Preview. The remaking of Gösta Berling's saga (1924). BFI screening on 19th January!

 

The BFI are screening Gösta Berling's saga on 19^th 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.

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.

 

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?

 

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 19^th January at the BFI and to introduce the results of your work as succinctly as possible!

 

Book your tickets now at the BFI website!