The BFI are screening Gösta Berling's saga on 19th
January and if you haven’t already booked I suggest you click on this link right away to make sure of the best seats for what will be a spectacular Sunday
with the best musical accompaniment!
The Swedish Film Institute have been working on restoring
one of the major works of their golden silent era for years and first presented
a restored version a few years back at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival
but, this wasn’t enough and they were motivated to further enhance what had
been done by the desire to present something as close as possible to Mauritz
Stiller’s original vision and… here we are!
I’ve been speaking to the person responsible for the
project, the SFI’s Jörgen Viman, Film Archivist and man on a mission. He says
that the initial motivation to make a new print was that the existing ones were
only in black and white. They discovered that there were tinted nitrate
materials in French, German and Portuguese archives and borrowed from all three
to create a digitized template for re-tinting the film.
I found images that we were missing completely, and
these are euphoric moments. I also discovered images that were similar, but
still not exactly the same. The camera angle was slightly different.
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| An example of one of the tinted source nitrates, many sprockets were fixed... |
Source materials
Examining the images in detail he discovered that that
there were differences in content and approach, these being all further
highlighted by a black and white print from Moscow. The project was now not
just about restoring the tints but also missing parts of the narrative and I
can well understand the satisfactions of an archivist on this trail especially
when he discovered after painstaking work sifting through the SFI’s filming
reports, text lists, text signs and other documentation, that there were
originally two slightly differing negatives.
Running to the same length these featured different angles
with Stiller and his legendary lensman Julius Jaenzon using two cameras as was
standard practice for at least parts of the filming. Trying to make sense of
Stiller’s intended narrative was always going to be difficult as films often
varied from the script which still survives in this instance. Luckily Swedish censorship
was diligent and so there was a record of all of the intertitles – praise be to
those who have the viewers’ delicate sensibilities at heart.
None of these records showed how the images were edited
around the text and so a long and laborious process was begun reviewing the materials
side-by-side to identify the best quality takes from scenes of varying length
and angles from those two cameras.
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| One of only six surviving images of Ava Lundin's original intertitles |
405 Intertitles…
In terms of the intertitles only three of Ava Lundin’s
lovely painted inserts survive but Jörgen found three more reproduced in a
magazine from 1924 that helped the team create a font that was a close as possible
to the originals. Anyone who has worked with typography knows what a challenge
this is but luckily all but the letter z were present in lower case on the six
intertitles although the capitals were more elusive especially as they varied
by context in the sentences.
Jörgen then used Photo Shop to recreate everyone of the
405 intertitles, originally painted by hand now by digital programming with no
less attention to detail and layout. I remember a world of graphic design
before digital artwork and it is such an underappreciated art with text
placement needing to balance, avoid line breaks and to be readable as easily as
possible. Jörgen centred the text and also aligned left and right creating a
consistent read area throughout the film. I noticed in Bologna that some of the
English text had changed as well, perhaps moving them closer to the original Swedish?
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| The reconstructed intertitle, only 404 to go... |
Tinting and colour ways
Obviously it was not possible to recreate Alva Lundin’s
painted images on the title cards but the magazine article revealed that they were
all toned in dark brown which no other document mentioned. This may not always
look the case though as the eye gets used to the colour that is in the image
before the text. As Jörgen says: If the image is blue, the eye perceives the
text as more strongly toned than if the image before is yellow, for example.
Now for the colour of the images the restoration team mostly
used the Portuguese nitrate print, but there were variations with that print
showing all the night images in light green, while the same sequence were
tinted blue in the French material. Swedish convention was – as with Hollywood
films – to use blue for night and this they did with exception of one scene only
found in the Portuguese copy – which they left in dark green. You’ll see it
when Gösta finds the little bird on the road.
Re-creation is an interpretation that is based on
facts, but also experience and collaboration.
New footage…
This is what gets most of us excited about any
restoration and watching the restoration in Bologna last June there were many occasions
when I wanted to stop the film and compare with my old Kino DVD but this would
have been rude of course!
There are a number of images from slightly different
places throughout the film and it felt like the key sequences in which first the
Major’s wife, Margaretha Samzelius (the Swedish theatre legend Gerda Lundequist)
and then Marianne (my favourite prima ballerina/actress Jenny Hasseqlvist) are
disgraced at Ekeby parties, were separated, giving both more impact for me.
There are new images in the latter scene where Gösta (Lars
Hanson) and Marianne dance – I always love seeing Jenny dance! – which fills
out the depth of feeling between the two as their attraction is revealed on
stage leading to Marianne’s father refuses to have anything more to do with her.
Jörgen says that the section that perhaps took the
longest to put together was the sequence that took place on the ice with many
options from the footage and different camera angles. He says that the sequence
where one of the wolves is attacked by his own pack was filmed from two
completely different directions, leaving him with the task of re-editing one of
the most exciting and important sections of the film.
Thank you for your time and for your diligence Jörgen,
what I saw at Il Cinema Ritrovato you have done a splendid job and I can’t wait
to see it all over again on Sunday 19th January at the BFI and to
introduce the results of your work as succinctly as possible!
Book your tickets now at the BFI website!
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