The Toll of the Sea, first Technicolor feature with colour prints The Toll of the Sea was premiered on 26 November 1922. It was the first two-colour Technicolor feature with colour prints produced for standard projectors.It was a Madama Butterfly story set near Hong Kong and featuring Anna May Wong, who was only 17 years old in her first leading role. A Chinese lady Lotus Flower rescues an American man…
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The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm The original negatives of The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962) were heavily damaged with moisture, mould, and general rot by water damage. It has two more film strips than a normal film. The film is about 140 minutes long, so it is equivalent to a 420 minutes film. Some film restorers described the film as ‘un-restorable’.The film restoration project was finally started…
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American short comedy The Frozen North One hundred years ago today, the American short comedy The Frozen North (1922) was released. In the film, director and actor Buster Keaton parodied the western star, William S. Hart. Keaton played the role of a bully and thief who beats his wife. He imitated Hart’s unique screen image, which made many audiences associate Hart with the role in the film. Some think that…
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Taiwan classic gangster film Dust of Angels The restoration of Dust of Angels (1992) began last March. The good condition of the original negative made the restoration much easier.The duration of the negative is 110 minutes, five minutes longer than the theatrical release. After comparison, the restoration team found that the plot and editing of the release are faster and tighter. They believed that these outtakes are coherent with their…
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Music reconstruction of Vampyr Carl Theodor Dreyer’s first sound film, Vampyr (1932), will be screened at HKIFF46. Although it is a sound film, very few dialogues are used. It is still in the form of a silent film narrated by title cards. The duration of the film is 73 minutes and the score takes up 71 minutes, which is particularly important in storytelling.Wolfgang Zeller’s score was thought to be lost,…
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Rescreened a rarely known title of Iranian New Wave—Cheshmeh A special dispatch from @screen_notes_didi: This year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato rescreened a rarely known title of Iranian New Wave—Cheshmeh (1972). It is the only feature film directed by filmmaker and writer Arby Ovanessian. According to Ovanessian’s introduction at the screening, Cheshmeh was produced between 1969 and 1971. It subsequently premiered at the first Tehran International Film Festival and received polarised reviews.…
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The earliest surviving Chinese fiction film Labourer’s Love On June 9, the International Archives Day, at the China Film Archive in Beijing, and on June 27 at the Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, Italy, the 4K restored version of Labourer's Love (also known as Romance of a Fruit Peddler or Romance of a Fruit Pedlar), a Chinese film produced a hundred years ago in 1922. It is the earliest surviving…
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The first generation of Nakamura Ganjiro’s footages were rediscovered The cultural and artistic significance of non-feature films can be seen in the case where the first generation of Nakamura Ganjiro's footages were rediscovered recently. Nakamura Ganjiro is a very important ‘Myoseki’ in the Japanese Kabuki world (that is, a stage name passed down from generation to generation for one’s performance style and specialised plays). The first generation of Ganjiro is…
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The latest restoration of Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives Produced by MoMA and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF), the latest restoration of Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives (1922) has screened at Il Cinema Ritrovato recently, after the premiere at San Francisco. Robert Byrne (SFSFF) and Dave Kehr (MoMA) attended the festival to talk about the case.The length of the film was at 14 reels for its New York…
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The first Korean feature-length animation film Hong Gil-dong The first Korean feature-length animation film Hong Gil-dong was restored in 4K! The film was directed by Shin Dong-heon, who adapted his younger brother’s famous comic series, Lucky Adventurer, Hong Gil-dong from 1965, and released it in Korea two years later.The lost original negative was made from military giant celluloid films. Korean Film Archive (KFA) collected a Japanese version of 16mm film from a…
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