1926, Paramount pictures released the first adaptation of “Beautiful gesture“A arousing adventure novel by PC Wren to be made about 1939 and 1966 and parodied by comedian Marty Feldman in comedy 1977”The last remake of beau geste. “Incarnation from 1926 was a commercial and critical success and won the Fotoplay -Tidningen’s top prize – one year before the birth of Academy Awards – And at a time when it was the most prestigious recognition that a movie could receive.
Despite it filmRumor, for decades it has been almost impossible to see, except at 16 mm pressure from mediocre dupes. That everyone changes this Sunday 27 April, when a wonderful new restoration will premiere at the closing night by TCM party in Hollywood. The film will be presented with a new point made live by Mont Alto Orchestra. It is an opportunity to see a really incredibly inspiring spectacle in the best way: on a huge screen (on one of Hollywood’s most beautiful movie palace, the Egyptian theater) with a crowded audience.
The restoration has been in the creation and represents a heroic collaboration between Paramount, several archives and San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which has collaborated with Veteran Film Restorers Robert A. Harris (No stranger for epic filmmaking, with monitored restorations of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Spartacus”) and James Mockoski on an initiative to bring silent classics to modern audiences. (For this purpose, the “Beau geste” restoration will be released theatrically in theaters over North America by Rialto Pictures.) According to Mockoski, “Beau Geste” is the perfect gate for viewers who really want to appreciate entertainment with epic cinema.
“You just can’t make that kind of filmmaking anymore,” Mockoski said to IndieWire, noting that the impressive scale of “Beau Geste” is comparable to another movie he worked with in his capacity as an archivist at Francis Coppola’s American Zoetrope, “Apocalypse Now” Like that movie, “Beau geste” is filled with jaw-dropping set pieces that staged practically without the advantage of digital technology. “Today the thousands of people who climb on the sand dunes would be CGI. At that time they had to build a fort in the middle of nowhere and get a water pipe. They had to create a whole infrastructure to shoot this movie.”
Ironically, the fact that “Beau geste” was so revered on his day left it somewhat neglected when it comes to conservation, because everyone in the field assumed it took care of. “Everyone thought someone else was doing something about it, but no one was,” Harris told IndieWire. “UCLA had some materials, but they were not complete. Moma had some materials.
Harris and Mockoski’s job were complicated by the fact that there were three different cuts by “Beau Geste” that went into the theater publishing: an initial roadshow version with an interruption, a slightly shortened editing for wider audience and a subsequent incarnation that was even shorter, with pieces. When Harris and Mockoski began to investigate the existing elements to see what they had to work with, they found that each version only existed in pieces and often in extremely poor form – UCLA’s archive, for example, had three out of 10 rolls from the other version, while MOM had a negative that was somewhat in focus due to film crop. George Eastman Museum had a 16mm version of the third version.
The most complete copy of the film was 1939 Paramount -print stored on the Library of Congress, all at an exposure without color time. This copy was printed according to the sound, which created a major problem. “The printer masked out the soundtrack area, so the entire left side of the frame was missing,” Harris said. This meant that the restaurateurs had to take imperfect left sites of other subordinate prints and digitally sew them to the Paramount, a process that took several years and efforts from dozens of archivists at several institutions.
“Thankfully, we got the collaboration with Paramount and George Eastman Museum and Ucla and Museum of Modern Art,” Mockoski said. “There were no egos – we just wanted to save the movie.” Mockoski credits the Library of Congress by coordinating all organizations so that all possible existing prints of “beau geste” could be used in the restoration. “It takes to build an army to make this work happen. It’s not a profitable endeavor. It’s just good to do because these are amazing movies.”
“Beau geste” is part of a larger project that Harris and Mockoski are currently working on when competing against time to save big films from the Paramount library. “We have been authorized by the studio to restore a number of their silent films,” Harris said. “They have given us access to many titles and we are juggling about 40 of them right now and trying to find missing elements.”
One thing that keeps Mockoski and Harris to go is the constant feeling of discovery that accompanies their work – both men were stunned, for example, by filmmaking and visceral tension of “beau geste” and how well they held up after 100 years.
“This production sometimes competes what we do today,” Mockoski said. He hopes that the work he, Harris and their peers can inspire the next generation of filmmakers in the way that Abel Gance’s epic “Napoleon” – a movie Mockoski and Harris worked to restore several decades ago – inspired Francis Ford Coppola. “The end of the silent era was such a wonderful, incredibly dense period of creativity,” Harris said, “but time is not our friend on these issues. We can’t just believe that these films are protected and preserved. We do everything we can to save the surviving silence.”
The world premiere of the restored “beau geste” will take place at TCM party On Sunday 27 April.
