This Thursday, Fathom Events will celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Lawrence of Arabia with a digitally remastered print.
I've used this blog space sparingly, to discuss the future of film- celluloid - with the advent of digital. While Gone With the Wind and the John Ford epics can certainly be ranked among the best of the film era, Lawrence of Arabia is right up there, and if only one film could be maintained on film for future generations, my pick would certainly be David Lean's masterpiece.
If digital is to learn from the film era - and I sincerely hope that "era" has a place moving forward - there is no better film than Lawrence of Arabia from which to get it right.
The advent of any technology breeds experimentation. A look at the gaudy Technicolor movies of the the 1950s are good examples that just because you have a new technology doesn't mean you are using it wisely.
One of the missteps digital has taken, in my opinion, is it's worship of the comic book and video game. When presented with more options, it seems the Studios always get it wrong before they get it right.
"Glorious Technicolor" and the three-strip dye process produced many wonderful films. They also produced many of the gaudier-looking projects -especially musicals - which continued with "Metrocolor" and other processes in the 1950s. Many just got gaudier (for my taste) with processes like Superscope, Techniscope and Vista Vision.
Brighter was not always better.
The Super Panavision 70 process was certainly part of this race for better resolution and a more "wide-screen" feel. (I know my DP friends are cringing right now - I am trying to explore this more from a movie-goers perspective than a filmmakers).
What Lean did with Lawrence, that many other filmmakers failed to do, was to take advantage of the process without letting the process determine the film-making. Digital movie-makers - are you listening?
I worked with a young, inexperienced DP who insisted on shooting with anamorphic lenses with the RED on a script that did not call for it at all. The result was, to say the least, unimpressive.
Lean not only made a great epic film, taking full advantage of the desert locales, but he made a great intimate film as well. He never fell so in love with the pretty pictures that he let the story take a back seat.
Sure, we all remember the scene of Lawrence returning with the man he had saved, starting as a spec in the distance, and the wonderful battle scenes. However, he paid the same deal of attention to the many intimate scenes in the movie. For me, that is what makes this such a great film, never to fall out of my personal Top Five.
The movie also has Peter O'Toole at a time when the camera just loved him; the same thing can be said of another favorite of mine, Lord Jim, just a short time later. Then, there are the great supporting performances, including the under-rated Omar Sharif.
Like Lord Jim, it deals with the "romance" of war while also exploring the depths to which man can sink, as well as the heights he can attain. Like Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai, it explores the absurdity of war at a time when a post-WWII generation was starting to question whether war should be lauded as it was in so many movies that welcomed fighting men home.
The "nobility" of British Imperialism celebrated in (also wonderful) films like Gunga Din are tempered here with real questions about the moral "superiority" of Western Europeans in an Arab world. These are themes that still seem fresh today, fifty years later.
Celluloid has many great qualities; impermanence is not one of them. As such, the restored print is being brought to us using the latest in digital technology, in the place that film cannot compare, the post process. The article I linked discusses the process better than I can.
Sure, I loved the restored film version that was released in 1989. As someone who had gone to see the weaker prints for years at revival houses like the Thalia on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I adored seeing it in its full glory on a big screen with many of the problems fixed.
Now, at the age of fifty - still a few years younger than me - Lawrence of Arabia returns to the screen, brought back to health like a sick patient who could not be "cured" of an illness without the newest medical break-through.
I will be there Thursday - it is only being shown on one day - and I promise to be thankful, not rueful, of the "young Turk" (pun definitely intended) digital as it comes to the aid of a great film, Lawrence of Arabia.
Hope you do so as well.
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