Restored and released, films finally get an audience
Some of the best films you may have never seen have finally been making their way to theaters.
Take Jean-Pierre Melville's French resistance epic "Army of Shadows": made in 1969, it must have seemed far too dark for the Age of Aquarius, and so never got a US debut. Nearly 40 years later, it got a full restoration, a real release, and critical glory (the Globe's Ty Burr gave it four stars, while Manohla Dargis of The
Now comes "Killer of Sheep," Charles Burnett's 1977 film about the travails of a working-class Los Angeles family. It had long been championed by critics and regularly shown in college courses and at cinematheques. What stopped it from getting a theatrical release was not the difficulty of finding a distributor, but music rights -- the soundtrack included songs by Dinah Washington , Paul Robeson , and Etta James . While there were negotiations, in the end there was no agreement. Cue more than 20 years of waiting.
The break came when Dennis Doros , the co-founder of the Milestone Films, learned from Ross Lipman of the UCLA Film and Television Archive that they were working on a complete restoration of Burnett's classic.
Doros decided to purchase the film, contributed money to UCLA for the restoration, and set about leaping over the very thing that stopped the film's release back in 1977 -- its music. The rights owners were often bitter about the 30 years the film had been shown without clearance and often disinclined to negotiate. Therefore it took Doros and Milestone "six years and many sleepless nights" to obtain the rights. Not every song could be acquired -- Washington's version of "Unforgettable," which originally scored the film's final scene, had to be jettisoned, and Burnett decided to replace it with her "This Bitter Earth." This Friday, however, Burnett's film gets its long-delayed and much-deserved release.
Milestone is just one of a number of small distributors that, working alongside restorers, subtitlers, and programmers, have taken on the immensely complex task of rescuing underappreciated films. "Army of Shadows" came back to us thanks to Rialto ; "Overlord" was released by Janus . Milestone took on "Killer of Sheep," the latest, and perhaps the most notable, in this string of films being returned to the public after decades in the shadows. In the process, they're encouraging film fans to see works from past eras the way they were meant to be seen: in a theater.
Haden Guest, Harvard Film Archive director, gives credit to the distributors' efforts. "[They're] important allies in the fight to show audiences that the true potential of cinema as an artistic and cultural medium lies beyond the by-the-numbers commercial schlock," he writes in an e-mail.
Once Milestone picks the film, the company leaves the restoration work to the experts. "We let the archives do the work they do best," says Doros. Milestone generally contributes between $25,000 and $100,000 for restoration , and must spend an equivalent amount on promotion once the film hits theaters. Doros is coy when it comes to numbers, but acknowledges that "Killer of Sheep" will be the most expensive film ever released by Milestone, costing more than $300,000.
The restoration process differs from case to case, but that of "Killer of Sheep" was complicated by a number of factors. Both image and sound had already suffered significant deterioration. In addition, Burnett originally shot the movie (which he made while a student at UCLA film school) on 16mm stock . While it reduced costs for him, it complicated the restoration. "Ironically, it can cost more to preserve a 16mm film than a 35mm-originated film," Lipman says on the phone from Los Angeles.
Lipman discovered that the lab work on the original print had been shoddy, and spent much of the restoration process laboriously extracting extra pictorial and sound information that had been neglected the first time around. "If you compare an old 16mm print to the new 35mm print, it's quite startling. The difference is the result of careful testing and extensive labor," he notes.
The challenge is to not over-tinker, creating a final product that lacks the original's gritty feel. "You can remove things that are intentionally part of the film," Lipman says. "You can affect the overall sound and image quality. For a low-budget, independent work like 'Killer of Sheep,' you really need to preserve that raw, in-the-street sensibility."
While it might seem difficult to persuade moviegoers to see a 30-year-old film, a film like "Killer of Sheep" was almost guaranteed to receive ecstatic reviews, eliminating one potential concern.
Companies like Milestone and Rialto have also managed to return some of the magic to the movie theater with their cold-case approach to distribution.
"There is a tremendous difference between watching a film at home and in the theater," Doros writes in an e-mail. "There is an incredible energy that can be felt while watching a great film in a theater. You can physically feel that excitement of something special happening. At home, no matter how great the set-up, you can't re-create the experience."
The theater is also essential to Milestone's business model; the current glut of DVDs on the market means that they must strive to recoup their investment by selling tickets, not discs.
Rialto's Bruce Goldstein does not see much difference between forgotten films like "Army of Shadows" and better-known Rialto releases like Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt" and Luis Bunuel's "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie." "You have to remove yourself from the world of cinephilia," he says, sitting in Rialto's office in New York. "You have to think of the larger public, who have not always been exposed."
Several years ago the company released two other Melville films, "Bob le Flambeur," from 1956, and "Le Cercle Rouge," made in 1970, to acclaim, before last year's "Army of Shadows" trumped them all. It won awards from the New York and Los Angeles critics' associations and reaped box-office gains that were remarkable for a little-known movie from 1969 .
Melville's film, with its dark palette and moody aura, is tailor-made for the big screen, and for Rialto's preference for full restorations from the original negative. They had purchased "Army of Shadows" in a batch of French films in 2000 , but held off on releasing it until 2006 , both to establish Melville as a brand name, and because StudioCanal (the company from whom they licensed the film) had promised a restoration.
"I'm so glad we waited, because it's really one of the most stunning film restorations I've ever seen," says Goldstein. "We could have made a print off the old negative, and it wouldn't have looked anything like what we released. It would have looked like a television film, almost. It would have had none of the mood, none of that muted color."
Working with mostly foreign films, Rialto employs a different attitude to marketing than Milestone. New prints are essential, but so are new subtitles and trailers.
"I take pride in our trailers, because we try to do something different with ours than having the conventional narrator and the canned laurel-leaves and the critics' quotes," Goldstein notes.
The subtitles, too, are a point of pride, being carefully worked over by Rialto's translator Lenny Borger in Paris, and then edited by Goldstein and his partner Adrienne Halpern.
"I always consult previous subtitle lists, if available, if only to confirm that they are at best inadequate, at worst cruelly inept," Borger writes via e-mail.
"We actually simulate the titles on a computer before they're engraved, so we place them exactly where we want them to be," says Goldstein. "We make the language as crisp and complete as possible."
The tortuous path of films like "Killer of Sheep" to the big screen is smoothed by the willingness of those involved to brave the difficulties involved. The care lavished on their releases is a reminder that the film industry, at least in its art-house incarnation, is not only a business, it is also a passion. 