Jan. 14, 2009 - Issue #691: The Great Indoors

SideVue

Redux Hunting

Bad Coppola or good Coppola? In San Francisco, on the historic, triangle-shaped flatiron Sentinel building that the director bought to house his Zoetrope company, a plaque talks of Francis Ford Coppola in the third person and notes the cinematic art being made right above the passerby’s reading eyes.

So it’s easy to think of the director’s Apocalypse Now Redux, which first screened at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, as a pretentious title. “Redux,” after all, means either “the return of an organ to a healthy state” or “brought back, restored” (from reducere, Latin meaning “lead back”). While Redux offered 13 altered or previously unreleased scenes, extending its running time by 49 minutes to 202 minutes, some critics felt the new sequences added little. And Apocalypse Now was hardly an unhealthy film being revitalized—it was, and remains, a fascinatingly unwieldy, lumbering classic (not unlike its hulking Marlon Brando as Kurtz or Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness on which it’s loosely based). But with a re-recording of lines, new music, and recolouring that necessitated the cutting of the old film, Apocalypse Now Redux is the permanent revision of the original release.

Wong Kar-Wai’s Ashes of Time Redux, a revision of his 1994 wuxia film, is also an attempt at definitive-ness, in part because of the many unsanctioned versions floating around and because the director, according to his own statement about the film, “discovered that the original negatives and sound materials were in danger: the laboratory in Hong Kong where they were stored was suddenly shut down, without warning. We retrieved as much as we could, but the negatives were in pieces. As if we were searching for a long-lost family, we began looking for duplicate materials from various distributors and even the storage vaults of overseas Chinatown cinemas.” This gradual family reunion then led to a technically improved film, also trimmed by about seven minutes.

Stanley Kubrick, too, was concerned about the state of his films—the ones he thought worth preserving, that is, since he bought up almost all copies of his first, Fear and Desire, so it would never be seen. Yet while A.I., a project he had contemplated, was brought to life by friend Steven Spielberg, and Kubrick cut nearly 30 minutes from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a scene near the end of The Shining, those scenes, thought lost forever now, would probably just make up intriguing Deleted Scenes for a DVD.

But another director who has shot so much that a truly different film could be brought back from the cutting-room floor is Terrence Malick. A million feet of celluloid were shot for The New World; Malick showed a 150-minute version for two weeks in two theatres (in New York and LA) in late December 2005 to qualify the film for awards and then, for the wider release in late January, cut the film to 135 minutes. A 172-minute version—though not titled “Redux”—was released on DVD in 2008. Still, a decade before, on his return to filmmaking after a 20-year hiatus, either Malick or—as cinematographer John Toll claimed—Toll and the editing team had gone much further, removing from the working print all three recorded hours of Billy Bob Thornton’s narration, then cutting all scenes with Thornton, Gary Oldman, Martin Sheen, Lukas Haas, Jason Patric, Viggo Mortensen, Bill Pullman, and Mickey Rourke before releasing The Thin Red Line, by then at least 40 minutes shorter.

Not interpretive but material “redux”—leading a film back from its archival grave or from decomposition—often seems to be left up to dedicated archivists or obsessive film historians, in many cases trying to undo studio interference. The 1998 Touch of Evil project saw Walter Murch, the editor who returned to redo Apocalypse Now with Coppola, help re-edit Welles’ film-noir minor classic (the opening is one of the great long shots in cinema history). Welles’ cut, forever lost, had been reshot by Universal, and the 1998 re-edit and restoration were based on a 58-page memo by Welles that he wrote after seeing the studio’s version. (RKO Studios also cut 44 minutes from Welles’ 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons.)

Especially because of particularly inflammable print material (nitrate) in cinema’s early years, but also because of poor film storage and the industry’s general disinterest in their archives (most Hollywood studios, once in the sound era, junked their silent films), countless works have been lost. FW Murnau’s debut The Boy in Blue, six of John Ford’s films, a DW Griffiths film starring WC Fields and Hitchcock’s second film, The Mountain Eagle, are just a few. Akira Kurosawa’s Sanshiro Sugata is missing 17 minutes and the studio slashed his adaptation of The Idiot by 100 minutes.

There have been a few odd, much delayed happy endings. The only complete version of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s celebrated The Passion of Joan of Arc (among many critics’ all-time best) was found in a janitor’s closet in a Norwegian asylum in 1981. Just last year, Fritz Lang’s masterwork Metropolis, in its full 210-minute original cut, was found in a Buenos Aires film museum; since it is in a reduced 16mm format that’s badly scratched, it needs true and full restoration, but will then be on disc later this year.

Some lesser known films the world over are seeing the light of a projector again, slowly but surely, thanks to a group that Wong Kar-Wai helped launch at the 2007 Cannes festival and is led by Martin Scorsese— the World Cinema Foundation (http://www.worldcinemafoundation.org/restoration_films-in-progress.html). The next film on their list, its inclusion spearheaded by actress Tilda Swinton, is the 1992 Iranian release Chakmeh (The Boot).

And then there’s the film that rises from the ashes of films un-redux: Bill Morrison’s 2002 work Decasia puts actual decomposing silent films on screen, building strange beauty out of decay as we watch the tendril-thin spirit of celluloid fade away. V 

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