"Azul" Print Comparison
This blog post for Preservation Week was contributed by media preservation graduate assistant Adrianne Lundy about her work on the Roland Legiardi-Laura and Joanna Kiernan Collection on the Azul Documentary (TAM.814).
Azul was directed by Roland Legiardi-Laura in 1988. The film focuses on Nicaraguan poetry and culture, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Ruben Dario’s published book of the same title. In 2022, NYU Special Collections acquired Azul’s many production materials, including raw footage and audio recordings.
Included in these acquired materials were nine separate prints of the film. All were assumed to be exhibition prints, based on their labeling and because they were housed in travel carriers used to ship prints to exhibitors. It’s not uncommon for duplicate materials to exist in a collection. However, maintaining duplicates means committing storage, funds, and resources that could otherwise be devoted to original elements of other collections. Exhibition prints also tend to have high rates of damage from projectors, abundant handling, and travel wear and tear. It was decided that these prints should be inspected and assessed to identify the best quality prints of the bunch.
The inspection of all nine prints took place in March and April of this year. The film is 105 minutes, and each print consisted of three reels. I made notes on key condition points, including the number of splices and level of shrinkage. A common form of damage across many of the prints came from misloading projectors or from DIY-ed projection marks. On two different occasions, the first ~100 feet of image on the first reel were heavily scratched, contained damaged perforations, and edge damage, but contained very little damage going forward. This is as if a projectionist had improperly loaded the film, stopped, corrected, and reloaded.
On other occasions, the projection marks varied in how they were implemented. Oftentimes individual projectionists/venues would have their own systems for indicating that a reel change was needed. On a number of prints, the heads and tails of the reels were painted white, presumably to indicate this.
On other occasions, one or two frames were cut and re-spliced into the film. This was likely a result of the three reels being edited together onto one reel for easier projection, and then separated again when the print was returned.
Another common issue across almost all prints were high levels of shrinkage. Most prints were found to have shrunk by 0.3% or more. Prints with 0.5% or higher shrinkage were noted as unsuitable for projection.
In inspecting the films, it was found that some prints were subtitled in English, while others were not. For this reason, a “best copy” was sought of each of these two versions. The two unsubtitled copies had the most vibrant colors of all the nine prints. Both were printed on Eastman 7243 Safety Stock, a stock used for color master positives. The stock type, plus the lack of subtitles, indicates that they may be of an earlier generation than the rest of the prints in the collection. One was in excellent condition, while the other suffered from projector damage and shrinkage over 0.5%, making the choice of “best copy” simple.
The remaining seven prints all had subtitles and were all marked as “Low-Fade Positive Prints” (LPP). Though this stock was created to prevent color fading (in response to earlier color stocks that were susceptible to fading to a magenta color), the colors of these prints often appeared a bit duller in comparison to the 7243 prints. Despite this, there was one film that registered as having 0% shrinkage, along with a minimal number of splices.
Additional repairs will likely still be needed on these prints. The subtitled print was one of the versions with projector damage at the head, though the rest of the film is in very good condition. Though no perfs were broken, many were bent and damaged. The non-subtitled version has an improper tape splice halfway through the second reel that is collecting dust and grime. Despite this, it was wonderful to identify two minimally damaged prints to represent these two versions of Azul.