The cumulative result is a version of “Metropolis” whose tone and focus have been changed. “It’s no longer a science-fiction film,” said Martin Koerber, a German film archivist and historian who supervised the latest restoration and the earlier one in 2001. “The balance of the story has been given back. It’s now a film that encompasses many genres, an epic about conflicts that are ages old. The science-fiction disguise is now very, very thin.”
So, it's been rescued from the ghetto? I respect your restoration work, Mr Koerber, but I'm not sure I appreciate the implication.
scrapped - after we got this version of the film back, we decided to rewrite the story. that meant that we substantially rebuild the film in the next year, even after we had recovered the version from Galyn's machine.
Like the remaster of The Day of the Tentace... The original has a vaguely German Expressionist (from 1920s films) look that I like. The artists of the remaster smoothed out many of the harsh edges, apparently assuming that they were only due to technical limitations. Technical limitations, like in the old movies, influenced the style, sure... but it works the way it was initially created and ignorant "improvements" don't do it any good.
This kind of modernization can be done right... Jim Burton movies and Babylon Berlin borrowed from German expressionism, especially in certain scenes - often night scenes. Tentacle is somewhere in between - the artists could have taken their inspiration from looking at the Caligari (1920) - Batman (1989) - Babylon Berlin scale and some 30s cartoons.
Disclaimer: I cannot art for shit. I can only look and talk about it.
The newly restored version, which I saw recently thanks to a torrent, is a much, much better movie (both finer as an art work and more entertaining) than the truncated, barely coherent, version that I remember from being in film school in the 1980s. The restored version displays a richness and fullness of story line that the truncated version, which circulated for decades, only hints at. (Personally, I consider the Moroder version to be a true esthetic atrocity, not worth watching.)
This partial quote implies that a fully restored version exists (in some publicly-viewable form), but I don't see any details:
[At long last, materials for some of these missing sections have been found and re-inserted into the picture under the supervision of Leone’s family and surviving collaborators. The work has been completed by the magnificent team at Cineteca di Bologna and L’Immagine Ritrovata, and it has been wonderful to witness this enlargement of Leone’s vision, step by precious step.” —Martin Scorsese, Founder and Chair, The Film Foundation]
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is simply a compression+decompression of the original film. This so-called 're-representation' is just the result of the dimensionality reduction.
So, it's been rescued from the ghetto? I respect your restoration work, Mr Koerber, but I'm not sure I appreciate the implication.
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