The definitive restoration of F.W. Murnau’s silent classic “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans” opened the 40th edition of Italy’s Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival on Saturday, with some 7,000 spectators packing Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore square to catch the 1927 masterpiece accompanied by a new score performed live by the Teatro Comunale di Bologna orchestra.
The San Francisco Film Preserve initiated this 35mm restoration and undertook the 4K digital restoration that allows audiences to view “Sunrise” in a way that very closely resembles its original appearance, nearly a century after the movie became a multiple winner at the first-ever Academy Awards.
“The biggest challenge with [restoring] ‘Sunrise’ is there is no original material; you are working with later generation materials the whole way,” San Francisco Film Preserve president Robert Byrne told Variety.
Despite the loss of the “Sunrise” negatives in a Fox vault fire in the 1930s, they scoured archives around the world to identify the highest quality surviving materials.
“Sunrise” had previously been restored several times, the last one about 20 years ago. “But never with the options that we have now, in terms of actually cleaning the image, removing the dirt and going as far as we can to ethically perfectly restore the film,” Byrne added.
The final result is a transnational collaboration based on film materials preserved by the British Film Institute National Archive, Cinémathèque royale de Belgique, The Museum of Modern Art, Eye Filmmuseum, Národní Filmový Archiv (Prague) and George Eastman Museum. The restored film was graded at Bologna’s L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory. The screening will be accompanied by a new score, composed and conducted by Timothy Brock, among the world’s top experts in film music (see video above).
Isabella Rossellini, Marco Bellocchio, Wim Wenders, Irène Jacob, Amos Gitai, Pietro Marcello, Rosalie Varda, Nicolas Seydoux, Thierry Frémaux, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Arnaud Desplechin, Lav Diaz, Bill Morrison, Francesco Sossai and Alice Rohrwacher are among guests of this year’s 40th edition of Cinema Ritrovato, which will run through June 28.
“Alice Rohrwacher has told me she has seen this film eight times,” Cinema Ritrovato chief Gianluca Farinelli, who is also founder and chief of the Bologna Film Archives and its film restoration lab, told the cheering audience as he presented the opener with Rohrwacher in the crowd. The director recently announced that she is planning to make a silent film herself.
This year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato will feature 540 rediscovered “vintage” movies from all corners of the world. “Never so much as before, this year the festival comprises great classics, but also totally unknown works,” Farinelli told the audience. “Perhaps the most surprising thing about this year’s edition,” he added, “is the quantity of discoveries of works and directors that I had never heard of who made really extraordinary films.”
The festival will wrap on Sunday with the world premiere of recent MoMA restorations of two cornerstones of Charlie Chaplin‘s filmography: “A Dog’s Life” and “Shoulder Arms,” the first projects Chaplin shot at his Hollywood studios. They are being presented in their original 1918 versions, before Chaplin himself altered their editing, accompanied by a live performance by Orchestra Senzaspine of Timothy Brock‘s new, specially composed orchestral scores.
