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

LIANNA (1983)

“We were working six day weeks,” Sayles recalls, of the production of his second feature film, “and we had about thirty days to shoot it. We were shooting on location [in Hoboken], not on sets, and that made things difficult. I could touch both walls of Lianna’s apartment. I told the cinematographers, ‘Try to have it look good and get us through the day.’”

As UCLA preservationist Ross Lipman recalls, “Our questions about Lianna started with the original negative. It was not clearly framed for a 1:33 aspect ratio (which is nearly square), as Secaucus Seven was. It seemed to look better in some kind of wide screen format. The cinematographer, Austin DeBesche, confirmed that while it had been shot at 1:33, they did have eventual wide screen projection in mind. He couldn’t remember which ratio it was, but we experimented with it and it turned out that the image was more comfortable at the slightly taller 1:66 ratio than at 1:85. There were heads that were getting chopped off a bit at 1:85 that were just right at 1:66.

One of the post-production techniques that caused problems during the restoration was the use of laboratory film stock called a CRI, or Color Reversal Intermediate. As Lipman explains, “CRI is basically a process for making a color internegative from another negative in one step, with no interpositive in between, using a chemical process that reverses the tones and colors. The footage tends to be grainier, and there can be noticeable color shifts.”

This posed some tough problems on Lianna, Lipman says, “because 16mm is often grainy to begin with. There were CRI sections throughout Lianna, and in those sections the grain just really popped. The main title sequence was a striking example of this.”

For Lianna, as on Secaucus Seven, Sayles adopted an archival approach to the theatrical re-issue: duplicate the original viewing experience as closely as possible. But whereas on his first film he intends to perform some additional surgery when the restoration is issued on DVD, he doubts that he will do any comparable work on his second movie.

“The things I don’t like about Lianna,” he says, “are not so much filmmaking things as writing things. Generally the filmmaking is fine and when it’s not it’s because I feel that it’s over-written. It’s very on the nose sometimes and at those moments I wish it was more oblique. I think because it is the writing, because it’s not like cutting out a shot, I’m less likely to make adjustments on this than on Secaucus Seven, which because it’s a group story is made up of many more little pieces that would be easy to take out. Lianna is really about one woman and her relationships, it has a very clear through line, and to really change something like that you’d have to go in and re-shoot—and nobody’s the same age.”

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.”