On Blu-ray - David Hare anticipates the new German edition of THE GOLD RUSH (Charles Chaplin, USA, 1925)

I’ve just ordered this German Arthaus 4K of last year's centenary restoration from Bologna of Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. They very wisely dodged the 72 minute 1942 reissue with a new score and Chaplin’s own horrible, maudlin narration track. Like the wiser heads at Criterion ten years ago the decision was made to basically tell the Chaplin estate‘s insistence on solely supporting the 1942 abortion to fuck off. Happily in 2025 all parties re-proposed that choice.

This new restoration does several quite radical things. Apart from meticulous correction of jiitter, tears, emulsion damage and frame skipping, all of which were still there in the previous restoration, they made the fascinating and radical decision to print the frame right back to the full exposure aperture corners. This was originally cropped slightly to avoid consistent frame edge damage. Now as you can see in the video comparison clip, the exposed image is wider by maybe 5% and the full exposure is clean and visible. I think it’s fascinating. 

Anyway given German Arthaus/Canal has jumped the gun on Canal and Criterion who will release next year. I am happy to jump the gun with them. My order is due before December 31.

WOOLLOOMOOLOO — Pat Fiske writes about a Restoration Project to restore her classic Australian documentary

Film-maker Pat Fiske writes:

How did the film, Woolloomooloo, come about...

In 1973, Denise White, Peter Gailey and I were struck by the potential life

changing impact of the actions of the various community groups, the NSW BLF and their Green Bans were doing. We began work on our first 16mm feature film. The section about Woolloomooloo and Victoria Street was originally intended to be about 10 minutes in the completed film about the history of the BLF and the Green Bans. When we came to the editing, we had such a bounty of footage our planned 10 minutes had turned into a two hour rough cut. So, we decided to make a film about Woolloomooloo first. When Woolloomooloo was finally completed in 1978, I went back to tell the broader BLF and Green Bans story, creating the film, Rocking the Foundations (1985), which has already been beautifully restored by the National Film and Sound Archive. Sadly, the NFSA can only restore a few films each year. 

We have commenced a Fundraiser to RESTORE this 16mm film to a very high quality digital product.

Donations to this Project are 100% Tax Deductible through Documentary Australia CLICK HERE

Completion Goal: $45,000 + Outreach Goal: $25,000

About the Film

Woolloomooloo is a landmark documentary tracking the fate of the 1969 scheme to

redevelop Sydney‛s old portside area of Woolloomooloo and its notorious neighbour,

Victoria Street, Kings Cross, overlooking the sparkling harbour. When the local

community are faced with the plans to replace working-class homes with high-rise

towers and busy expressways, they enlist support from the Builders‛ Labourers‛

Federation (BLF). Led by Jack Mundey, the BLF‛s Green Bans propel the issue into the national spotlight.

 

Woolloomooloo captures the historical combat whose players include local, state and

federal governments, the State Planning Authority, the National Trust, the developers,

the residents‛ action groups, the Builders Labourers‛ Federation (BLF), and the police.

Through to late 1977, when a radically reconfigured Housing Commission Project is

completed, it‛s a story rich in human drama. 

To make a donation  and to be kept informed of the progress of fund-raising CLICK HERE

What's going to happen...

Woolloomooloo is now 47 years old and much of the footage is even older. It needs

urgent and tender loving care to survive and to carry this excellent history of

Woolloomooloo and Victoria Street into the future. It will be time consuming to restore this film because of its age. Ray Argall of Piccolo Films, who recently did the gorgeous restoration of my film, For All the World to See, a Portrait of Professor Fred Hollows (1992), will be restoring Woolloomooloo and will do a spectacular job.

Restoration includes digitising the 16mm camera original - over-scanning every frame at a very high quality (4K). An exacting and time-consuming task. The audio will be remastered from the original 16mm mix master. Ray will carry out and supervise the Restoration in consultation with me. The restored Woolloomooloo will be available as a much more pristine and clear-viewing experience on all screens, big and small, and will be able to be transferred to any formats in the future and will have a very long life.

Woolloomooloo is an important part of Australian history and remains highly relevant. It has been screened by interested parties, universities and organisations since 1978

although in poor quality. When restoration is completed, it will be launched in cinemas. And an impact and screening campaign will follow to promote it far and wide.

For any questions or further information, please contact:

Pat Fiske pat@bowerbirdfilms.com +61 407 813 255

CINEMA REBORN 2024 FESTIVAL EXPANDS TO MELBOURNE - 1-7 May (Sydney), 9-15 May (Melbourne)

“It’s great news that the fabulous Cinema Reborn programmes will be shown in Melbourne in 2024.  I’ve greatly enjoyed a number of visits to the Sydney programmes, where it’s been so exciting to see restored prints on a big screen”.

 

Bruce Beresford, Director of Tender Mercies  (screened at Cinema Reborn, 2023)

 

Cinema Reborn, Sydney’s annual festival of restored classics showcasing the work of directors from Asia-Pacific, Europe, Africa and North America, has been presented in Sydney since 2018, with the last four editions presented at Randwick’s heritage-listed Ritz Cinemas. The 2024 Sydney season will take place from 1-7 May and, in a first for Melbourne, Cinema Reborn will also be presented at the Lido Cinema in Hawthorn from 9-15 May. 

 

The Chair of Cinema Reborn’s Organising Committee Geoff Gardner said today: “The presentation of the 2024 Cinema Reborn season in Melbourne is a landmark moment in the short life of our event. Over the past six years our annual season of restored classics has built a loyal Sydney audience who appreciate the opportunity to see the cinema’s masterworks in state of the art digitally restored versions. We are delighted at the prospect of presenting our festival in Melbourne. We have just started the selection process and already news of our expansion has been welcomed by the local and international distributors and film archives from whom we obtain our program. 

 

Cinema Reborn in Sydney has become part of a worldwide network of events endorsed and supported by the Cineteca Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato. Guy Borlée, the Co-ordinator of Il Cinema Ritrovato, has welcomed Cinema Reborn’s new step: “We are extremely happy that the desire to (re)discover good old movies inside a beautiful movie theatre, in the dark and in the middle of unknown strangers, will expand towards Melbourne. Il Cinema Ritrovato, the festival based on the same desire and organised by Cineteca di Bologna for 38 years, has supported Cinema Reborn since its birth in Sydney and will continue to do so in Melbourne.”

 

Cinema Reborn brings us fabulous restorations of cinema classics each year. Always enhanced by introductions by industry and academic cinephiles, it is a big screen experience not to be missed by film lovers.
Margot Nash Director of Shadow Panic, (Screened at Cinema Reborn 2021)

 

Benji Tamir, the General Manager of both the Ritz and Lido Cinemas, part of the chain of quality independent cinemas owned and managed by the Tamir family’s Moving Story company, has welcomed Cinema Reborn’s expansion to Melbourne: “Since we started presenting Cinema Reborn in Randwick we have been thrilled to be part of this unique event. We have seen audiences double and been impressed by the dedicated work of the Organising Committee of professional film-makers, critics and curators who present the event on an entirely voluntary basis. The range of films selected each year, many of them direct from the Classics sections at Cannes, Venice and Berlin, is a constant delight. We look forward to building a similar audience in Melbourne.”

 

Cinema Reborn’s 2024 program will be accompanied by the publication of a superb printed catalogue and a dedicated website with comprehensive notes on the film selection written by some of Australia’s best known film scholars and critics. The 2023 website is still posted here and you can read the pages of the 2023 Cinema Reborn printed catalogue here.

 

Cinema Reborn is an important site for accessing significant films which should not be forgotten. Long may it continue!

 

Arthur and Corinne Cantrill Director of In This Life’s Body, Screened at Cinema Reborn 2018)

 

The full Cinema Reborn 2024 program with titles, dates, session times and booking information will be released in March.

 

For further information contact:

 

Geoff Gardner

0416 912567

filmalert101@gmail.com

 

Benji Tamir

0433 505534

benji@movingstory.com.au

 

Guy Borlée

Guy.Borlee@cineteca.bologna.it

CINEMA REBORN 2022 - Update, Donations and Concession Prices, Free Online Catalogue Download and a link to an easy guide to the Festival timetable

Ruan Lingyu,The Goddess, screens Saturday 30 April

One of the key moments for us each year at Cinema Reborn is when we know all the films we’ve booked have arrived safely. Nowadays almost everything from overseas arrives via the internet and we rely on Melbourne production house JORR and its dedicated staff to organise the downloading of the massive files that contain the restored copies we will be screening. It’s a whole new world and needless to say it reduces costs enormously. Decades ago the Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals shared costs of upwards of $40,000 every year to get the mostly 35mm film cans shipped in. Now it’s just a fraction of that cost and essentially makes an event like Cinema Reborn viable. Still, our costs are substantial and we are always grateful for the support of donors and others, both individuals and institutions. 

If you are minded to make a tax deductible donation, large or small, to support the work of our all-volunteer group and bring more film classics back to the screen in Sydney click here for  THE AUSTRALIAN CULTURAL FUND

 ....and if you want to maximise your attendance think about joining THE RITZ ROYALTY CLUB and save on all admissions. Seniors get additional savings.

…and yes, the files and DCPs of all the films we are screening at Cinema Reborn 2022 are all accounted for…

Mie Kitahara,The Moon Has Risen,
screens Friday 29 April and Sunday 1 May

AN EASY GUIDE TO THE CINEMA REBORN TIMETABLE

We have just published this page on the Cinema Reborn website which sets out the whole event’s activities in one place. It includes a symbol indicating which sessions have introductions. https://cinemareborn.org.au/Festival-Schedule

Checkout as well our Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages. Just type Cinema Reborn into the search engines. For all of this activity thanks as always to our webmasters and social media gurus Angelica Waite, James Vaughan and Kyrene Carter. Your enthusiasm is infectious. 

Cinema Reborn 2022 catalogue cover

THE CINEMA REBORN CATALOGUE IS NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE

This year’s Cinema Reborn catalogue is being distributed a little differently.

 

Instead of just printing a small number of copies and selling them during our event  we are making it available early and free online via our Cinema Reborn website and via the Ritz Cinemas website.

 

This year’s edition is 76pp of absolutely splendid critical commentary. It is already posted on the Ritz website.  You can now read it, download it into your PC or print it out if you wish. Almost all of the commentaries are specially written for our catalogue. Contributors include Noel Vera, Tony Rayns, David Hare, Adrian Martin, Ehsan Khoshbakht, Rod Bishop, Janice Tong, Jane Mills, Mark Pierce, Adrian Danks, Marshall Deutelbaum, Margot Nash, Scott Murray,  Pamela Hutchinson, Annouchka De Andrade, Helen Goritsas, John Baxter and Geoff Gardner. We have only printed  a very limited number of copies but if you wish to order one, cost $5 + $2.50 postage, send an email to info@cinemareborn.org.au

 

The publication was designed and laid out by Cinema Reborn’s great friend David McLaine to whom we owe a huge debt of thanks

 

HERE IS THE LINK

https://www.ritzcinemas.com.au/content/Cinema%20Reborn%202022%20Program.pdf

 

Feel free to pass on the link to assist us in getting the word out for and about Cinema Reborn 2022

RANDWICK ACCOMMODATION

We are often asked by out of towners for any advice as to possible accommodation near the Randwick Ritz. We have no connection with, control over or relationship with the Sydney Lodges group of guest houses and private hotels that are in the vicinity but  a number of Cinema Reborn patrons have stayed at various places nearby that come under their management. You can check out their offering, which includes several places within walking distance,  Website

IF YOU CLICK HERE

On 4K HDR/DV - David Hare welcomes a restored ANATOMY OF A MURDER (Otto Preminger, USA, 1958) & TAXI DRIVER (Martin Scorsese, USA, 1976)

This is the second big six picture collection boxset from Sony of their “Columbia Classics”, all totally new updated restorations executed in 4K with HDR/DV. Grover Crisp who has personally curated these sets (and much more) through Sony’s still flourishing physical media arm makes a particularly strong case in some of the copious restoration notes on each title in which he really promotes the complete revelation HDR and it’s much wider color gamut, wider dynamic range and more has to seriously sell the superority of the new format over all and any earlier Home Vid platforms.

I won’t take much more space here but to say the movies I’ve sampled so far are breathtaking in these UHD 4K discs, even better than a first 35mm viewing of a revival print of Anatomy of a Murder at Sydney Uni Film Group in 1968. By then (only ten years after it was made) the O-neg had been intefered with after wear and tear leaving ten no less lab shots re-inserted from an inferior later gen neg. Even the very beautiful master Criterion used for its own Blu release a few years ago is still stuck with the dupe shots, although Crisp’s team did an almost total restoration on that occasion. 

For the new release they restarted the elements harvest and in the process found a third gen but extremely high quality neg which yielded clean optical shots which now seamlessly meet the rest of the print’s image quality for grain, grayscale and density.

The new 4K of Taxi Driver is from just a few years ago but Crisp and his team are now able to use HDR to really push saturation and the emphasis on grain and texture in this new disc which is quite frankly, gobsmacking, and once again the image quality once again surpasses the 35mm I first saw in opening week at the old Town Cinema in Pitt Street, Sydney. Another bonus is the discovery of multi track stems of Herrmann’s score for which they’ve added a five channel Dolby track with the score isolated on the rear channels. You’ve got to hear this to believe it. They also preserve the original legacy mono track.

I understand the new 4K of the Preminger was amongst the “rediscoveries” at this year’s Cannes event. This boxset, with marvellous liner notes from Julie Kirgo for the Preminger, and Glenn Kenny for Taxi Driver is worth every cent. The remaining four titles (Oliver, Stripes, Sense and Sensibility and The Social Network) are yet to be plundered by me.