Return of the Secaucus Seven
Lianna
Baby, It's You
The Brother from Another Planet
Matewan
Eight Men Out
City of Hope
Passion Fish
The Secret of Roan Inish
Lone Star
Men with Guns (Hombres Armados)
Limbo
Sunshine State
Casa de los Babys
Silver City
Honeydripper

THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET (1984)

The Brother from Another Planet did not require extensive treatment, as most of the film’s original elements were located and found to be in good condition. Working closely with Suzanne Ceresko of Anarchists’ Convention and Scott Smerdon of Monaco Labs in San Francisco, Lipman tried to replicate the look of the original film as closely as possible.

While the preservation work on Lianna and Return of the Secaucus Seven was much more extensive, ironically Brother is the only title that can truly be called a restoration, at least as UCLA uses the term. The difference is that while all the original elements were located for the other titles, one whole reel of the original negative of Brother was lost, and that footage had to be replaced with material from another source.

The missing reel of The Brother From Another Planet comprised a section of the film that begins during the stranded alien’s tryst with the singer Malverne Davis, played by Dee Dee Bridgewater. The preservationists found a usable version of the sequence on a CRI, or Color Reversal Intermediate, that had been prepared by the filmmakers during the post-production work on the film. “Luckily the CRI footage we got in this case was not too bad and we were able to blend it in pretty seamlessly. As it happens there are CRI shots elsewhere in the film, which they used because they were doing an optical re-composition, so by the time you get to the full reel that's CRI, you’ve seen that look before anyway.”

Lipman’s initial reaction to the CRI footage when he first saw it spliced together with the surrounding original negative material was not so positive, however. The questions that arose illustrate the kind of subtle ethical dilemmas that can arise in the restoration process: It isn't always easy to distinguish between “flaws” that can legitimately be repaired, without violating a classic film’s integrity, and characteristics that are intentional aspects of the original work.

“At that point it becomes a question of degree,” Lipman says. “What is a minor fix that you can do in the printing that doesn't really change the nature of the work, and what would be a more qualitative change?”

“At first,” Lipman says, “the switch to the CRI material looked very dramatic to us, and we were wracking our brains trying to figure out how to fix it. But then we realized that there was something strange about the way an early shot in the CRI reel had been photographed.” The shift occurs when Dee Dee Bridgewater comes out of the bathroom with her hair up. “In a composition where your eyes would normally go straight to her in the background, she’s out of focus. They’d focused on Joe Morton in the foreground when the visual subject of the material seems to be Bridgewater. So it wasn’t a CRI issue, at all, it was a focus issue. And then after that, the rest of the reel was pretty much all right.”

Sayles himself was even more impressed. “It’s pretty incredible,” he says. “I’ve seen [the restored version] and I couldn’t tell you that anything is different with it. There are a couple of little blown-up shots that look as funky as they ever did, they’ve got more grain than anything else. But everything else looks seamlessly just the way it did originally.”

ABOUT THE RESTORATIONS

In a major effort undertaken over the past two years by Anarchists’ Convention Inc, along with experts from the UCLA Film and Television Archive, four early films written and directed by the pioneering independent filmmaker John Sayles have been fully restored.

The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), Lianna (1983), The Brother From Another Planet (1984), and Matewan (1987) will be re-released this year as a touring retrospective package presented by IFC Films, with a boxed-set DVD release to follow.

Over the past decade these landmarks of do-it-yourself American cinema had fallen out of distribution, had become hard to track down even as well-worn VHS cassettes. Now all three can be re-visited in their original theatrical formats, both by long-time fans who have been following Sayles career for almost twenty years, and by younger admirers of such recent award-winners like Passion Fish (1992), Lone Star (1996), and Limbo (1997).

Sayles has said that he plans to make some adjustments to both Secaucus Seven and Lianna for the DVD release, the kind of changes he has made occasionally in the past when supervising the transfer of his films to video. “One of the things I like to do is change things to make them better,” he says. “You can get often better color in video than you could [on the prints]. You can add little zooms, you can add re-positions that you might not have been able to do on the set. To me you should always use those tools if they’re available, to make it better.”

But the theatrical versions of these films are intended to be “archival,” and for these Sayles adopted a “no tweaks” policy: “What we’re going for is to get them back to what we had in hand. This one was shot in 16 and blown up, this one was actually shot on 35 by a great cinematographer, and this is pretty much what they looked like and this is pretty much what they sounded like. I told the people at UCLA, ‘Don’t try to make this better than it was.’”

In the real world, of course, a restoration project begins long before any technician lays hands on a piece of celluloid. As Sayles notes, “Untangling the rights [to these films] has been a huge, huge job. Sue Beaudine, who’s our lawyer, has been going through this incredible maze of finding what happened to the companies which distributed the movies, which often no longer exist and who may have sold the rights piecemeal to foreign countries and cable operations, which themselves may no longer exist but may have been bought by another one. And then there’s just finding the elements, as they’re called. What exists? And the sound can be as much of a problem as the picture, as the sound elements disappear or deteriorate. Luckily we haven’t had to re-record anything, we found enough of what we got.”

Once the raw material was located and the rights secured, UCLA restoration specialist Ross Lipman supervised the clean-up work, working closely with Suzanne Ceresko, of Anarchists’ Convention, and Scott Smerdon, of Monaco Labs in San Francisco. “It was nice from our standpoint as archivists,” Lipman says, “that John’s take was, ‘Just present them as they were.’ Because that’s what we always want to do. Our first allegiance is to the work as it stands. We’re not in the business of doing new versions for commercial release.”