Frankenstein 1910

In 2016, to celebrate the bicentenary of Mary Shelley's novel, the Ciné-club universitaire de Genève honored Frankenstein with a program that oscillated between “pre-Frankenstein” films, works of inspiration, great classics and B-movies.

The Ciné-club was also interested in its first cinematographic representation, dating from 1910 and soberly entitled Frankenstein (J. Searle Dawley, USA). Faced with poor-quality prints, the Ciné-club set itself the daunting task of restoring this unique work, now in the public domain. One of its most active members, Julien Dumoulin, dedicated several months to this immense task, putting in over 100 hours of work, from image processing to finalizing the project.

At a time when the Internet offers unrivalled possibilities for archiving, distributing and protecting works, it may seem paradoxical to assert that the Web is sometimes - often - the cause of a deterioration in our heritage. In the case of cinema, works that have fallen into the public domain and are offered for free access bear the mark of this lack of regard for their integrity. The fault lies not only with the Internet, the last stage in the journey of old films through the vagaries of history, but in the age of high-definition video, cheap digitization is an additional blow to products that are often incomplete, fragile and threatened with extinction.

Such is the case with Frankenstein, directed by J. Searle Dawley for Edison Studios in 1910. The video we have today is offered on the Internet in a multitude of versions, already reappropriated by numerous Internet users. The oldest appears to come from an American DVD released in 2010, already featuring a restored version of the film! The proposed version apparently comes from a 35mm film print, as evidenced by the watermarks embedded in the image. To sum up: the 1910 film was first copied onto film in the 1970s for safekeeping. This film was then digitized and a DVD was released in 2010, from which the versions available on the Internet today are derived. But each of these steps represents further damage to the original. First of all, the film (copy or original) bears the scars of time: stains, dust, chemical reactions... The image shows a ripple, which may have been caused by humidity deforming the film itself, but other causes such as poor copying or over-compression of the image can also be the reason. The film copied in 1970 was not yet in the public domain, which explains the inlay of several watermarks featuring Edison's company logo on several corners of the frame. The transition to DVD also had a deleterious impact on the film, which was reduced to a definition of 480 pixels high by 640 pixels wide for the American image format, which uses the NTSC standard (a format even smaller than the European PAL, which offers an image 576 high by 720 pixels wide). Added to this is the film's conformation for the NTSC frame rate. The 1910 film, shot at a frame rate of 16 to 18 fps, is now shot at 29.97 fps, and the simplest interpolation tool for “creating” the missing frames and enabling the final product to retain its original length is to double certain images. This means almost doubling their defects. The additional compression induced by the digitization of this version for the web ends up damaging the video.

With this in mind, half of the restoration work is limited to trying to undo these final steps to recover a file that is as close as possible to the 1910 version: deleting duplicate images, enlarging the image to allow detailed work. The film is then “cleaned”, with the most deteriorated passages corrected frame by frame. The sequences are stabilized (the shakes are the result of reading the original film, which also had image jumps) and the watermarks are erased to restore the 1910 image. The work of cleaning and in-depth color grading then begins to “stabilize” the film colorimetrically (softening the differences in image that make lighter or darker passages appear from one image to another). In a final step, the most discreet dust and scratches are removed frame by frame. The image is then calibrated in the classic way, in an attempt to achieve better image definition and contrast.

Naturally, each restoration stage raises a number of historical issues: how should the new cartons look? How often should the film be played? What defects in the image are due to the technology of the time or to subsequent deterioration? Other films from Edison Studios have come down to us, giving us an insight into the studio's style and the quality of the technology used at the time, and providing us with reliable references to guide our work. They show that many films from the very beginning of the twentieth century had impeccable image definition, which makes us regret the loss of detail in the 1910 version - detail that would be irrecoverable in its current state without a new, high-quality digitization of the original film.

However, the film, long considered lost, can now be seen in its entirety and has even been given a new lease of life, with a restored image, updated cards and an original soundtrack. Let's not deny ourselves the pleasure.

By Julien Dumoulin, Ciné-club universitaire committee member

This is a silent film, which did not have the privilege of being given a soundtrack at the time of its creation. That's why the Ciné-club called on the services of the renowned composer Nicolas Hafner, who imagined an original sound part and performed it on the magnificent cinema organ of the Collège Claparède.