William Lingle asks: >Your request for a review of the restored print of Pepe Le Moko raises a >question that your association may have already examined throughly: What >is a restoration? You can (and I did) study for a master's degree in film archiving which is 90% devoted to addressing this question, and nothing I can write here will do it justice. You might like to try reading the following: Henry Wilhelm and Carol Brower, 'The Restoration of Color Photographs, Negatives and Films' (I might not have got that title quite right, but the authors are accurate), Read & Mayer, 'The Restoration of Motion Picture Film', Anthony Slide, 'Nitrate Won't Wait', Penolope Houston, 'Keepers of the Frame' and Brian Winston, 'Technologies of Seeing'. Sorry those aren't the complete references, but a brief search on Amazon or whatever will quickly identify the books. For what it's worth, my take on this is that restoration is what is necessary when preservation has failed. In an ideal world, the camera negative of a given film will be taken into the care of a recognised film archive the minute it's commercial purpose has been served, and then stored in ideal atmospheric conditions. From that camera negative an intermediate positive, printing negative and release print will be made and the print will serve as the access copy. In the appropriate climate-controlled conditions the master status elements will last in almost perfect condition for centuries, and new release prints can be made as and when needed. That's in an ideal world. Sometimes the original negative gets lost. If it's nitrate (as with 'Pepe Le Moko') it will eventually decompose and become unusable. Acetate will too, but over a much longer timescale. Sometimes the camera negative gets cut or altered after the original release version either due to censorship or because the first version proved commercially unsuccessful and the studio wants to try making it shorter (as happened with 'Lawrence of Arabia'). Sometimes footage from a film is deliberately destroyed or concealed for political or commercial reasons. Sometimes the Spanish dub of a Hollywood feature may survive but not the English one. And so on. 'Restoration', therefore, is the process of sorting out this mess and reconstructing a version which existed at some predetermined point in the past but which is not available now. First off, you need to be clear what it is you are trying to restore - put in crude terms, how you define 'original'. The recent 'Apocalypse Now Redux' is extremely problematic in this regard because the new prints were made by recutting (and inserting new sections into) the original camera negative. For those of us who believe that the version released in 1979 has some claim to originality, that's too bad because the process of recutting the camera negative has made the chances very remote that we can ever produce new 35mm prints of the version released in 1979 again. Coppola says that the 1979 version did not conform to his artistic vision and that he's now seizing a chance that he didn't have 23 years ago. Question - how do you define the 'originality' here, and what are you trying to 'restore'? You have to be clear about that. Broadly speaking, there are two types of restoration. The first is the type described above, where you are reconstructing footage to form a sequence of shots (and in some cases, sound recordings) which, from some extant and verifiable empirical evidence, is known to have existed in the past. The other type is where you are trying to restore the (subjective) quality of the images and sounds themselves, as distinct from their running order (e.g. the 1997 rerelease of 'Vertigo', which corrected Eastmancolor fading and restored the VistaVision aspect ratio). Sometimes you're going at both, as with the 1988 restoration of 'Lawrence of Arabia'. Even with the latter there are points of contention - cinema projection and sound equipment worked very differently in the past, and that had a subjective effect on how films looked and sounded. Does your 'restoration' attempt to allow for that? BTW, referring to 'Pepe Le Moko', I saw a 35mm print at the Exeter Arts Centre about 3 years ago: apart from a thin s/n ratio on the soundtrack (an occpuational hazard with the early RCA variable area unilateral tracks) I was very impressed with it - the picture was sharp, contrasty and had no sign of the grain or fuzziness which indicates duping through several generations. Unless that version was incomplete, I'd be pleasantly surprised if you could achieve much more than the negative from which the print I saw was struck. Leo Dr. Leo Enticknap Director, Northern Region Film and Television Archive School of Arts and Media University of Teesside Middlesbrough TS1 3BA United Kingdom Tel. +44-(0)1642 384022 Fax. +44-(0)1642 384099 Brainfryer: +44-(0)7710 417383 ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite