speed at which the director originally shot the film, and that the technicians who added the soundtrack would have kept the film at that speed if it had been technically possible. I'm sure the director and the actors, if they could be consulted, would have preferred it that way, if they had a preference; and I would too.

But for me there's one counterargument which outweighs all this, and it isn't even a verbal one: the monsters in the tunnel added to the "improved" edition of THX-1138. It's not just that they weren't there before; it's that they COULDN'T have been there. And neither could the adjustment I suggested. A version so adjusted could be provided as an alternate on the flip side of the disc; so could an "improved" edit with "unnecessary" shots excised; etc.; but the changes should be identified.

Don't want to wander off-thread too far, but this discussion has gotten me thinking about some other films I've seen that raised similar questions in my mind about the proprieties of restoration. But first, and while the subject of film speeds is still on my mind: has it ever been noted that in The Mummy (the real one, not the dumb one--but maybe it's unnecessary to specify that here) the director did the flashbacks not only in the style of silent films, but of silents running at sound speed. This suggests that even so far back, audiences were already accustomed to silents' being shown at that speed--I assume because the theatres had been converted for sound and ran the old films on the same equipment.

But as to questions of restoration: Anyone who has seen the DVD of In Old Arizona will have found that it offers a choice of two soundtracks. One is the real track as it exists now, with all its history showing in the clicks and rustles; the other is the same track restored to its original state, supposedly, without all the wear and tear. Given this one, I wondered why the DVD producers had bothered to include the unrestored track at all. After hearing both, I understood: the reconstruction was AWFUL. Since I'm ignorant of audio engineering, I don't know if this is technically correct; but it sounded as if a sound guy had just run the track through a computer program to excise all the noise--ALL of it, including the ambient noise--and when there was no dialogue, music, or sound effect, the film was completely silent, as if it had been taking place in a vacuum. I tried the DVD in three players, and it sounded the same in all three. Not only was the sound more unattractive than it had been with all the wear and tear, it was unhistorical: it sounded like no film from that period, or any period, could ever have sounded. I conjectured that this must have been the cause of some controversy, and was the reason the DVD producers had thought it a good idea to include the original track as well.

Here's another example of a try at "accuracy" in the absence, seemingly, of sufficient knowledge to support it: decades after its release The Black Pirate was restored in a beautiful color print, probably taken from the original negative, but one big change: all the intertitles were redone. The original ones were written and typeset in a deliberately archaic style, with the minor words italicized, the nouns capitalized, and the punctuation overstated, helping to give the film something of the flavor of the past, as well as something of a storybook quality. I think the restorers must have misperceived this style as belonging to the silent era and therefore "dated," and so they re-edited the titles into conventional text and set it in a modern typeface, thereby taking away a proportion of the flavor, and the fun.

Usually, we don't know these things--because how would we?--unless we've seen the film before, or we hear the story from somebody who knows. The Passion of Joan of Arc has been one of my favorite films since I first saw it--except that what I saw wasn't it, exactly, and I didn't find this until I saw it again 20 years later at a Dreyer retrospective at UCLA The version shown there was introduced as the first authentic version to be shown in several decades; the story (allowing for the blurring of my recollections over time) was that the film commonly shown wasn't Dreyer's original, which had been lost or destroyed (maybe during the war), but a re-creation of it compiled from the footage left in the cutting room. Since this included none of what had been used in the film, the new version was made from the outtakes. In the 1980s the Danish film archive, working from material that was previously unavailable (negative? original prints?), painstakingly restored the film from Dreyer's cutting notes. This story raises some unanswered questions (e.g. there had been several versions of the film floating around; where did the others come from?), but the results were there to be seen: the cutting technique was distinctively Dreyer's, totally of a piece with that of his other works--so much so that I was able to conclude definitely that I liked it less than the way I'd first seen the film, as put together by someone else. I guess the point is that you don't always know what you're seeing, even when you think you do.