Скачать или смотреть Flies (1922) 16mm composite restoration demonstration

From our upcoming Kickstarter update:

"Now, enjoy a clip from a composite version of Flies (1922), made from several sources—with color tinting added for demonstration purposes only—so you can tell the different sources apart:

What you're seeing in this clip are three different prints spliced together. The regular black and white element is the best looking one and the physical source print resides at a major archive. It's a 1920s print from Kodascope Libraries, and their mostly excellent prints are usually considered to be the best of the best.

Unfortunately, though, careful inspection shows that this physical print is missing a lot of footage! The old print has physical splices in it from wear and tear. I also learned last year while restoring another early inkwell film—Reunion (1922) that Kodascope's negatives were sometimes incomplete to begin with. That was also true with Flies.

So that's where my own two 16mm prints have come in to save the day, tinted here in red and green. The green footage comes from a print I own that was struck from a sound reissue version created in the 1930s. Sadly this particular print was silent, and didn't have its track—but it did look good, and it had some footage missing from the Kodascope!

Even more footage, tinted red in the excerpt above, comes from another print in my archive—a 1970s dupe of another 1920s Kodascope print, this one made from a different master element. This third print looks a bit softer and dupier than the others, but it contained lots of important footage that was missing from the first two elements.

The next step for Flies will be for my team to match the quality of all the different elements to the best of their abilities and then steady and clean up the entire thing, which won't take terribly long.

In any case, this is just one of many examples showing how much effort our Cartoons On Film team puts into comprehensively restoring these neglected early silents—something they, and I, are honored to be sharing. We're lucky to have multiple prints of some of these very rare films. If we didn't, and if we'd only restored Flies using the print we started with, we'd have so much less of it!"