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Stefan Andersson wrote:Shooting seems to have begun in February.

Nothing wrote:

Stefan Andersson wrote:Shooting seems to have begun in February.

Surely you've answered your own question?

foliagecop wrote:Yoshimori, any chance of a blow-by-blow account like last year? Not being able to get to Cannes, I found it essential reading.

Nothing wrote:My early prediction is still that the Suleiman will walk away with one of the three main prizes, if not the Palme d'Or.

Nothing wrote:In other news, it looks like Critics' Week + Wild Bunch have found themselves another one. The first truly 'must see' film of the festival?

MichaelB wrote:I bet it's a lot less fun than Dejan Zečević's The Fourth Man

MichaelB wrote:made by Ordinary People regarding perpetrators of Serbian atrocities and the way they're dehumanised to the point when their very identity is open to question.

Nothing wrote:Das Weisse Band isn't screening for four days, there's plenty of fun to be had before then.

Nothing wrote:

MichaelB wrote:I bet it's a lot less fun than Dejan Zečević's The Fourth Man

I'll bet it's a lot less "fun" than Transporter 3 as well... =

That sounds like a far less interesting point than the one this film is supposed to be making. Obviously, I haven't seen it. Variety.

david hare wrote:are there any online reviews of the Restored Red Shoes yet?

'The Red Shoes' shines anew

After combating mold, dirt and shrinkage, a 2 1/2-year restoration of the 1948 Technicolor stunner culminates at Cannes.
By KENNETH TURAN
May 17, 2009

EVEN REDDER: Moira Shearer stars in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s film nominated for five Academy Awards. Modern technology has made the film look better than ever, preservationist Robert Gitt says.

After combating mold, dirt and shrinkage, a 2 1/2-year restoration of the 1948 Technicolor stunner culminates at Cannes.
By KENNETH TURAN, Film Critic
May 17, 2009

Few films have more passionate partisans than Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's "The Red Shoes," but no matter how much you love it, you probably don't know it as intimately as Robert Gitt.

Gitt spent so much time looking at the 1948 British classic he not only can tell you how many frames it contains -- 192,960 in the print, 578,880 in the tripartite negative -- but what had gone wrong with each and every one of them, from a massive attack of mold to wonky negative shrinkage.

Gitt knows all this because as preservation officer at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, he's spent the last 2 1/2 years supervising a painstaking restoration of this landmark three-strip Technicolor film. He watched it so long and so hard he can recite the dialogue, and Barbara Whitehead, the assistant film preservationist who worked with him, knows the ballet choreography by heart.

All this demanding effort -- Gitt called it one of the most complicated endeavors of his career -- paid off Friday night when the "Red Shoes" restoration was scheduled to have its world premiere on the big screen at the Cannes Film Festival's glamorous Salle Debussy. (Time and place for an eventual Los Angeles screening have yet to be determined.)

The film was to be presented by two of its most illustrious devotees, director Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese's longtime editor and Powell's widow. Scorsese and Schoonmaker consulted closely with Gitt and Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging, which did the digital picture restoration, with Schoonmaker providing meticulous notes that proved invaluable...

The other major factor was the gorgeous color photography of Jack Cardiff. The UCLA restoration does full justice to what has to be one of the most exquisite color films ever made, filled with the kind of deep, vivid hues that will leave viewers literally gasping.

Not that restoring those colors to their original brilliance was easy. First, it turned out that every reel of the original negative, which had been stored in Great Britain, had been attacked by mold, causing what Gitt describes as "thousands of visible tiny cracks and fissures."

To get rid of the mold, Whitehead had to both use ultrasonic cleaners and hand-clean parts of the negative frame by frame with perchloroethylene, commonly known as perc, a hazardous fluid usually used in dry cleaning.

Another problem discovered early on was that "there were thousands of visible red, blue and green specks caused by embedded dirt and scratches." Once all this was dealt with, Gitt remembers, "we breathed a big sigh of relief, we thought we were free and clear." It was then that yet another problem, negative shrinkage, was discovered.

A Technicolor issue

As its name indicates, three-strip Technicolor was shot with three different negatives, and over the course of time some of the negatives had shrunken to different sizes. Also, it turned out that the camera had been out of adjustment for much of the shoot, and the equipment Technicolor had originally used to adjust for that was no longer functional. As a result, the images looked like a 3-D movie without the glasses, with red and green fringes around the sides.

These problems, and others, including the "flickering, mottling and 'breathing' " of the image, were all corrected via digital restoration to the point where "The Red Shoes" actually looks better now than it ever has. "In 1948, images were fuzzy by today's standards," Gitt explains. "And because there was more information on the negative than could be printed at the time, we got a lot more off it than they were able to do when the film first came out."

Those red shoes have never looked redder, or more alluring, than they do today