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

MATEWAN

One would think that a film as recently made as MATEWAN would not be in dire need of preservation. Indeed, the original materials for the film all turned out to be in excellent condition. By the time Sayles made the film he already had four features under his belt, and was working with seasoned professionals such as Haskell Wexler. So the quality in all respects was much higher than for a traditional independent film. However, every preservation job presents its own twists and turns, and MATEWAN was no exception.

Scott Smerdon of Monaco Labs and Ross Lipman of the UCLA Film and Television Archive were concerned that the use of current positive film stocks, which are designed for a slightly more contrasty look than was common in the mid 80's, might result in a slight loss of detail in new prints. It was discovered that old prints of the film were in fact made on Fuji film stock. Suzanne Ceresko of Anarchists' Convention contacted Haskell Wexler, who was a consultant for the preservation project, and asked him if that was incidental or in fact an artistic choice. It turned out that Wexler had indeed purposely chosen Fuji stocks for MATEWAN due to their softer look and slightly different color palatte.

As a result, Monaco printed side-by-side section tests on Fuji and other film stocks, which Wexler and Lipman screened. All parties agreed that the Fuji material was better suited for MATEWAN's "period" look, having a softer and less vibrant, but more detailed image. Monaco's timer, Kip Hansen, then meticulously went through a number of answer prints before arriving at a viewing copy that essentially "translated" the look of the original to the newer Fuji print stocks, and met the satisfaction of Sayles and the preservation team.

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 Bodine, 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.”