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[April 22 / NY, NY] The Film Foundation, the non-profit organization created in 1990 by Martin Scorsese, is launching The Film Foundation Restoration Screening Room to showcase films restored with support from the foundation and its partners. The Film Foundation Restoration Screening Room will be available free of charge, starting on Monday, May 9th, with additional feature presentations debuting on the second Monday of each month. The first presentation will be I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING! (1945, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), restored by The Film Foundation and BFI National Archive, in association with ITV and Park Circus available for a 24 hour window.

Viewers will experience the excitement of a live event, with introductions and conversations with filmmakers and archivists, providing an inside look at the restoration process. The Film Foundation Restoration Screening Room will be “appointment viewing,” with screenings starting at a set time, and available for a limited period, distinguishing it from other streaming options. The Film Foundation Restoration Screening Room will celebrate the collaborative nature of film preservation by highlighting the work of archives and studios.

“We’re looking forward to making these beautiful restorations available to a wide audience,” said Martin Scorsese, The Film Foundation founder and chair. “Many of these presentations will feature restorations that are rarely seen, with myself and other filmmakers sharing why these films are important, how they have impacted our lives, and why it’s crucial that they be preserved.”

“We’re grateful to Oracle and DelphiQuest for making this possible, and we’re thrilled to share these restorations with new audiences,” said Margaret Bodde, the Executive Director of The Film Foundation. “The Restoration Screening Room aligns perfectly with the foundation’s mission, and we’re eager to connect with people around the world who love cinema.”

The screening of I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING! on May 9th is co-presented by the BFI National Archive, Janus Films, ITV and Park Circus. This restoration of the classic romance, which received its world premiere at Cannes Classics last year and UK Premiere at the BFI London Film Festival last October, was selected by Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones, who are co-curating the Restoration Screening Room. I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING! will be introduced by Scorsese, and include interviews with Thelma Schoonmaker Powell, Joanna Hogg, Tilda Swinton, and Kevin Macdonald; all of whom count the film among their favorites. Restoration funding for I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING! was provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation with additional support provided by Matt Spick.

The Film Foundation is partnering with Oracle and DelphiQuest to create and power the platform, which will be available online at film-foundation.org/restoration-screening-room. The programming will showcase a broad range of restorations, including classic, avant-garde, independent, documentary, silent and short films from every era, genre, and region of the world. Upcoming monthly presentations include LA STRADA (1954, d. Federico Fellini), KUMMATTY (India, 1979, d. G. Aravindan), a film noir double feature of DETOUR (1945, d. Edgar G. Ulmer) and THE CHASE (1946, d. Arthur D. Ripley), SAMBIZANGA (Angola, 1972, d. Sarah Maldoror), ONE-EYED JACKS (1961, d. Marlon Brando), MOULIN ROUGE (1952, d. John Huston), LOST LOST LOST (1976, d. Jonas Mekas), and others to be announced.

About The Film Foundation: 
The Film Foundation is a nonprofit organization created by Martin Scorsese in 1990 to protect and preserve motion picture history. By working in partnership with archives and studios, the foundation has helped to restore over 925 films, which are made accessible to the public through programming at festivals, museums, and educational institutions world-wide. The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project has restored 47 films from 27 countries to date, representing the rich diversity of cinema from around the globe. The foundation's free educational curriculum, The Story of Movies, teaches young people - over 10 million to date - about film language and history.
https://www.film-foundation.org
Twitter: @Film_Foundation
Instagram: @thefilmfoundation_official
 

About the BFI:
We are a cultural charity, a National Lottery distributor, and the UK’s lead organisation for film and the moving image.
Our mission is:
● To support creativity and actively seek out the next generation of UK storytellers
● To grow and care for the BFI National Archive, the world’s largest film and television archive
● To offer the widest range of UK and international moving image culture through our programmes and festivals - delivered online and in venue
● To use our knowledge to educate and deepen public appreciation and understanding of film and the moving image
● To work with Government and industry to ensure the continued growth of the UK’s screen industries

Founded in 1933, the BFI is a registered charity governed by Royal Charter. The BFI Board of Governors is chaired by Tim Richards.

 

Before the outbreak of WWII, George Stevens had already developed into a great filmmaker, a comic master with a lyrical visual sense and an extraordinary sensitivity to changing moods within relationships, one shading into or delicately layering over the next. During the war, Stevens led a Signal Corps film unit through enormous swaths of the European theater—they were present at D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge and the liberation of Dachau. In 1974, when Joseph McBride and Patrick McGilligan asked Stevens how he thought his experience of the war had affected his films, he answered: “It causes a most profound adjustment in your thinking. I don’t suppose I was ever too hilarious again.” He was, after the war, on every possible level, a different kind of filmmaker.

Stevens did indeed set aside humor, but his sensitivity to human affairs only deepened. He shifted to an epic canvas, partly as a way of adapting to changing conditions in Hollywood and the “threat” of television, but more importantly because it afforded him a kind of double perspective. In A Place in the Sun, Shane and Giant, Stevens chose narratives in which contentment and melancholy, fulfillment and tragedy, freedom and entrenched exploitation, abundance of space and human immediacy, communal cooperation and the violent exercise of power always go hand in hand, one always shadowing the other. The many dramatic shifts in scale in those films and the frequent use of the optically-achieved long dissolve as a transitional device embody Stevens’ wider perspective on ever-changing reality. At the level of artistry, spectacle and emotional and thematic complexity, Giant is a peak moment in American cinema.

In 1995, Giant had its first photo-chemical restoration. A vastly improved digital restoration led to the creation of an HD master in 2013. In the decade since, technological developments have led to vastly expanding possibilities in film restoration, which have made the glorious, painstakingly achieved 4K restoration done by Daphne Dentz and Bob Bailey and their team at Warner Bros. possible (the restoration was supported by The Film Foundation and Turner Classic Movies). The restoration will have its big screen premiere tonight as a highlight of the TCM Film Festival (happily in person once again after two years in virtual limbo). Appropriately, the screening will take place on one of the biggest screens left in the country, the TCL Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard.

“We actually over-sample,” said Bailey when I talked with him and Dentz the other day. “We scan on a device that does 6K scanning, 16-bit. We did that to the YCMs (yellow, cyan and magenta separation masters) and the OCN (original camera negative)—which has faded, so we recombined the blue layer for the entire project. Some of the fading in the OCN was so bad that we had to put in the YCM. We did that literally cut to cut. And we were working on opticals for days at a time to make sure that everything was cleaned to a pristine level that you’ve never seen before. There was a lot of movement in opticals in those days, and a natural weave in the film just going through the camera, so now we can stabilize everything. We lock that down.”

The other thing to add,” said Dentz, “is the improvements in the actual tools themselves—Baselight has improved greatly in the management of grain, and we also use Neat, another grain management tool that is able to, on a frame-by-frame basis, manipulate and remove grain in some sections and then add it back and blend it in. So that's happening as well throughout the film. But there's a lot of that work happening on the opticals, which is why I think they look so good.”

“Our goal,” added Bailey, “is to have the exact same experience you would at the movie theatre if you saw the first print ever released. That's our goal.”

“We're purists,” said Dentz, “so we don't want to change the image, the look of the image, the feel of the image. There's a constant dialogue around what to do on every  title—with the colorists, with the scan artists, in this case with Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, and, of course, with George Stevens, Jr.”

I can only repeat what I’ve said before about other figures in the world of restoration: if you love film, whether you know it or not, Daphne and Bob are among your heroes.

- Kent Jones

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GIANT (1956, d. George Stevens)
Restored by Warner Bros. in collaboration with The Film Foundation. Special thanks to George Stevens Jr., Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg.

Martin Scorsese’s nonprofit The Film Foundation is officially launching a free virtual screening room to showcase film restorations. The Film Foundation Restoration Screening Room, which will showcase both foundation restorations as well as those from partners, will launch on Monday, May 9, with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1945 romantic comedy “I Know Where I’m Going!” starring Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey. The restoration was overseen by The Film Foundation and BFI National Archive, in association with ITV and Park Circus.

The film and subsequent titles will be available for a 24-hour window and will feature introductions and conversations with filmmakers and archivists, providing an inside look at the restoration process. The Film Foundation Restoration Screening Room will offer “appointment viewing,” with screenings starting at a set time and available for a limited period, which is unlike other classic streaming options.

The restoration of “I Know Where I’m Going,” which received its world premiere at Cannes Classics last year and U.K. Ppemiere at the BFI London Film Festival last October, was selected by Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones, who serve as co-curators of the Restoration Screening Room. The film will be introduced by Scorsese, and include interviews with Thelma Schoonmaker Powell, “The Souvenir” director Joanna Hogg, Tilda Swinton, and Kevin Macdonald, all of whom count the film among their favorites. The screening is co-presented by Janus Films.

“We’re looking forward to making these beautiful restorations available to a wide audience,” said Martin Scorsese, The Film Foundation’s founder and chair. “Many of these presentations will feature restorations that are rarely seen, with myself and other filmmakers sharing why these films are important, how they have impacted our lives, and why it’s crucial that they be preserved.”

On the streaming side, The Film Foundation currently hosts many of its titles over at the Criterion Channel. Restorations on the streaming platform include “The Broken Butterfly,” “The Red Shoes,” “How Green Was My Falley,” “Ugetsu,” “La Strada,” “Wanda,” and “Mysterious Object at Noon.”

Restoration funding for “I Know Where I’m Going” was provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation with additional support provided by Matt Spick.

The Film Foundation is partnering with Oracle and DelphiQuest to create and power the platform, which will be available online at film-foundation.org/restoration-screening-room. The programming will showcase a broad range of restorations, including classic, avant-garde, independent, documentary, silent and short films from every era, genre, and region of the world. Upcoming monthly presentations include “La Strada,” “Kummatty,” “Detour” and “The Chase,” “Sambizanga,” “One-Eyed Jacks,” “Moulin Rouge” (1952), “Lost Lost Lost,” and more.

Turner Classic Movies is expanding its partnership with The Film Foundation with a multiyear financial commitment to fund education and the restoration of classic movies, it was announced Friday.

The fruits of this relationship will be on full display — in 4K, no less — at next week’s TCM Classic Film Festival with an April 22 screening of a restored version of Giant (1956) at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

At 7 p.m. before the start of the film, TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz will host a conversation with Film Foundation board member Steven Spielberg, executive director Margaret Bodde and George Stevens Jr., whose father won an Oscar for directing the sweeping Texas-set family saga that starred Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean.

Since its launch by Martin Scorsese in 1990, The Film Foundation has restored more than 900 movies. Scorsese and fellow board member Spielberg hand-picked Giant as one of the group’s latest restoration projects, working with the Warner Bros. archives team for a year to complete the process.

“Anything that presumes to call itself ‘Giant’ better have the goods to keep such a lofty promise,” Spielberg said in a statement. “Both [novelist] Edna Ferber and George Stevens far exceeded the title to bring such an epic American story to the big screen, and I’m proud to have been a small part of the restoration team of this classic motion picture.”

The restoration was completed by Warner Bros. Post Production Creative Services: Motion Picture Imaging and Post Production Sound by sourcing both the original camera negatives and protection RGB separation master positives for the best possible image, then color corrected in high dynamic range for the latest picture display technology. The audio was sourced primarily from a 1995 protection copy of the Original Magnetic Mono soundtrack.

The restoration also will be available on HBO Max this year.

“Working with The Film Foundation allows us to preserve these important films for future generations to experience across multiple platforms,” TCM GM Pola Changnon said. “There is so much to learn from classic movies, and we are honored to host the world premiere screening of the 4K restoration of Giant.”

Added Stevens Jr.: “I was with my father during the writing of the Giant screenplay, and he measured films by how they stood the test of time. Giant has more than met that test, and he would be grateful that Steven, Marty, The Film Foundation and Warner Bros. have achieved this brilliant restoration so a new generation can see Giant on the big screen, streaming and Blu-ray.”