Laboratories meeting

Thursday started with a gathering of engineers and laboratory technicians to present their new restorations and ongoing projects.

120 years after his birth, Abel Gance is still revered by film lovers. This is reflected in the two restoration projects that began the laboratory conference held Thursday morning in the Karbone. Eclair presented its work on the first of its two river films brought up to date this year: the ambitious Napoleon of 1927. An unprecedented restoration carried out at the request of the Cinémathèque Française and under the direction of Georges Mourier. With no less than 7 hours of film and a thousand reels analysed, the repair efforts were exemplary in terms of meticulousness and therefore very time-consuming. Despite work on two different negatives (Negative B and Negative Apollo), the persistence of missing images complicated the work of the teams, who were condemned to spend a whole day on the sequence of the snowball fight, which did not exceed thirty seconds.

One of the issues shared by Eclair and L'image Retrouvée (who came to present its work on La Roue de Gance) was the desire to bring the image back to life, without sacrificing the particularity of the period lenses and projectors. The engineers of l'Image retrouvée encountered the multiplicity of versions of the film, its author having himself put it together in order to make a meaningful adaptation. Because of this cinematographic clutter, the restoration was based on the musical "playlist" orchestrated by Paul Fosse during the film's screening at Gaumont Palace in 1923. For some shots, the technicians even used several copies, juxtaposed by an almost invisible crossfading technology at 24 frames per second.

Hiventy ended the Abel Gance session by presenting a mix of film and animation co-directed by Paul Grimaud (The King and The Mockingbird) and Jacques Demy. Entitled La Table tournante, this hybrid film is a collection of short films introduced by the director of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. The restoration challenges lay both in the repair of the trichrome strips in successive images and in the differentiation of the damage over time of the period animation.

For its first appearance at the MIFC, the VDM laboratory presented the restoration of Jean Chapot's La Voleuse. Six years before Les Choses de la vie, Chapot's work marked the birth of the Romy Schneider/Michel Piccoli couple on screen. With the use of a very damaged countertype, pulling and abrasion problems, the teams mainly had to do a deflickering job (removal of flickering and tremors). The polish company Di Factory also presented a project with a smaller budget than the first speakers: a collection of student short films recovered from the archives of the Katowice Film School. DI Factory had chosen to broadcast an excerpt from one of them, the very dark and clinical Death in the Beginning.

Lumières numériques, INA and Neyrac Films closed this conference by presenting their work on animation, sound and the most obsolete formats (4/3). The INA also screened an excerpt from Philippe Garrel's Liberté la nuit with a focus on calibration work to give an organic feeling of film.