Diving into the Nitty-Gritty of Film Conservation in Kolkata

For his part, Kline contributed to this year’s workshop by telling some stories, while his two colleagues took charge of the more granular classes. In his lecture “Adventures in Restoration,” Kline presented dozens of memorable case studies from Criterion’s last several years of restoration work. He demonstrated why we decided to go back to a nitrate fine-grain held by the Museum of Modern Art, instead of safety copies made years later, when it came time to restore Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, and talked about the unusual process on two John Waters films, Multiple Maniacs—the 16 mm reversal original of which the director had kept in his (occasionally sweltering) attic for decades, and which had splices that cut deep into the top and bottom of the frame—and Female Trouble, much of whose music we wound up replacing with better-sounding recordings originally made by Waters. He also covered the unique problems posed by the film materials for Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy (forthcoming from Janus and Criterion), since original lab processing, not to mention storage, is done differently in Iran than in the U.S. Four years ago, at the first workshop in Mumbai, Kline had spoken extensively about our work on Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, the original negatives of which had been damaged in a 1990s film-lab fire, and this year he revisited the subject, showing a clip from Pather Panchali to convey a sense of that particularly painstaking restoration. (Just a few days before the workshop, a Criterion contingent that included Kline was on hand at the Kolkata International Film Festival, where all three Apu Trilogy restorations made their Indian premiere, with many of the stars of the films also in attendance.) Meanwhile, throughout the week, Sherwood and Shatzman gave groups of three to five students a little hands-on experience.

In his primer on the color-correction process, Sherwood laid out the basics of the postproduction software we use to adjust a film’s color balance, often in accordance with instructions from a movie’s director or cinematographer, or with reference to preexisting presentations of the film. Some of the questions Sherwood got from the students—whom the workshop encourages to use such classes to try to “upgrade their skills in their existing work areas,” according to Dungarpur and Cherian—revealed the unique challenges of film-preservation work in India and its surrounding countries. One return attendee from Sri Lanka, who oversees a film archive there, asked if it was possible to improve the image quality on a DVD of a VHS transfer of a film that had otherwise been lost. This scenario put Sherwood, who is accustomed to working with high-resolution scans of film elements, in mind of something he says the workshop’s organizers had emphasized to him ahead of the trip: “Priority number one is preservation, not restoration—we just have to make sure that these films aren’t lost.” Sherwood ultimately told the student that there was still a place for digital color-correction tools under these far-from-ideal circumstances. The VHS transfer “probably has rainbow fringeing in it, no blacks, and poor contrast, so maybe it can look a little better and become watchable,” he says.