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THELMA SCHOONMAKER visits Scarecrow Wednesday, Feb. 10th
We at Scarecrow are honored to once again welcome to the store Thelma Schoonmaker, the triple-Oscar winning film editor of many of Martin Scorsese’s films including Raging Bull, The Aviator, The Departed and the upcoming Shutter Island. She’ll be stopping by the store on Wednesday, February 10th at 2pm. Ms. Schoomaker is in town presenting two films by her husband, legendary British director Michael Powell, at Seattle Art Museum. On Tuesday, February 9th it’s I Know Where I’m Going! (1945) and the following evening it’s The Red Shoes. This is the Seattle premiere of Martin Scorsese’s personal Film Foundation restored 35mm print of The Red Shoes, which he mentioned during his speech accepting the Cecil B. DeMille award at last month’s Golden Globe awards:
Note: If listening to Mr. Scorsese talk about film and film preservation made you tear up a bit (like I did), be sure to check out A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, in which he takes us through his favorite films and shares their influence on his work. One viewing is roughly equivalent to a quarter of film school.
Both films begin at 7:30pm downtown at the Seattle Art Museum. For ticket information, please visit their website.
To prepare for her visit, here’s footage of Ms. Schoonmaker discussing her career and how she goes about the editing process.
Make plans to take a late lunch, skip class, or leave work early to meet and chat with a modern film legend. We’ll see you here.
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Here’s some more information on the restoration (from the Association of Moving Image Archivists):
Many people consider Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressberger’s 1948 production “The Red Shoes ,” photographed by Jack Cardiff, to be one of the most beautiful three-strip Technicolor films ever made.
Previous restorations in the 1970s and 1980s had used optical printing from B&W protection masters to combine the three images on Eastmancolor film, and though correct color registration was successfully accomplished, a contrast build-up caused by optical printing resulted in somewhat harsh color in the resulting negatives and prints.
In 2006, The Film Foundation asked UCLA Film & Television Archive to work with them on a new 35mm restoration of the film that would utilize the best of today’s technology to recapture the qualities of Technicolor dye transfer prints of the 1940s. The original plan was to do the work photochemically, using wet printing from the original YCM camera negatives as UCLA had done previously on many Technicolor movies ranging from the first successful three-strip feature film “Becky Sharp” (1935) to “The Barefoot Contessa” (1954), one of the last films photographed in the three-strip process.
However, a multitude of serious problems, including horizontal and vertical misregistration of the colors, objectionable color breathing, optical dupe sections with excessively high contrast, and the unexpected discovery of severe mold damage on all forty-eight reels of original negatives, ultimately led to the conclusion that 4K digital restoration of the entire film would be required. In the end, approximately 580,000 individual frames of the YCM nitrate negatives had to be converted to the digital domain with a Filmlight Northlight scanner, digitally cleaned up and repaired, and then recorded out to Kodak Vision 2242 stock via an Arrilaser.