Restoring The New World
With the Academy Awards coming up on Sunday, we’re celebrating the breathtaking work of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who is nominated this year for his work on Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant. If he wins, Lubezki will be one of the only cinematographers to ever take home the Oscar three years in a row, following his wins for Gravity and Birdman. In honor of that, we’re giving you a rare glimpse through Lubezki’s talented eyes, an opportunity to see what the raw original negative of Terrence Malick’s 2005 film The New World, one of the cinematographer’s most beautifully lensed films, looks like before and after color correction. Lubezki and Malick have been working with Criterion for more than a year to create a new 4K restoration of Malick’s preferred 172-minute cut of the film, and these brief, never-before-seen examples show the incredible difference between the look of Lubezki’s meticulously exposed camera negative and that of the finished film.
