Berkhamsted, Oct 14 (AFP) In a refrigerated vault outsideLondon filled with old film reels, a team of curators isbringing to life forgotten masterpieces of early cinemahistory.
A chemical smell hangs in the air at the British FilmInstitute's National Archive, where some 250,000 wheels of oldfilm are stacked floor-to-ceiling.
"As we're restoring them we're pulling back the veils ofhistory, and we can see much more clearly than we used to,"curator Bryony Dixon told AFP on a visit to the archive in thetown of Berkhamsted this week.
A selection plucked from the shelves is being showcasedat the BFI's London Film Festival, including a tale about theheartbreaking Indian love story of the Taj Mahal mausoleum.
"Shiraz: A Romance of India" is being screened at a galatoday for the first time since its release in 1928, followingmonths of restoration.
"It's beautiful, it's dramatic, it's got excitinglocations, and great acting. And it's unique, there are almostno surviving Indian films from that era, so it's veryspecial," Dixon said.
A score by composer Anoushka Shankar, daughter of lateIndian sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, has also been added toaccompany the silent film.
BFI curators have restored a wealth of films includingAlfred Hitchcock's nine surviving silent films and footage ofa legendary Everest expedition in 1924 in which two of theclimbers died.
Despite technological leaps, preparing the film beginswith it being checked by hand.
"There will be a lot of hand, manual repair on theoriginal film copies, using tape to make sure the films canpass through cleaning machines, and also through the scanner,"said Kieron Webb, the archive's film conservation manager.
The team used the original camera negative of "Shiraz",along with a copy made decades later, which were combineddigitally to obtain the best images and restore tens ofthousands of frames.
"The removal of scratches and dirt; de-flicker, whichmakes the image look more stable; reduce the light anddarkness changes in some shots," said Webb, summarisinghundreds of hours of work.
Ben Thompson, an image quality section leader,demonstrated how to remove a scratch from a "Shiraz" scenewithout accidentally brushing out a horse's leg.
Restorers have also sharpened the images, which Thompsonsaid creates more work: "As soon as you improve the sharpnessof the image it reveals, brings into sharp focus the detailbut also the defects."Digital techniques, which have replaced much of the oldphoto-chemical processes, have enabled restorers to becomemore precise in their work and upgrade every single shot in afilm such as "Shiraz".
The Indian film is nearly 90 years old but BFI also holdsfilms going as far back as the 1890s.
Despite the films' age, curators said they were easier torestore due to their brevity.
"Some of them are only a minute long," Dixon said.
"With the 1920s it gets much more complex, because thefilms get longer and they have a grammar to them which meansif you're missing part of the film print, you have to sort ofcompensate in order to make it understandable for theaudience."Colour and sound add further layers of complexity,although silent films are themselves problematic because theyoften lack any documents to dictate the speed they should beshown at.
Restoration is a costly endeavour and the archive relieson public funds and private donors, as well as ticket salesfrom screenings.
But the restorers say the cultural value is boundless,giving audiences a window into an unseen age and places thathave since disappeared.
"Fiction film, or non-fiction film, is this fantasticrecord of the whole of the 20th century that people can lookat... It is, for those that care to look, a real experience,"said Dixon. (AFP)EMY.
This is unedited, unformatted feed from the Press Trust of India wire.