Recent Film Restorations

[Stefan Andersson]

Upcoming German restorations:
The Treasure in the Silver Lake (feature film, 1962, director: Harald Reinl)
A Love in Germany (feature film, 1983, directed by Andrzej Wajda)
Distance (feature film, 1966, director: Jeanine Meerapfel)
Das Lied einer Nacht (feature film, 1932, directed by Anatole Litvak)
The Great King (feature film, 1940–1942, directed by Veit Harlan)
The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (feature film, 1970–1971, directed by Volker Schlöndorff)
The Lost Shadow (feature film, 1920, director: Rochus Gliese)
The Sorrows of Young Werther (feature film, 1976, directed by Egon Günther)
Frühlingsrauschen – Tränen, die ich dir geweint (feature film, 1929, director: Wilhelm Dieterle)
Summer in the City (feature film, 1970, directed by Wim Wenders)
Fährmann Maria (feature film, 1935, director: Frank Wysbar)
Venus in a Tailcoat (feature film, 1927, directed by Robert Land)
https://www.ffa.de/pressemitteilungen-d ... r-66-filme

[Stefan Andersson]

In August 2025 in India, there were showings of allegedly restored Dutt films; reports on the showings start in post 45 here:
https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.ph ... 488&page=3

"Guru Dutt /../ would have been perturbed to learn that the original negative of Bharosa (1963), a film in which he had a starring role, resurfaced at a scrap dealer’s shop, wedged between dormant film magazines and discarded VHS cassettes.

"restoration of Pakeezah(1972), expected to be completed in a year /../ The discovery of the film’s negatives /.../ by accident — in a lab — while looking for another classic, Daaera (1953), also directed by /Kamal Amrohi/. “Then suddenly, there it was, in a dilapidated condition, but still salvageable. The city’s humidity too adds /.../ the prints were scattered all over, each version slightly different from the other, with even different run times. “Back in the day, individual exhibitors would chop off reels to make films shorter, which meant more screenings. This means that decades later, we are left with a patchwork of mismatched reels and missing frames,”
“We are planning a calculated re-release — a two-week theatrical run and festival screenings,” he says, adding, “We may revisit the film at the editing table once it is restored to pace it differently for modern-day moviegoers.”
https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/ ... 220535.ece

https://www.reddit.com/r/bollywood/comm ... getting_a/


Ray´s "Kanchenjunga, made in 1962 and the director’s first colour feature, is also a forthcoming project.restoration work is also being undertaken by the National Film Development Corporation of India which had the digitally-enhanced version of Raj Kapoor’s Awara at TIFF in 2024."
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-ne ... 22728.html

Awāra was restored in 4K by NFDC-National Film Archive of India under National Film Heritage Mission, a project undertaken by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India.
https://tiff.net/events/awara

[Stefan Andersson]

Ville à vendre, Mocky, 4K:
https://www.cinematheque.fr/seance/44209.html

Kawachi Karumen, Suzuki, 4K:
https://www.cinematheque.fr/seance/44245.html

La bête à l´affut, Chenal, 4K:
https://www.cinematheque.fr/film/47486.html

Duel in the Sun, 4K, from the 35mm nitrate separation negatives:
https://www.cinematheque.fr/film/37409.html

Nihon senbotsu gakusei shuki: Kike wadatsumi no koe, Sekigawa, 4K:
https://www.cinematheque.fr/film/37631.html

Iracema: Uma transa amazônica, 4K:
https://www.cinematheque.fr/film/43175.html

Les Mauvais Coups, 4K:
https://www.cinematheque.fr/film/49868.html

Les Nuits fauves, 4K:
https://www.cinematheque.fr/film/47763.html

Pink Panther, 8K scan of OCN:
https://www.cinematheque.fr/film/32370.html

Rapt, Kirsanoff:
https://www.cinematheque.fr/film/49397.html

El Sur, 2025 resto from OCN by Le chat qui fume:
https://www.cinematheque.fr/film/43768.html

La Vérité sur Bébé Donge, 4K:
https://www.cinematheque.fr/film/47976.html

https://www.cinematheque.fr/cycle/resta ... -1488.html

Poema o more, Solntseva, DCP:
https://www.cinematheque.fr/seance/44476.html

[hearthesilence]

Duel in the Sun, 4K, from the 35mm nitrate separation negatives:
https://www.cinematheque.fr/film/37409.html

Presumably stills from this restoration posted on the Film Foundation's IG account. Looks pretty great.

[Stefan Andersson]

I giganti della Tessaglia (The Giants of Thessaly):
https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/11056

[domino harvey]

Duel in the Sun, 4K, from the 35mm nitrate separation negatives:
https://www.cinematheque.fr/film/37409.html

Presumably stills from this restoration posted on the Film Foundation's IG account. Looks pretty great.

Who even owns this anymore? I thought it was with Fox when KLSC put it out which means we’ll never even see it, but I’d love to be wrong

[dwk]

Duel in the Sun, 4K, from the 35mm nitrate separation negatives:
https://www.cinematheque.fr/film/37409.html

Presumably stills from this restoration posted on the Film Foundation's IG account. Looks pretty great.

Who even owns this anymore? I thought it was with Fox when KLSC put it out which means we’ll never even see it, but I’d love to be wrong

Pretty sure it is Disney

[A Tempted Christ]

Arco Foundation (?) has restored the color version of The Gospel According to St. Matthew. They bizarrely claim:

Originally shot in color, the film was distributed and has to this day always been seen in black-and-white. The Arco Foundation has restored the original colored version being screened, on this occasion, for the first time in North America.

I've seen caps of the color version on DVDBeaver from a previous DVD release and they absolutely look like colorized black-and-white footage. Also, the 35mm OCN was accessed for the recent 4K restoration and it was definitely in black-and-white. Any more information on the history of this color version?
Even if we were to believe this, I'm curious, can you strike B/W prints from color negatives? I know we can get close to a monochrome look through bleach bypass but fully black-and-white as if it was shot that way? any precedents?

[domino harvey]

I know it was not uncommon for some European prints of color films to be distributed in black and white as a cheaper option for smaller theatres, but this would surely be much more well known and discussed before this screening. No scholar or contemporary critic knew this? There’s no on screen credit for the color process they used? And no mention in this listing of what color process was used, which would be something any restorer would know and advertise? Color Italian films from this period are exceedingly rare due to the cost, one of Pasolini’s earliest films would be given a budget sufficient to produce it in color? They wouldn’t have used this as the source instead of the computer colorized versions produced for the Christian DVD market?

[JSC]

I remember reading that John Ford's Gideon's Day when it was released in the US under the title
Gideon of Scotland Yard was distributed in black and white prints (I don't recall the reason for
this, though).

I've never heard of Il Vangelo secondo Matteo being shot in color from any source, so I don't know
where this comes from. Edipo Re is usually cited as Pasolini's first feature in color. According to their
website, Arco films appears to be a company based out of Delaware with several Pasolini (and other Italian
films) in their catalog.

[domino harvey]

From Pasolini’s 1965 Film Comment interview

With The Gospel, the thing was so delicate that it would have been easy to fall into the ridiculous and the banal and the typical costume film genre. The dangers were so many that it wasn’t possible to foresee them all. And it being so difficult, we had to shoot three or four times more material than necessary. In effect, most of the scenes I created in the cutting room. I shot the whole Gospel with two cameras. I shot every scene from two or three angles, amassing three or four times more material than necessary. It was as if I had done a documentary on the life of Christ. By chance. With the moviola, I constructed the scene.

No one is shooting 4X what they need on expensive color film stock in this period

From Oswald Stack’s 1968 interview

Stack: Do you mind what happens to your films when they go abroad? For example, in Spain, Christ in The Gospel was dubbed with a voice that completely changed his character. In the Italian version you gave Christ a rather hard voice that none of the foreign dubbings reproduced.

Pasolini: Far worse things than that happen in Spain. In a country where people are still garroted I can resign myself to the idea that my characters may be badly dubbed. All I can say is that I despise anybody who is responsible for doing things like that. Part of the dubbing in Spain I organized myself, but it was half done when I got there and it was horrible, so I tried to fix the other half as best I could. In civilized countries like England and America the film came out with sub-titles, which I prefer.

You think he wouldn’t mention “and let’s not forget them turning my color film into black and white” here?

I had fun reading through these interviews though— I wish I liked his films more!

[knives]

Could color just mean tinted such as a sepia tone? This all seems a rather bizarre claim.

[MichaelB]

No one is shooting 4X what they need on expensive color film stock in this period

Indeed not. In my commentary for Radiance’s Une Femme Douce I discuss enforced changes to Robert Bresson’s working methods due to him turning to colour - the main one being that he was restricted to markedly fewer takes. And this was five years later!

The other interesting one was that the film has no fades to black, previously a Bresson stylistic staple, but it was impossible to do them in colour without the film visibly dropping a generation and Bresson wasn’t happy with what that did to the image.

[JamesF]

According to their
website, Arco films appears to be a company based out of Delaware with several Pasolini (and other Italian
films) in their catalog.

Arco was the production company of Pasolini’s then-producer Alfredo Bini, who died in 2010. I’m not sure what the connection is to this company in Delaware - Bini’s daughter maybe? - but certainly quite a few of the films listed on their website are represented elsewhere by other companies, so I’d take this all with a big pinch of salt.

[GaryC]

Even if we were to believe this, I'm curious, can you strike B/W prints from color negatives? I know we can get close to a monochrome look through bleach bypass but fully black-and-white as if it was shot that way? any precedents?

There are a few. Shooting on colour stock but printing in black and white became a preferred method for the few black and white commercial features of the 1980s and later, for example the Coens' The Man Who Wasn't There. The reasons were that by then, colour stocks were far more sensitive to light than black and white (which was pretty much just Kodak Double X in the West), which hadn't been the case a decade or two earlier. Also, having a colour negative available meant that a colour version could be produced for markets (cinema, video or TV) which wouldn't buy a black and white version. The earliest major-studio film I know of shot this way was was Movie Movie (1978), where the Dynamite Hands segment (a parody of 1930s boxing melodramas) was black and white in cinemas, as were the fake trailers in the middle, before the film went into colour for the parody of musicals, Baxter's Beauties of 1933. On television, Dynamite Hands was in colour, though in the version I saw on the BBC in 1982 the fake trailer was still black and white. I had a letter in Radio Times about this. It was a result of this that when Jonathan Sanger (who had worked on the film) produced his first feature, The Elephant Man, he was anxious that it be shot on black and white stock so that there wouldn't be a colour version.

An earlier example is Bill Douglas's My Childhood from 1972. This was shot in 16mm on colour stock but printed in black and white for an intended charcoal-drawing effect. At least one colour print was struck, though - I remember reading in Sight & Sound that it was actually shown by accident once.

[ellipsis7]

John Boorman's 1998 film THE GENERAL was shot in colour by DP Seamus Deasy & then released desaturated in black & white, a process supervised by the Director & DP...

Although shot in colour, the theatrical release of the film was presented in black-and-white for artistic reasons, while an alternate version of the desaturated original colour print was subsequently made available for television broadcast and home video. Asked why he chose to depict Cahill's life in black-and-white, Boorman said

I love black-and-white, and since I was making the film independently — I borrowed the money from the bank — there was no one to tell me I couldn't. If I had made [The General] for a studio, they wouldn't let me do that. The other reason, the main reason, was because it was about recent events and people who were still alive. I wanted to give it a little distance. Black-and-white gives you that sort of parallel world. Also, it's very close to the condition of dreaming, to the unconscious. I wanted it to have this mythic level because I felt this character was an archetype. All throughout history, you find this rebel, this violent, funny, brilliant kind of character. I wanted to make that kind of connection, and black-and-white film helps. Up until the middle to late '60s, it was a choice to film in black-and-white or color. But then television became so vital to a film's finance, and television won't show black-and-white. So that killed it off, really.

[RodneySauer]

As per a post on Nitrateville for the restoration of Beau Geste (1926)

Is the re-release of Beau Geste (1926) in theaters yet? Yes! The restored version premiered at the TCM Classic Film Festival on April 27, 2025, and is now being released theatrically across North America by Rialto Pictures. This restoration has been years in the making, involving a heroic collaboration between Paramount, multiple archives, and veteran film restorers. It even features a new score performed live by the Mont Alto Orchestra. If you're a fan of epic silent cinema, this is a rare treat.


Here are a few confirmed or likely venues based on past Rialto releases and silent film programming:

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York, NY Scheduled for Aug 1, 2025
Castro Theatre San Francisco, CA Likely (home of Silent Film Festival)
Music Box Theatre Chicago, IL Often hosts Rialto restorations
AFI Silver Theatre Silver Spring, MD Known for classic film series
Texas Theatre Dallas, TX Possible local screening.
Restoration runs approximately 101 minutes, drawn from multiple archival sources.

Will be interesting to see which boutique releases this

This is being released by Robert Harris / James Mockoski's own label, Artcraft Pictures. Available for order through the usual distributors, and also https://www.maltesefilm.com/purchase

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

A particularly odd example of a film shot in color that was only available in black and white for a long time was the first part of the Residents' promo film for The Third Reich 'n Roll, which was shot on color 16mm... with sets, props, and costumes covered in newspaper and tinfoil, so that the only glimpses of color come from occasional light leakage and a blue "laser beam" that was seemingly drawn or scratched directly onto the film. When the telecine was done, the operator assumed it was or was intended to be in black and white, so it was transferred in monochrome. AFAICT the color version was unavailable on video until it was restored a few years back for the Ears, Eyes and Throats compilation. (I've never seen an actual explanation for why it was shot in color in the first place—all I can assume is that it was a bizarre joke, which I totally respect.)

[Stefan Andersson]

Restoring the French-language version of Kirsanoff´s Rapt:
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/culture/lo ... s/89626130

"The French negative was incomplete, with decomposing reels and missing fragments. A German print featured different takes – original, but not identical, as was a common practice at the time, especially in Switzerland, where films were released simultaneously in French- and German-speaking markets. /.../ Another restoration project will concentrate on the German version, which was shot simultaneously with most of the same cast."


The Mender of Nets (D W Griffith, 1912), restored by Film Preservation Society, MoMA and LoC:
https://www.calameo.com/fiaf/read/0009185405b263e8ef3ce
https://www.filmpreservationsociety.org ... ph-project

Moi syn (Soviet Union, 1928):
https://www.calameo.com/fiaf/read/0009185405b263e8ef3ce
https://silentfilm.org/event/my-son/

Woman of Wrath, Taiwan 1984:
https://pavilion.taicca.tw/portfolio-it ... storation/
https://medium.com/@phillkatinkamus/fre ... 2042d48882
https://webs-of-significance.blogspot.c ... -than.html
"The Woman of Wrath was previously shown with eight scenes cut that this restored version reinserts into the work."

[FrauBlucher]

This is being released by Robert Harris / James Mockoski's own label, Artcraft Pictures. Available for order through the usual distributors, and also https://www.maltesefilm.com/purchase

There was a thread created for this and other Robert Harris' releases under Film Reserve in the boutique labels section

[Lowry_Sam]

Just watched the Film Forum preview for Who Killed Santa Claus? which looks to be a 4k restoration. Hope Kino doesn't get this as they don't like to release older French films on UHD (ie. Black Tulip).

[DeprongMori]

As per a post on Nitrateville for the restoration of Beau Geste (1926)

Is the re-release of Beau Geste (1926) in theaters yet? Yes! The restored version premiered at the TCM Classic Film Festival on April 27, 2025, and is now being released theatrically across North America by Rialto Pictures. This restoration has been years in the making, involving a heroic collaboration between Paramount, multiple archives, and veteran film restorers. It even features a new score performed live by the Mont Alto Orchestra. If you're a fan of epic silent cinema, this is a rare treat.


Here are a few confirmed or likely venues based on past Rialto releases and silent film programming:

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York, NY Scheduled for Aug 1, 2025
Castro Theatre San Francisco, CA Likely (home of Silent Film Festival)
Music Box Theatre Chicago, IL Often hosts Rialto restorations
AFI Silver Theatre Silver Spring, MD Known for classic film series
Texas Theatre Dallas, TX Possible local screening.
Restoration runs approximately 101 minutes, drawn from multiple archival sources.

Will be interesting to see which boutique releases this

This is being released by Robert Harris / James Mockoski's own label, Artcraft Pictures. Available for order through the usual distributors, and also https://www.maltesefilm.com/purchase

This Beau Geste restoration screened last night at the Orinda Theatre — this year’s home to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which was scheduled a bit later in the year for 2025. It was glorious. They had a great discussion in Amazing Tales from the Archives of the restoration and the two other Paramount restorations in this festival as well as those scheduled for next year’s festival in May at the Castro. Forthcoming is Clara Bow in It!

[jmj713]

Noriko's Dinner Table:
https://physicalmedia.news/news/norikos ... australia/

[Hogfather]

The Wild Party, 1929:
https://silver.afi.com/movies/detail/0100005282/

Smouldering Fires, 1925:
https://silver.afi.com/movies/detail/0100005289/

Der Richter und Sein Henker (Maximilian Schell, 1975), 4K, two versions (the long one only on blu) plus deleted scenes:
https://www.schnittberichte.com/news.php?ID=22646
Not clear if both versions are 4K.

Thank goodness! I've been aching to see Schell's movie for years if only to see what Martin Ritt's performance looks like.

[Stefan Andersson]

Herrin der Atlantis, German version, Pabst:
https://nfi.hu/en/budapest-classics-fil ... antis.html

For the record --
"In early 2018, the French version was announced for Blu-ray by Arrow Video in the US and UK. But an unspecified problem with the restoration led to it being delayed indefinitely, and in August 2022 Arrow finally confirmed it had been cancelled altogether."
https://brentonfilm.com/multiple-langua ... antis-1932

80 Hussars, Sándor Sára, 4K:
https://nfi.hu/en/film-archive/film-mar ... ssars.html

Father, István Szabó, 2K:
https://nfi.hu/en/film-archive/film-mar ... ather.html

Love Film, István Szabó, 4K:
https://nfi.hu/en/film-archive/film-mar ... -film.html

Upthrown Stone, Sándor Sára, 4K:
https://nfi.hu/en/film-archive/film-mar ... stone.html