The definitive restoration of F.W. Murnau’s silent masterpiece Sunrise: The Song of Two Men opened Italy’s 40th Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival on Saturday, with around 7,000 spectators flocking to Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore to see the 1927 masterpiece accompanied by live music by the Orchestra of the Opera House of Bologna.
Nearly a century after the film won multiple awards at the first-ever Academy Awards, the San Francisco Film Conservancy began this 35mm restoration and performed a 4K digital restoration that will allow audiences to see “Sunrise” in a way that closely resembles its original appearance.
“The biggest challenge in[restoring]Sunrise is that we don’t have the original material. We’re working with much later material,” Robert Byrne, president of the San Francisco Film Preserve, told Variety.
They scoured archives around the world to identify the highest quality material in existence, even though the negatives of “Sunrise” were lost in the Fox vault fire in the 1930s.
Sunrise has been restored several times, the last time being about 20 years ago. “But it’s simply not an option that we currently have in terms of actually cleaning the images, removing dirt and doing everything we can to ethically restore the film to perfection,” Byrne added.
The final result is a cross-border collaboration based on film archives held by the National Archives of the British Film Institute, the Belgian Royal Cinematheque, the Museum of Modern Art, the I Filmmuseum, the Národny Filmmovie Archive (Prague) and the George Eastman Museum. The restored film was graded at the L’Imagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna. The screening will be accompanied by new music composed and conducted by Timothy Block, one of the world’s leading experts in film music (see video above).
This year’s 40th guests include Isabella Rossellini, Marco Bellocchio, Wim Wenders, Irene Jacob, Amos Gitai, Pietro Marcello, Rosalie Varda, Nicola Seydoux, Guests include Thierry Frémaux, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Arnaud Desplechin, Lav Diaz, Bill Morrison, Francesco Sossai, and Alice Rohrwacher. Cinema Ritrovato will be shown until June 28th.
“Alice Rohrwacher told me that she saw this film eight times,” Gianluca Farinelli, head of Cinema Ritrovato and founder and director of the Bologna Film Archive and its Film Restoration Lab, told the cheering audience as he and Rohrwacher performed the opening in the audience. The director recently announced that he also has plans to produce a silent film.
This year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato will feature 540 rediscovered “vintage” films from around the world. “More than ever, this year’s festival includes not only great classics, but also completely unknown works,” Farinelli told the audience. “Perhaps the most surprising thing about this year’s edition is the number of films and directors we’ve never heard of who have made truly extraordinary films,” he added.
The festival closes on Sunday with the world premiere of the recent MoMA restoration of two cornerstones of Charlie Chaplin’s filmography, “A Dog’s Life,” the first project Chaplin shot in a Hollywood studio, and “Shoulder Arms.” These are the original 1918 versions, before Chaplin’s own editing changes, and will be performed with live music by the Senzaspine Orchestra from a new orchestral score specially composed by Timothy Bullock.
