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Restoration drama
Independent, The (London), May 14, 2008 by Chris Evans
Britain's greatest film classics are being digitally enhanced to crackle-free HD standards. Chris Evans takes his seat for an exclusive screening
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.
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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."
