After discussing Son of the White Mare, David Marriott explains the joys and challenges of film restoration
With a catalog as diverse and exciting as the one Arbelos Films has built since its 2017 inception — with titles ranging from Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971) to Björk’s first film, The Juniper Tree (1990) — it was no surprise that Robert Delany’s interview with co-founder David Marriott about their 4K restoration of Marcell Jankovics’ Son of the White Mare (1981) would lead to discussions of previous Arbelos releases.
We present the rest of their discussion, which delves into the differences between restoring animated and live action films, and the thrill of convincing Béla Tarr that digital can (nearly) live up to actual celluloid.
Robert Delany: How did the restoration process for Son of the White Mare (1981) compare with previous films that Arbelos has restored?
David Marriott: Animation is a little bit of a different thing. Since Son of the White Mare wasn’t made digitally — it is an analog thing made on film — what you have is a mandate on our end to get rid of anything that physically affected the negative superficially. But due to the analog animation process you sometimes will have instances where there is dirt or dust, or slight misalignments of frames that are part of the process of making that film. That we don’t want to touch because that’s the film, that’s the document. We’re not interested in making a new film. We’re interested in restoring Son of the White Mare.
You don’t often have that issue with live action because you’re not looking at different planes. With animation it becomes a thing where you don’t want to necessarily rely too much on the automated tools in your digital restoration tool kit because that can lead to removing things that capture the process of making that film that should still be there. Then in terms of where restoring animation dovetails with live action restoration is we want to keep the grain. We don’t want to make it look like the film is not film because it gets this weird eerie plastic look that nobody wants. We’re migrating an analog thing into a digital thing, but we’re very mindful of retaining the filmic aspects of a film that was made on film.
Read more about Arbelos’ 4K restoration of Son of the White Mare here:
In a time where digital formats are more popular than ever, what are the advantages of creating such a robust physical release for Son of the White Mare?
That’s been really gratifying because with everything that we’ve restored, we’ve made a point to do some version of a deluxe home entertainment release. That’s really important to us for a bunch of different reasons. Part of it is we’re all giant physical media nerds and we really love that. That’s a big part of the reason why we started this company. Keeping physical media alive is really important. Physical media is obviously not an expanding market. But when it comes to people who are collecting these types of sets for new 4K restorations or arthouse cinema, who are really interested in that, that market is stable or growing. Especially over the course of the pandemic. We saw home entertainment sales really ratchet up. That’s great because that gives us license to make even more robust packaging and invest more in that. That’s a trend we are seeing happening now and we couldn’t be happier about it.
Before you were talking about researching underground masterpieces of animation. Do you find that it’s a gratifying process finding these gems that you might not have known existed before?
Oh, absolutely. We’re lucky in the sense that our mandate isn’t anything beyond [working on] films that we all love and are not readily available and readily established. Probably the most canonical thing we’ve released is Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó (1994). But even that is something where it’s seven-and-a-half hours long, so there’s not going to be a real economic incentive for many people to restore that, especially as a new 4K restoration. Because we can do some of the technical work, that puts us in a position to have that proposition make sense. Even something that is relatively canonical by our standards, we felt that there was a real reason to do that because it wasn’t out there in any representative way. It didn’t seem like that was going to change based on just the hurdles of the length and x, y, and z.
All of which is to say, it’s really exciting when your job is just to find a film that you really love, then do your best to make it look the best it can and get it in front of as many people as possible.
What was the process like of restoring Sátántangó, which to many people is such a monumental achievement of cinema?
It’s interesting because we’re obviously equally proud of every restoration that we’ve done and released, but like I was saying before, they are generally not as established as Sátántangó. Generally, our job is to do all of the restoration work that I’ve been talking about and make it look the best it can, and then to get everybody really excited about it. To kind of go from zero to a hundred. Whereas with Sátántangó that process was a little bit reversed. We really did feel the weight of [the project], asking ‘are we doing the best we can?’ ‘Is this the right decision?’ Luckily a lot of those decisions are sort of made for us, we’re not going to go out of our way to do a bad job or cut any corners.
It’s interesting because even though Sátántangó was released first, the conversation around Son of the White Mare is the reason that we became really close with the Hungarian National Film Institute. They have their own really sophisticated lab in Budapest and that was where we did a lot of the scanning for Sátántangó because, with very good reason, Béla Tarr’s negatives don’t leave Hungary. So there was no way in which they were going to come to America for us to scan them here. It was a really nice thing where the collaboration we had around Son of the White Mare also created an infrastructure for us to do work on Béla’s films as well.
It was also another instance where Béla Tarr was in the room, very involved in the color grading, and he had very strong opinions about how everything should look. That’s invaluable. He wasn’t very excited about going from the analog to the digital space for a long time. I think the greatest compliment we could get when we premiered the restoration at the Berlinale, and Béla got up and did his introduction, he was like, ‘It looks 98 percent as good as the 35mm print.’ And I was like, ‘I’ll take it! That’s great, we’ll take it!’
That’s something that you can hang your hat on I imagine.
Yeah, that was a very gratifying moment. Also, very scary, because when he teed that up, we were like, ‘I don’t know where he’s going with this. If he says 49 percent, that’s going to suck!’ I think ultimately it’s about finding, sustaining, or nurturing the audience of the work. It’s about access, to speak in archival terms, with the caveat that we want that access to be a really high quality 4K restoration. Not to speak for Béla, who can obviously speak for himself, I think that might have been a major incentive for him coming around on the digital process. I think it was just that knowledge of the economics of a theater showing a 35mm print for a movie that is seven-and-a-half hours long, the financial investment is not inconsiderable. Whereas you get that same film as a great looking 4K restoration on a hard drive, it just makes it easier for more people to see it in the best way possible. I think that ultimately might have been a consideration in Béla finally embracing the 4K digital restoration world.
I was also really happy to see Mutual Appreciation (2005) as a part of your catalog. A lot of us here at Split Tooth are big fans of Andrew Bujalski’s work. What was the process like restoring Mutual Appreciation?
That was a dream. Andrew, it should come as no surprise, is the best dude. He was incredibly involved, brilliant, and just really easy to work with. Restoring Mutual Appreciation was a little more straightforward because Andrew’s based in Austin, and we’re here in L.A., so it’s not that far apart. So we did the color grade at the Post House in Austin that he works with a lot and he has a team there that he’s really comfortable with who have worked on his last few films. We worked with the Harvard Film Archive to get the original materials. It was a very straightforward, easy, delightful process. The whole thing probably took only a few months. And it’s something where I know some people thought Mutual Appreciation seemed like too recent of a film to restore. But then when you think about it, at the time, there was only one print that had been in circulation for a really long time. There was a DVD that obviously wasn’t 4K and it was out of print. There was a real mandate to do the restoration because if you’re going to do a new scan to create a Blu-ray, why not do a proper restoration if you already have to get that involved to do it?
Arbelos has such a diverse catalog: between films like Sátántangó, Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, Nina Menkes’ Queen of Diamonds (1991), and now Son of the White Mare. What would some of the next dream restorations be for you at Arbelos, and are you working on anything now that you can speak about?
We are working on something now that we’re incredibly excited about, but I can’t speak about it yet, which I know is a total tease. I’m sorry! I can say that it’ll be at a fall festival and you’ll hopefully hear about it. It’s another one of these films that I’ve had a lot of love for for a long time. It’s inconceivable that it’s not readily available. It is an absolute masterpiece. It’s as diverse as anything else that’s in our catalog. I know that it seems like a long walk to get from The Last Movie to Son of the White Mare to Belladonna of Sadness (1973) to Mutual Appreciation to Juniper Tree (1990), but we love all of those films. They’re all films where there was a reason to bring them back out in these deluxe editions. The diversity of the catalog is a real point of pride for us. And that’s true of this new one that we’re going to be talking about in a few months as well.
Stay up to date with all things Split Tooth Media and follow Robert on Twitter
(Split Tooth may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
