Doc Corner: The art of restoration at TCM Classic Film Festival

By Glenn Dunks

Do you ever think about what career path you may have chosen in retrospect? You know, the one you would have selected had you been able to make such a life-changing decision after having actually experienced life? Maybe you already have your dream job, but even then—there’s often a niggling part of us that imagines something else. If I could turn back time, I think I would love to have gotten into film restoration and archiving. They are each fascinating professions that play to my niche interests including preservation and exhibition of celluloid, not to mention pretty, curated shelves. (I was the guy who would visit the video store and ensure the cases were in alphabetical order.) What's this go to do with anything though?

I bring this up because playing at this month’s TCM Classic Film Festival (May 6–9) is a new documentary called The Méliès’ Mystery about the efforts to conserve and restore the 520 films by the French pioneer, Georges Méliès. Yes, he of A Trip to the Moon had burned the original print negatives of all his movies as his career faltered at the start of the 1910s. His fairy tale excursions of light and magic were out of vogue and his production house of Star Films, with French and American studios, shut up shop.

Méliès’ story is not new to audiences, of course...

There have been numerous documentaries about or inclusive of his important place in film history. More famously, of course, Martin Scorsese interpolated his story with that of a children's storybook narrative in the Oscar-winning Hugo. Nor is it a particularly unique story as to what happened to his body of work. 75% of silent era films are lost forever—not always for such self-destruction reasons as Méliès’, but it’s all very upsetting if you covet film history.

Here we get to see film artists like Costa-Gavras and Michel Gondry articulate what made him so special beyond the title of ‘first!’ of so many things. For Méliès, cinema was magic and he utilised his history in that medium to build a catalogue that films that enraptured audiences. As lovingly detailed in Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange’s The Méliès’ Mystery, it’s something of a magic trick of its own that dual negatives were discovered of some 200+ titles and allowed to bring his artistry back to audiences. The film itself is modest; a one-hour TV documentary that is perfect for TCM or a home entertainment box-set of Méliès’ films. Nothing wrong with that, and its second half in particular delighted me with its stories of the discoveries, mysteries and subsequent restorations.

More exciting, however, is a treat for a certain segment of audience. While Bill Morrison’s let me come in [sic] isn’t a documentary in its classic form, it does make a wonderful partner to The Méliès’ Mystery. As is Morrison’s want, he has re-assembled ten minutes of scrappy, moth-eaten, decomposing and deconstructed footage from a silent era French film, Pawns of Passion (as an aside: whatta title!). Overlayed is an original operatic composition by David Lang, who’s “Simple Song #3” from Youth was Oscar-nominated in 2015. Truly, I could have done without the music, but Morrison’s skill at repurposing old celluloid is a gift that does often feel quite operatic so I won’t object too much.

Where Morrison often finds beautiful, rhythmic ways of editing, here the majesty comes in the mirage of images this old film shifts between in front of the eyes. At one moment it looks like a abstract expressionistic painting, a science fiction tableau, a microscopic close-up of bacteria or an aerial photograph of a desolate, bone-dry riverbed. It makes art out of the accidental, where a pocked cell actually frames its protagonists in light and shapes. let me come in is more experimental than documentary, true. But the way Morrison utilises old film, recontextualises and repurposes it, makes for maybe(?) a new form of it. Lovers of his Dawson City: Frozen, my own no. 2 doc of the decade, will want to experience it.

Where and when to watch

The Méliès Mystery is screening as a part of the TCM Classic Film Festival alongside four of his short films, airing on HBOMax. let me come in airs on the TCM network at 3:15 AM on May 7th (I assume you can record it given the airtime? I don’t know exactly how it works!).

A few other documentary titles to mention. The festival is playing the greatest work of non-fiction that I have ever seen—Chantal Akerman’s News from Home on the 9th of May. It is a film I would always take an opportunity to watch whether it’s your first or tenth time doing so. It will be followed by Akerman’s short, La Chambre. If Mark Harris’ new book about Mike Nichols has reignited that flame, then the 1996 doc Nichols and May: Take Two screens on the 8th of May. Like Méliès, it’s not much of a movie-movie, but it’s a hilarious 60-minute look at the work of Nichols and Elaine May that eventually just becomes long sketches of the pair. Steve Martin and Robin Williams appear, too.

Penelope Spheeris’ 1981 classic, The Decline of Western Civilization also screens as a part of the HBO Max line-up. Lastly, there is Tex Avery: The King of Cartoons on May 8th.

Comments

[thevoid99]

OK, gotta remind myself to DVR that film. Thank you for reminding me.

[joel6]

Thanks for drawing my attention to this. Loved and was fascinated by Dawson City so I hope it will be the same with this.

Though some of the film loss was accidental, the enormous Fox & MGM vault fires in '37 & '65 respectively destroyed treasures untold, the short-sightedness of the early filmmakers who salvaged so much of their work for the silver content is tragic. They're hardly alone so much of early television was recorded over without a thought.

Pawns of Passion is some title but they cranked out product at such a pace back then that florid titles ("In Search of a Sinner" and "Passion's Playground" among others) were commonplace.