DB7

Restoration drama: Film classics in HD

Britain's greatest film classics are being digitally enhanced to crackle-free HD standards. Chris Evans takes his seat for an exclusive screening

Wednesday, 14 May 2008


In the darkness of a screening room at the British Film Institute's archive site, a group of men in white coats are watching poor-quality old footage of Sir David Lean's classic war film In Which We Serve, made in 1942. The projector then skips and the same scene appears – only this time the quality of the image is startling and the sound is crystal clear. The technician next to me smiles and nods his approval.

This transformation of some of Britain's greatest films, including Dracula, Great Expectations and Lawrence of Arabia, is being undertaken in a maze-like 1980s building tucked away in a gated enclosure in the little town of Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire. The men in white coats are restoration experts who have been working day and night to remove all the hisses and crackles from old film negatives ravaged by time.

Film restoration is, of course, not a new process. Various film institutes around the globe have been performing photochemical restoration for decades, but now there is a new technology in town, which is being used alongside traditional methods, and the BFI is determined to take full advantage.

"Our aim, in the not too distant future, is to have every British film digitally restored," Andrea Kalas, senior preservation manager at the British Film Institute boldly states. However, if you consider that there have been more than 50,000 films made in this country in the past 100 years, and that it would cost about £100,000 to digitally restore each black-and-white film and up to £600,000 for a Technicolor, the sums that would be required to complete the job become extremely high.

The British Film Institute is supplied with £16m each year by the UK Film Council, a government agency. The BFI then has to more than match that figure with a further £18m from DVD sales, lottery funding, sponsored events, advertising, money from foundations and ticket sales at the BFI Southbank site in London.

The then Secretary for Culture, Media and Sport, James Purnell, announced last October that an additional £25m in government money would be put towards securing and digitising the national and regional archives.

The BFI National Collection holds more than 60,000 fiction features, 120,000 non-fiction titles and 675,000 TV programmes. In total, it represents more than 500,000 hours of material.

But as the content deteriorates, more funding has been needed for restoration. An estimated 30 per cent of the BFI's acetate collection is deteriorating. Photochemical restoration has commonly been considered the cheapest and easiest way to preserve the film footage that is shrinking, discolouring, dirty or scratched. But it is often seen as a tidy-up job, a stop-gap measure to keep the films alive for another few years. Digital restoration, however, gives the films a permanent new lease of life, and allows a modern audience to watch classic films as if they were made yesterday. The quality really is that good.

"With digital you are scanning each frame at the highest possible resolution. So by starting with the best material, everything is better in the chain, from cinema release to DVD, HD or Blu-ray," says Kalas. It is also cheaper to release a film that uses a digital rather than an optical projector.

But digital restoration is costly. The equipment alone can cost a small fortune. "A really good digital scanner is a quarter of a million pounds, and it's really expensive to maintain this kind of machinery over a long period," says Kalas. "To get the infrastructure in place is a massive task, then you need servers and networking and storage – it goes on and on."

So do the benefits outweigh the negatives, so to speak? For those with a keen interest in and appreciation of our cinematic history, the answer seems obvious. If you look at published lists of top 100 films, more often than not there will be at least 20 British films featured, with one, possibly, even occupying the top position.

Progress on restoration is slow and the work painstaking. The BFI has just put the finishing touches to 10 David Lean films, which have been restored part digitally and part photochemically at the institute's archive site over the past four years by a team of about 40 technicians working around the clock in laboratory conditions, removing every scratch, hiss and crackle to get the films ready to be presented at the Cannes film festival this week.

"In the case of In Which We Serve, the original film materials were in a really bad condition, not just from tears, scratching and dirt, but also there were frames missing," explains Kieron Webb, technical projects officer at the BFI who oversaw the restoration. "We tried substituting those shots from another nitrate negative [most films from the first half of the 20th century were filmed on highly flammable nitrate film base] but the problem was the second copy was in a bad way as well due to mould. So the only option to us was to do a full digital restoration job."

As for Brief Encounter (1945), the original negative no longer exists. "They worked them a lot harder in those days. Prints for prestige cinemas and screenings would have been made from original negatives. So we often have to use positives, which are copies of the camera negatives."

The same process applies for the soundtracks. "We choose the best version we can from as early as possible. If there isn't an existing positive, we will get a new print made from the original negative then play it back on to a special optical replay machine and digitise it into a PC," says Richard Yeoman-Clark, the BFI's audio archivist. "We have to retain the synch of the sound with the picture, so I have the film images digitised into the computer in front of me and look at that and check the sound frame by frame." Removing all the unwanted noises took him about 100 hours of work for each Lean film.

Finding the old optical replay machine in the first place also proved tricky. "We found ours at a post-production company in London," says Charles Fairall, senior preservation manager, video and audio. "But Richard had to dismantle it then rebuild it again at the archive site from his own drawings. We then had to add modifications to deal with film shrinkage."

In some cases the film itself needs to be modified. "I worked on the first British talkie, called The Informer [1929]," explains Yeoman-Clark. "That was terrible quality and very unsophisticated. The two lead actors were foreign, so their voices were dubbed live on the set by two people standing to one side with a microphone. Quite often the actors' mouths weren't in-synch with the words. Then there were special effects to deal with, including gun battles where the flashes and puffs of smoke didn't coincide with the bang noises, so quite a lot of that had to be re-synched as well."

But going beyond touching up the quality of the sound and images to actually reworking masterpieces, inserting newly filmed missing scenes, for instance, is a territory the BFI is cautious about entering. "It is a temptation for some directors to tinker with their work and that is a discussion you have to have," says Kalas. "[We ask them] how far do you want to go?" In the case of the Lean films, the BFI was assisted by the David Lean Foundation and Ronald Neame, the producer of several of Lean's films, including Great Expectations (1946), Oliver Twist (1948) and This Happy Breed (1944).

There are cases where temptation has got the better of technicians. "I worked with a guy named Bob Gitt, who we called the pope of preservation. He was restoring an early Technicolor film, The Toll of the Sea [1922], and the very last reel was missing of the heroine walking into the sea to kill herself. Bob got an actress that looked like her from the back and shot it," says Kalas. "He never lied about it, but it is really important that if you are going to change something you tell people about it. We keep meticulous notes of what we've done, and how many sections of films have been digitised so that if anyone ever wants to use or undo our work they can."

All this digitisation work is not only for preservation purposes, the BFI also makes sure all the films it restores are re-released in cinemas for others to enjoy. "The distribution market for older films is tough, but if we can say to people that one of their favourite films has been digitally restored then, hopefully, they are going to want to watch it again at the cinema," says Kalas.

The first port of call for the BFI's newly restored films is at the BFI Southbank. In the Mediatheque room, the public can now view, for free, close to 1,000 digitised films and TV programmes, from Brief Encounter to Monty Python. There will be a retrospective of Lean films there in June and July to celebrate the centenary of his birth (1908) and show off the films' newly restored quality.

After that, local "classic cinema" distributor Park Circus takes over with, potentially, a nationwide theatrical release. "Our approach is slightly different from the BFI's. We are a commercial enterprise and have to make money from reissues of classics and back catalogues," says the company's managing director, John Letham. "The thing about reissues is that unlike a standard release, where a film is shown in the cinemas for one or two weeks, possibly a couple of months, with the reissues of classic titles what tends to happen is you get a few of the exhibitors touring the films up and down the country at their various sites for six or seven months."

Letham is convinced of the need for digital distribution. "When they are released digitally we can make many more prints available – it is more cost effective. With 35mm, each reel can be somewhere between £2,000 and £4,000; digital copies are much easier to clone."

As well as its digital endeavour, the BFI is planning a new film centre on the South Bank by 2012 (in time for the Olympics). Full details of the site are being kept under wraps, but the idea is that it will offer interactive displays of the archive film footage alongside old scripts, directors' notes and letters, to ensure audiences of the future remain enthused by the past.

David Lean's 'The Passionate Friends' is released in cinemas on 6 June; the complete retrospective, Rediscover David Lean, plays at BFI Southbank throughout June and July; a selection of David Lean's films will also screen at cinemas across the UK BFI | David Lean Centenary

Inside the archive

Black and white film

Made commercially available by Kodak in 1889, black and white film consists of a transparent base covered with a light-sensitive chemical.

Partial colourisation

The earliest way of adding colour to film was partial colourisation. Made possible through the Pathéchrome system in 1905, it required glass stencils to be cut for each frame and dye painted on to the film.

Natural colour

Invented by Claude Friese-Green in 1898, the process produced the illusion of true colour by exposing each alternate frame through red and green filters. It gave tolerable quality but left audiences suffering headaches from its constant flickering.

Kinemacolor

This British invention from 1908 was the first successful movie colour process. Using a two-colour additive illumination system it was installed in over 300 cinemas across Britain. But despite being more advanced than natural colour, it failed commercially due to high installation costs.

Technicolor

Vibrant Technicolor was introduced in 1917 and was operating a full-colour system by 1932. It used a beam-splitter to expose two adjacent frames to a red and green filter, cutting out any flickering. It became the Hollywood standard when Walt Disney adopted it for all his films.