Les Vampires (new restoration)

[denti alligator]

Looks nice, but what will fill all those DVDs, I wonder. One would need three discs at most for the films at a high bit rate. Comes with the book! Pretty cool and so damn tempting!

With the restored prints of Fantomas and Les Vampires now available, we can hope that Tih Minh and Barrabas will follow soon!

[HerrSchreck]

I would rather they brought Ti Minh or Barabas out prior to this, though I'd imagine this release is for the general French public who knows nothing about all-region players/disc-collecting. Sure looks like a nice wallet-eater, though.

[denti alligator]

The good news is that Tih Minh and Barrabas will be coming, eventually. Gaumont has restored both of them, and they should be brought out on DVD in time. Soon after Artificial Eye will lisence them, add English subs and sell them at a lower price. With this package, however, I don't think I'll be waiting for the AE release. It looks too tempting with the book and all!

[Arn777]

Yes David, there seem to be lots of people with multi-region players and avid collectors in France, although I would think that it may more true in the Paris area than elsewhere, but remember that France is still a very cinephile country, just look at the number of foreign films (read non-US) relaesed there every month. Interestingly, before DVD, French consumers were buying far less movies on VHS like the Brits, and now they buy more DVDs.

I am very much looking forward to Les Vampires, hoping that Gaumont does not delay it again...

[htdm]

remember that France is still a very cinephile country, just look at the number of foreign films (read non-US) relaesed there every month.

This has been my impression too. Yet, I've always been a little confused by the relative lack of older French films available on DVD in France. There are some exceptions of course (for instance, I'm glad to see Duvivier's sound version Poil de Carotte is finally getting released), however, my sense is that more classic French films are available on DVD outside France than in.

[ola t]

I'd imagine this release is for the general French public who knows nothing about all-region players/disc-collecting

The R1 has English intertitles.

[HerrSchreck]

I'd imagine this release is for the general French public who knows nothing about all-region players/disc-collecting

The R1 has English intertitles.

Excellent point Ola, which zapped my speculation into the dust... I shoulda realized as I've had the R1 (quite pricey for a DVD18, but I guess owing to the heavy telecine budget) disc since it came out. Same with JUDEX, an otherwise quite nice presentation by Flicker Alley. I really wish these guys would stop making their own intertitles and start subtitling, which only MoC & CC seem devoted to doing, even when creating brand new intertitles off of flash intertitles.

This is probably a good a place as any to mention something I've already had a whiff of from a couple of sources, but had confirmed a bit while reading a monograph on the print-history of NOSFERATU on the Chiaroscuro.com site:

I recalled reading someplace else (come to think of it it may have been the VAMPIRES booklet with the Image dvd) about the legendary projection by Langlois at the Cinemateque of LLES VAMPIRES, which was the first exposure of the film to a whole new generation of cineastes... deliberately projected by Langlois without intertitles. I recall thinking "Wha?" when I read it, especially since this was in the country of origin. NOSFERATU monograph paints an unflattering picture of the usually universally-revered & otherwise unassailable Langlois vis his treatment of the intertitles of silent films, as well as maintaining their integrity, flat out, as a preservationist for future generations may study the filsm in the state of their original release. It turns out this was a common practice for the man, who had an apparent disposition of annoyance with intertitles. He did the same for CALIGARI, which, until non-Cinemateque sources were located, were usually projected without intertitles by Langlois... resulting in intertitles, when at last reconstructed by others who (after going back to censor records or other non-CF prints) had no idea of the interaction of the CALIGARI intertitles with the art-direction of the film (as seen in the Murnau-Foundation 'authorized' editions the original intertitles were pieces of expressionst art in themselves).

The same goes for scores: he had somewhat of an apparent disdain, which seems to run right up into our own times with contemporary preservationists & vid-producers, for the original music or settings composed or arranged specifically for these films deliberately by the director in conjunction with composers. I find it outrageous that Murnau-foundation "authorized" releases of critical films, even by Murnau himself, have these fucking rediculous industrial/pop/Sosin-barbiturate soundtracks whereas the reality is they know quite well that, as in, for example, the cases of say NOSFERATU & LETZE MANN there are original scores composed by Guiseppe Becce for which the sheet music is freely available. How the editions out now (save for one LETZE MANN edition I believe Eureka?? which does have the original score) can proclaim they are the restored authorized editions closest to the director's original release intentions is beyond me. It irks me to no end that I've purchased multiple editions of both films & not one creates the aural mood demanded by the director.

As for VAMPIRES I'm not sure about scoring, but these revelations about Langlois amaze me...

[whaleallright]

deliberately projected by Langlois without intertitles

I'm not confident this was as deliberate as you imply. Frequently, nitrate prints are preserved without intertitles. Perhaps a title-less print was all that was available to Langois at that time.

Whatever the cause, the title-less Les Vampires was an inspiration to Resnais, Franju et al.

[HerrSchreck]

New York Times 10/25/98 Classic 'Junk,' Saved From Trash

By J. HOBERMAN <snip> THERE'S an iron law of history that decrees, given enough time and sufficient scarcity, anything from broken crockery to petrified dinosaur droppings will become a precious relic.

This process has been vastly accelerated by motion pictures -- and not just because the discarded props from Hollywood classics are now five-figure collectibles. And not just because auteurist film critics have discovered artists where none were originally seen, creating an atmosphere in which the "world's worst filmmaker," Edward D. Wood Jr., could become the subject of a reverential bio-pic.

Ephemeral as they may once have seemed, movies preserve the past and in preserving it, change our sense of just what ephemera is. Dumped and dismissed when it was first made, Orson Welles's "Touch of Evil" has been hailed on its re-release as the 1998 movie of the year -- although there are some who might bestow that honor on the video release this month of Louis Feuillade's complete "Les Vampires." (It will also be screened in its restored entirety at the French Institute in Manhattan on Nov. 7.)

Newly refurbished, retinted and corrected to its original running time by the master restorationist David Shepard, Feuillade's 1915-16 serial has long been recognized as a signal accomplishment of French silent cinema. Still, this is a film that was rescued from the garbage in the 1930's -- literally -- by the founder of the French Cinémathèque, Henri Langlois. Tipped off by a film buff working at Gaumont that the studio was cleaning out its vaults, Langlois picked up the discarded material on the street, where it was left for collection.

Had "Les Vampires" gone to the dump, an entire world would have been lost. "Les Vampires" is the original pulp epic: a seven-hour phantasmagoria in which Paris is terrorized by a criminal gang that commits all manner of daredevil abductions, outrageous jewel heists, daylight murders and elaborate frauds before slinking over the rooftops in form-fitting black outfits to dance the turkey trot in their suburban hideout .

Nothing is ever quite what it seems. "Les Vampires" is predicated on illusion and surprise, the interplay between ordinary appearance and the mysterious threat lurking just below the surface. It follows an obsessed journalist and his comic sidekick as they pursue successive satanic masterminds, as well as the gang's cross-dressing femme fatale Irma Vep (an anagram for Vampire), through a treacherous landscape of trap doors and sliding panels, secret compartments and false ceilings.

With this impossible to synopsize, playfully paranoid rondo of disguises and cryptograms, poison rings and hypnotic trances, Feuillade anticipated everything from the thrillers of Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock (and Ed Wood) to James Bond, Batman, and "The X-Files." But when the first of "Les Vampires's" 10 installments appeared in the fall of 1915 (the remaining nine were released through the following summer), it was considered by some to be junk -- or worse. <snip> <snip> Surrealist champions notwithstanding, Feuillade died in relative obscurity in 1925. His subsequent reputation is largely due to the efforts of the archivist Langlois, barely a toddler when "Les Vampires" was first released. Having rescued the film from the trash, Langlois subsequently revived it, after his own fashion. Langlois removed the intertitles and, according to Mr. Shepard, lost them. (Titles reconstructed from the serial's original script and subsquent novelization were only added during a 1990's restoration supervised by Feuillade's grandson Jacques Champreux.)

Complete Hoberman Times article here.

[unclehulot]

As for VAMPIRES I'm not sure about scoring, but these revelations about Langlois amaze me...

Can't imagine an original score(s) would exist for these films......certainly I can't imagine more than a stopgap cue sheet for so many hours of film.....in any case, I think the Robert Israel score is as apt as any original score might be.....the quality of the playing is a bit hit or miss, which is understandable considering the number of hours in the recording studio. His Judex score is even better. The Gaumont "Fantomas" is a pretty good score too, and is superbly played (shows what a big budget can do once in a while for one of these projects).

Until you can show me an intimate relationship between a film director and a particular composer of a silent film (yes, of course there are a few, and certainly more for European films of the 20s), I can't get TOO caught up (personally) in this........perhaps I just don't mind buying the new versions to hear a different musical interpretation. Sometimes it's annoying to have the right score with the wrong video version (I'm NOT a fan of that damned repetitions xylophone concerto Zimmerman score for the Eureka "Dr. Mabuse", for instance).

My favorites so far as far as original scores: "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" on Milestone and "El Dorado" on the Gaumont R2 disc.

[HerrSchreck]

This should probably be in the silent film music thread, but I'd just mention--

Look, your tastes are your own. One guy likes silence. Another guy likes Al Jourgensen-type industrial 10,000 Homo DJ's-style goth-kid music on his classic silent fillms. The only thing that should supercede all is the director's original intentions, when discernable.

I'll concede it's one thing if we're dealing with a slaphappy old days DVD by Shepard or low-rent pd dvd from Alpha and the original score isn't used... But if I'm looking to end a long string of triple & quadruple dipping by buying the Restored Authorized edition of a classic silent film where the world was scoured for original nitrates for finest quality and most complete version, the script was hauled out for retranslation, original sketches and outtakes and poster art and tinting schemata all were ressurected and put into the "final" edition (Restored Authorized Editions is what the FW Murnau Foundation i e Stifting specializes in btw)... if all this is on the table, then the original score is tossed aside for Sosin analog piddle or Angry Teen Synth music, in this case I'll be a little annoyed. When watching Lang's METROPOLIS or NIBELUNGEN I at least want the option of having Hupperz' magnificent scores. It stuns me that the foundation which bears his own name is not being faithful to Murnau's intentions on one of his most famous works of art, NOSFERATU.

As for VAMPIRES, I have no udea whether or not a score existed at the time. Since it was a serial, and owing to it's sum length, my guess is that at most there was just a cue sheet.

[HerrSchreck]

I saw some votes around here for (non-CC) DVD of Yr for Gaumonts new release of Feulliades 1914-15 masterpiece LES VAMPIRES. Anyone around here in the know and care to comment, particularly those who have seen the Shepard presentaion viz Image/Waterbearer (I have no doubt the material is exactly the same ie the film elements, but am wondering if Gaum did their own new--huge, and costly considering the size of the audience involved, particularly if unsubbed-- transfer... or did their own enocding/authoring off of the old Shepard digibeta?) Any obvious increase in image quality? Extras to croon over?

Another piece of acute obviousness is there will be no vintage subs, and that the french titles cards hhad to be recreated from script or censor rec's, as fucking Langlois flushed em on purpose in one of the more notorious haircuts ever given to a film ex post facto by a 'preservationist'. Bless his grizzled heart, god knew what old Henri was thinking...... or smoking.

[academyleader]

Cutting titles out of nitrate films is based upon the belief that titles decompose sooner than film stock because they are the last items cut into a negative and are, therefore, less carefully washed. Cutting out titles is done in the belief that it delays decomposition. Whatever Langois' peculiarities may have been, other more reasonable archivists shared this belief.

[HerrSchreck]

I must go home and snip out the babies from my family photos because they were the most recent insertions on the neg which generated my prints..

"Less carefully washed?"

Evidence of best drugs in a post, 2006...

No my good man/woman, it was always, in Langlois' case, an editorial decision. This is a notorious and well known case.Think about what you posted, then think about it again. Newest material, less carefully washed... from generations back to the neg, not the fine grain in hand. Then think (even if that were industrially correct) about the process of discarding without duping all intertitles from what you know to be the last known print in existence on the earth. .. then read Hoberman from the NY Times:

Classic 'Junk,' Saved From Trash

By J. HOBERMAN
New York Times 10/25/98

THERE'S an iron law of history that decrees, given enough time and sufficient scarcity, anything from broken crockery to petrified dinosaur droppings will become a precious relic.

This process has been vastly accelerated by motion pictures -- and not just because the discarded props from Hollywood classics are now five-figure collectibles. And not just because auteurist film critics have discovered artists where none were originally seen, creating an atmosphere in which the "world's worst filmmaker," Edward D. Wood Jr., could become the subject of a reverential bio-pic.

Ephemeral as they may once have seemed, movies preserve the past and in preserving it, change our sense of just what ephemera is. Dumped and dismissed when it was first made, Orson Welles's "Touch of Evil" has been hailed on its re-release as the 1998 movie of the year -- although there are some who might bestow that honor on the video release this month of Louis Feuillade's complete "Les Vampires." (It will also be screened in its restored entirety at the French Institute in Manhattan on Nov. 7.)

Newly refurbished, retinted and corrected to its original running time by the master restorationist David Shepard, Feuillade's 1915-16 serial has long been recognized as a signal accomplishment of French silent cinema. Still, this is a film that was rescued from the garbage in the 1930's -- literally -- by the founder of the French Cinémathèque, Henri Langlois. Tipped off by a film buff
working at Gaumont that the studio was cleaning out its vaults, Langlois picked up the discarded material on the street, where it was left for collection.

Had "Les Vampires" gone to the dump, an entire world would have been lost. "Les Vampires" is the original pulp epic: a seven-hour phantasmagoria in which Paris is terrorized by a criminal gang that commits all manner of daredevil abductions, outrageous jewel heists, daylight murders and elaborate frauds before slinking over the rooftops in form-fitting black outfits to dance the turkey trot in their suburban hideout .

Nothing is ever quite what it seems. "Les Vampires" is predicated on illusion and surprise, the interplay between ordinary appearance and the mysterious threat lurking just below the surface. It follows an obsessed journalist and his comic sidekick as they pursue successive satanic masterminds, as well as the gang's cross-dressing femme fatale Irma Vep (an anagram for Vampire), through a treacherous landscape of trap doors and sliding panels, secret compartments and false ceilings.

With this impossible to synopsize, playfully paranoid rondo of disguises and cryptograms, poison rings and hypnotic trances, Feuillade anticipated everything from the thrillers of Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock (and Ed Wood) to James Bond, Batman, and "The X-Files." But when the first of "Les Vampires's" 10 installments appeared in the fall of 1915 (the remaining nine were released through the following summer), it was considered by some to be junk -- or worse. … Surrealist champions notwithstanding, Feuillade died in relative obscurity in 1925. His subsequent reputation is largely due to the efforts of the archivist Langlois, barely a toddler when "Les Vampires" was first released. Having rescued the film from the trash, Langlois subsequently revived it, after his own fashion. Langlois removed the intertitles and, according to Mr. Shepard,
lost them. (Titles reconstructed from the serial's original script and subsquent novelization were only added during a 1990's restoration supervised by Feuillade's grandson Jacques Champreux.)

After World War II, Langlois began the practice of showing the entire serial at one time, and it was in this pure, if disorienting, form that Feuillade was embraced by a second generation of French cinéastes -- including the critic André Bazin, who wrote enthusiastically of one marathon screening that required a reel change every 10 minutes, and the director Alain Resnais, who called Feuillade "one of my gods" and, by quoting "Les Vampires" in "Last Year at Marienbad," as only one of several distinguished French directors to pay homage to Feuillade. (Others include Georges Franju, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette.)

The Langlois "Vampires" was first presented in the United States at the 1965 New York Film Festival as a sort of Pop Art happening. Mr. Shepard was among the film buffs present. "There were no titles, no plot synopsis," he recalls. "The episodes weren't distinguished. It was completely mystifying." The audience was encouraged to treat the screening as a sort of ambient cinema installation, not unlike Andy Warhol's notorious "Sleep" and "Empire" – and the event was duly sanctified by Warhol's attendance. Reporting a capacity house, The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther remained for a few hours, long enough to be convinced that he had seen "the ultimate in cinema camp."Theatrical as the event was, it resonated for years on Off-Off-Broadway. It was evoked first in 1974 by the Richard Foreman-Stanley Silverman musical
"Hotel for Criminals" and, a decade later, by Charles Ludlam's even more movie-drenched "Mystery of Irma Vep" (currently in revival at the Westside Theater). But perhaps New York audiences, who have had few subsequent opportunities to see the entire serial, were puzzled when "Les Vampires" was presented as the essence of cinephilia in Olivier Assayas's 1996 film "Irma Vep."

[academyleader]

Again, whatever Langois' idiocyncracies were, cutting out titles to delay nitrate composition was an accepted archival practice among some archivists. Showing the film without titles as some sort of delirious experience is another matter. However, there is nothing in the quote to dispute my explanation of why titles were cut out. As someone who has heard this explanation from archivists--and seen rolls of titles from nitrate films kept separately for exactly this reason--I offer this merely as an explanation, not as a defense of Langois.

[HerrSchreck]

So then... ? O never mind.

(Long tremoring exhale emoticon)

SO... has anyone seen the Gaumont and can comment on the quality versus the WaterBearer-Image?

[Kinsayder]

New York Times 10/25/98
Classic 'Junk,' Saved From Trash
By J. HOBERMAN
<snip>
Langlois removed the intertitles and, according to Mr. Shepard, lost them.

Jacques Champreux, in the restoration doc on the Gaumont set which goes into some detail on the recreated intertitles, states quite clearly that the 700 intertitles and inserts (newspaper headlines, etc) in Les Vampires were not present on the reels that Langlois found. It was never a question of the intertitles being chopped out; they had simply not yet been added to that particular copy.

[HerrSchreck]

I'm at a bit of a loss here, Kin... you seem to have access to something which says Shepard and Feulliades kin and all privvy to the original projections back inna day shared a mass hallucination.

Any explanation (though this wouldn't be the first time old silent film scholarship would have been-- wha??-- incorrect, or -- never-- subject to the bitter slant of angry ego's and opinionation). Always looking to update the terribly ported history of silents so more info would be appreciated.

Do they mention this commonly understood story?

Patalas

At the same time the graphic form of the intertitles was standardised from one version to the next, and there was a loss in image quality down the generations. There is a story - I do not know whether it is true - that Henri Langlois used to remove the intertitles from prints of silent films. What is certain is that he was not very interested in preserving or restoring them. This was in marked contrast to Lotte Eisner, who was aware of the importance of titles - at least in German films of the '20s - and who inspired me, 20 years ago, to begin searching for the titles of Der müde Tod (Destiny) and also Nosferatu, which were thought lost.

reprinted here

Reccollections in print and other sites unavailable not in person or of course require registration ie http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/access.cgi? ... gracy.html

EDIT: so Kin, how does the Gaumont look compared to the Image-- use the caps on the Beaver for comparison if you don't own the R1. Furchrissakes this was the simple goal of reviving this discussion...

[Kinsayder]

These are frames from the Gaumont discs which correspond to the Beaver's comparison between the Fox Lorber (clips from Irma Vep) and the Image:




I'd say that's an improvement. I could not find the big damage spots that the Beaver's captures show on both the NTSC discs in the second frame, which indicates that further restoration has been done for this French set. The Gaumont is untinted and interlaced and, as you know, does not have subtitles.

There are some more screen captures on the Gaumont page.

The following Feuillade shorts are included as extras: "Une dame vraiment bien" (1908), "La Bous-bous-mie" (1907), "C'est pour les orphelines" (1916), "La Légende de la fileuse" (1908) and "L'Orgie romaine" (1911). "L'Orgie romaine" appears to be a hand-coloured print. The quality is variable on these, and again no subs. There is also a very substantial (130-page) illustrated book on Feuillade.

I wasn't aware of Langlois's reputation as a trimmer of intertitles and there's no reference to it in the set. It doesn't make much sense to me on either preservation or aesthetic grounds, especially for a narrative-driven serial like Les Vampires where the removal of intertitles would make it almost unintelligible.

EDITED TO ADD:

you seem to have access to something which says Shepard and Feulliades kin and all privvy to the original projections back inna day shared a mass hallucination.

If you mean the projections of the "Langlois Vampires" referred to in the NYT piece, as I understand it those screenings were without intertitles, which does not conflict with what Champreux and the Cinémathèque restorers say on the Gaumont documentary. According to them, the print Langlois found had never had intertitles added, though there were marks on the reels to serve as a guide for their insertion. If Langlois did indeed have a reputation for chopping out the intertitles on other films, maybe Shepard assumed (and reported as fact) that this is what had happened with Les Vampires.

[HerrSchreck]

From Jonathan Rosenbaum here... interesting.

II A Few Not-So-Definitive Editions

a) Is there any reason to suspect that Gaumont's four-disc French edition of Les Vampires, Louis Feuillade's great 399-minute, ten-chapter serial of 1915-1916, might be better than David Shepard's US edition (on only one two-sided disc), released eight years ago on Image Entertainment? Recalling Gaumont's exquisite edition of Feuillade's earlier Fantomas, one of the best box sets any company has ever released, I thought there was. But I was wrong and I'm afraid my money was wasted. Quite apart from the absence of subtitles, and excepting the bonuses not included in the US version (four Feuillade shorts from 1908-11, one of which jammed on my copy; a half-hour TV documentary from 1963), the American edition is flat-out superior in almost every respect, including price and design. It's true that the Gaumont box set includes a handsome 34-page brochure summarizing all the episodes and reprinting a Louis Aragon text, plus a new, beautifully and lavishly illustrated 128-page paperback by Patrice Gauthier and the indispensable Francis Lacassin, Louis Feuillade, Maître de Cinéma Populaire. But you can also order the paperback separately, forget about the rest, and save a lot of money.

As to the speculation regarding the state of the reels upon discovery vs. what's been said about Langlois losing the intertitles, it sounds like the reels you're describing were from export negs which were very very common time and money savers for film companies' means of shipping export prints. Some simply shipped export negs with no intertitles, and avoided the duty on shipping a zillion weighty prints all over the globe, and relegated the business of printing and creating/inserting intertitles to the various foreign distributers who came up with some fascinating, and artsy regional variants (see the French INDIAN TOMB, the Italian MAN WHO LAUGHS). ..Though frankly I don't know what a export neg, intetitles free neg-print , printed with the intertitles not inserted in any language would be doing in France. Doesn't that sound suspect to you Kin? Prints are expensive, and the print supposedly unearthed was vintage from the era, supposedly-- one Langlois supposedly "saved". Why print a print in the silent era for use with no intertitles. Perhaps, and just maybe it was an interpositive??? But from back then, and intertitles free from the vintage domestic market, prior to the age of film preservation? An interpositive from camera neg (i e sans intertitles)?

And I'd say that Shepard, despite his dvd-encoding shortcomings from tiime to time, has handled enough silent film in his life-- over and beyond Langlois, the Beckers, Krim, Doros it's his overwhelming specialty-- to recognize the signs on the reels (lack of positive splices, photog'd insertion marks) of an intertitles free export-neg print, pre-insertion. To say "No intertitles must mean the man chopped them and lost them" without at least examining the print would be shooting a bit from the hip... despite the man's (Langlois') reputation. I don't know, I just don't know. I'm at a loss if the doc specifically said "The reels, as found by Langlois, were unedited positives vintage to the era with no intertitles," and not, "The reels that we worked with for this set are the reels from the Cinemateque, and they had no intertitles"... which could mean Langlois removed them, or they were never there in the first place. IN other words they just weren't being specific.

[HerrSchreck]

Do you mean his ethic was "change nothing?" from "the condition as found"? i e treat as sacred text whatever random condition an artifact happens to be found in? In other words-- "I will not take the sensible step of hunting and shooting, printing and inserting intertitles into this classic intertitle-driven serial of 400 minutes before projecting it for an audience because the print I happened to find had none?" That's the gist I'm getting from what your post above. Not doubting, just looking for clarification in this peek into the world of Hanky Panky Henri..

[Kinsayder]

Do you mean his ethic was "change nothing?" from "the condition as found"? i e treat as sacred text whatever random condition an artifact happens to be found in? In other words-- "I will not take the sensible step of hunting and shooting, printing and inserting intertitles into this classic intertitle-driven serial of 400 minutes before projecting it for an audience because the print I happened to find had none?" That's the gist I'm getting from what your post above. Not doubting, just looking for clarification in this peek into the world of Hanky Panky Henri..

It's not quite as easy as you make it sound, Schreck. The 700-odd intertitles and inserts couldn't be "hunted and shot" because they no longer existed. Anywhere. Not just in the print Langlois found. Anywhere. The 1984 restorers created them anew largely by guesswork, with the help of a few contemporary records such as a novelisation of the serial. Many of the inserts are of telegrams, handwritten letters, visiting cards, newspaper cuttings, etc, all of which had be recreated and filmed in a manner consistent with the original. Jacques Champreux, Feuillade's grandson and the man in charge of the restoration, describes it as the labour of a Benedictine monk. Henri Langlois in 1938 clearly felt the work was beyond his resources, and I hardly think we can blame him for that.

[HerrSchreck]

Come on Kin, give me a break here-- you're not Henri and David and I cannot sully the glory or the great credit owed the man on the basis of a mere couple of obvious fuckups. I'm not saying hunted and shot as in "find them in concrete vintage examples".. I mean in censor records, scripts, personal archives, recreate them as others do and did... what was done in the resto and many others going back to the early days of Langlois, Eisner, etc. Langlois was magnificent but not perfect.

Nor am I the creator of the historical reputation, or the sense that in some cases that more could have been done in terms of presentation. Enough awready.

(Titles reconstructed from the serial's original script and
subsquent novelization were only added during a 1990's restoration supervised
by Feuillade's grandson Jacques Champreux.)

[Kinsayder]

That "original script" was actually a little school exercise book containing a few pages of handwritten notes relating to various planned but unused versions of the story.

Though frankly I don't know what a export neg, intetitles free neg-print , printed with the intertitles not inserted in any language would be doing in France. Doesn't that sound suspect to you Kin? Prints are expensive, and the print supposedly unearthed was vintage from the era, supposedly-- one Langlois supposedly "saved". Why print a print in the silent era for use with no intertitles. Perhaps, and just maybe it was an interpositive??? But from back then, and intertitles free from the vintage domestic market, prior to the age of film preservation? An interpositive from camera neg (i e sans intertitles)?

The way it's explained in the documentary is that a separate set of intertitles was prepared, by a specialist workshop, for each print and inserted on a copy-by-copy basis prior to projection, using the marks on the reels as guides. The Langlois copy had presumably never been prepared for theatrical presentation at the time when Langlois acquired it.

[HerrSchreck]

Now this is fascinating! You mean that these were not individual reels of each episode collected together made a bit apart from each other within the organic production spacing of the serials episode premeires, but a one-off set of reels generated at the same time after the serial had ended (but without intertitles) to create a comprehensive collection of the serial in sum? That this was chosen with the understanding that projection would require the manual cutting and glueing *and then running thru a projector!!* of hundreds or thousands of intertitles/letters/newspaper-shots etc all at once (rather than on a per episode basis broken by weeks as the films were produced by Feulliade) when the whole serial was acquired by whoever acquired those reels... this as opposed to duping the work prints in circulation at the time, requiring no work at all.... If this were the scenario, since the serial had existed in sum, and if the studio were creating a, say, interpositive for their own preservation, or projection positive, why not cut up and insert the intertitles-- since it had to be done anyway to make the set of reels useful-- into the neg from which aforesaid reels were struck? This would of course save this step anytime a new dupe was needed in the future, place the studio into the common zone of labor efficiency, and save the hell of creating a spliced up positive to be cranked thru a hot projector and potentially jumping offa the sprockets wshenever exhibited..

What I'm getting at here is this: if they were vintage, previously projected prints going back to the original screenings (or slightly older than vintage dupes of same) they would have had inserted intertitles, especially if they were created after the completion of the serial. If they were not, for god's sakes who were they created for, as the relationship (or at least contract)for intertitle creation and insertion in your above recounted scenario viz the specialist workshop had terminated. Thereby incurring new and special off-contract costs (since the workshop was no longer working on this project) just to make a set of their own films whole again, when whole prints were already in circulation.

Your print by print scenario is so astounding and cost ineffective it almost defies logic!... particularly as you say for the domestic market. Even when shipping abroad for international exhibition dupe negs free of intertitles (with the mentioned insertion marks, of course) were used, whereby intertitles were shot and stuck on the neg by the foreign distributors whereby reels requiring no labor-intensive and projector-vulnerable cutting/splicing an a per-print basis could be thereby struck ad infinitum as needed throughout the theatrical run and forward.

The fact that they assert that this was done domestically, and that the workshop's intertitles were inserted into the print, physically glued in and run thru projectors in this fashion time and time again, reel by reel, week by week with each new episode, for each exhibition venue, boggles the mind-- this as opposed of course to shipping the workship intertitles to Gaumont and inserting the intertitles ONCE and thence running off dupes for exhibition. It's all very mystifying (as I'm taking your word for it, and that you speak french well enough to fully process the info on the doc.. and that you're by far one of the more dedicated and intelligent cineastes here), and almost every piece of info relayed defies common practice, logic, economic sense, and info from usually very good sources (no shooting script, no removing then discarding of intertitles, the manual print by print DOMESTIC insertion of intertitles to the complete exclusion of the vintage interpositive or at least dupe neg generation).

A fascinating discussion, and a mystifying set of contradictions. Thanks for your input Kin. Thed upside is that we still have these films to view and discuss, and that is still tribute to Langlois.

Once question-- did the doc mention why certain episodes were on 16mm reductions, and others (the vast bulk of course) from 35's?