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At Criterion, we've always thought that we should leave a movie we've worked on in better condition than we found it in. In one sense, that means we try to present our films as the filmmakers would want them seen. That means in uncut and uncensored versions, in their proper aspect ratios, with ancillary materials that will enhance not only viewers' understanding and enjoyment of the film, but also their desire to see it again and look deeper into it.

But we also recognize that filmmakers really want their films to be seen in a dark room with a lot of other people, projected from some distance away, on celluloid. When we have an opportunity to restore and reissue a film theatrically, bringing it back out in front of audiences, we do that. The difference between what we do and what Bob Harris does when he restores "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Rear Window" -- though the goal is the same, to present a pristine print of a great picture -- is that Bob really wants to create a stable, secure, even permanent physical picture element. We all hope it will last, but he's working with an ephemeral medium that needs proper temperature storage and other stuff.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

Still, you can't beat film grain! It's the most beautiful recording surface for moving images. Our works exists finally on a digital tape. The movies are stored in bits. Strictly speaking, in terms of film restoration, the film may not be restored. But it is at least preserved and recorded. We shouldn't underplay the importance of these things just because the final product for restoration isn't a piece of film. It's probably more stable and certainly in a format more accessible to an array of people than a piece of film permanently stored in an archive vault. That's not to say that we shouldn't be giving money to film preservation. Everywhere we look we find that films have been recorded on volatile material and there is a great deal of restoration and preservation work that needs to be done.

Now, when we go through and do restorations for video only -- and we're very clear that we're not actually restoring the film -- we tell people that the image has been restored and we show them examples of the repairs that we do so that we can educate their eyes. We want them to know what a splice looks like. What we do is go back to the best possible preprint elements that we can, then we create a digital record of those elements.

In the case of "The Seventh Seal," even when you find the best possible element -- which was just a revelation, a stunning, beautiful piece of film -- it had tears, it had scratches, it had all kinds of things that would be very difficult to get rid of prior to making a theatrical print, because you'd have to find replacements for those frames and match them and time them into a new element and all that. Digitally, it's relatively easy for us, because of the material we invested in here for our specialized work, to go in and repair a tear or a scratch or a section that needs special attention. Often the heads and tails of reels, where the reel changes, tend to be where the film gets beat up.

We do these repairs in our offices, on a Silicon Graphics rig set up with a brilliant piece of software that was designed by a company called Mathematical Technologies -- just a very smart and single-minded digital image restoration system. It does incomprehensible amounts of math in order to generate algorithms that will compare the elements of past and future frames to the damaged frame and mathematically interpolate what actually ought to be in that frame. It's not infallible; we end up using a very light hand with it.

If there's something that can't be repaired in a way that we feel that we feel is ideal -- i.e., imperceptible -- then we'll leave it. Same thing goes for sound restoration, which we do with a great system designed by a company called Cedar. There are certain kinds of problems that are almost impossible to repair imperceptibly and then we'll have to leave them. And that's true in actual film restoration as well. There's always the one that got away.

"Grand Illusion" is one of the best examples of the work you do spilling over into actual film preservation and restoration -- also of how the problems of banning and censorship intensify the challenges of film restoration, since they make it even more difficult to find decent renditions of a director's preferred version.

The short form of the "Grand Illusion" story is: Basically, the film was declared cultural public enemy No. 1 of the Third Reich by [Joseph] Goebbels. Largely that had to do with the close friendship it showed between the character played by the French everyman movie star Jean Gabin with a Jew. Of course, there were also notions of undermining and overthrowing the German order. I'm sure none of those things played well with Goebbels.

So when Paris fell and the Nazis marched in, the negative was seized and everyone believed that it was immediately destroyed. But in fact it was spirited away to the Reich film archive and there fell into the hands of Dr. Frank Hensel, who, at least when it came to great movies, was more of a loyal cinéaste than a Nazi. Despite orders that "Grand Illusion" be destroyed, he hid it away.

After the war and the partitioning of Berlin, the film element we are talking about turned up in the Russian sector. Nobody believe it existed, everybody believed it had been destroyed back in '42 when the Nazis first walked in. So nobody was really looking for it. It went back to Moscow and sat there. From 1958 until 1998-'99, when we finally re-did it, there was a blurring on the right side of the frame on all the available elements of "Grand Illusion."

Correcting it wasn't a matter of digital restoration -- it was a matter of getting to the right element, which turned out to be this original camera negative. The blurring was made in an intermediate stage in the printing process, when a duplicate negative was struck that became the master element for the 1958 reconstruction of the film. That blurring in the right side of frame was in everything we looked at for the last how-many years.

In '96 we started seeking new film on "Grand Illusion" because we wanted it to be our first DVD. The spine on the DVD still says that it's No. 1 even though it came out after 65 others. It is spiritually, the first DVD of the Criterion Collection. Our first picture on laser was "Citizen Kane"; when it came time to do DVD we knew we wouldn't launch until a year after the DVD roll-out. What were we going to do? What would be the first one? We all democratically kicked this around and voted and all this stuff and many heated run-on conversations and everyone finally rallied behind "Grand Illusion."

Next page | "Citizen Kane" -- and "Gimme Shelter"