What does it take to bring a film back to life?

Thorold Dickinson’s 1949 The Queen of Spades is the per­fect win­ter ghost sto­ry. Based on Alexan­der Pushkin’s clas­sic short sto­ry, the slim, sharp tale fol­lows a young offi­cer through shad­owy streets, grand man­sions, and seedy tav­erns as he seeks a dev­il­ish secret to win at cards.

Over time though, 35mm prints and mag­net­ic sound­tracks degrade, even for films kept in rel­a­tive­ly pres­tine stor­age. Dig­i­tal restora­tion is a key new tool in address­ing logis­tic chal­lenges of film preser­va­tion and archive cre­ation. John Rod­den, Head of Film Enter­tain­ment at Stu­dio­Canal, and Jahanzeb Hay­at, StudioCanal’s Tech­ni­cal Man­ag­er for The­atri­cal Restora­tions, explain the metic­u­lous process and respon­si­bil­i­ties of 4K restoration.

LWL: Why restore The Queen of Spades in 4K now?

John Rod­den: For us, it’s always been a favourite. It’s one of those British films that we think res­onates and is wor­thy of an audi­ence. Even if you haven’t seen it, you will have seen its influence.

Our work is about rais­ing the pro­file of pres­tige films.The best way to do that is to show­case films in the way they were intend­ed to be seen, on the big screen. We encour­age peo­ple to see The Queen of Spades in a cin­e­ma with an audi­ence if pos­si­ble. But it’s also great at home, so we’re pre­sent­ing it in Jan­u­ary as part of our Vin­tage Clas­sics Col­lec­tion, as well as a collector’s edi­tion with bonus content.

4K tech­nol­o­gy can present films bet­ter than ever in a cin­e­ma and then in the home. It’s some­times sur­pris­ing how good films look when restored. The mate­ri­als Dick­in­son shot on were great. He was work­ing with incred­i­ble equip­ment and lens­es. 35mm film was and is an amaz­ing medi­um to record imagery. 4K tech­nol­o­gy brings all the detail out – in a black and white film the dynam­ic range of greys and blacks.

Can you walk us through the film’s restora­tion process?

Jahanzeb Hay­at: The BFI held the orig­i­nal nitrate neg­a­tives and gave them a phys­i­cal clean. Then we brought them to our restora­tion com­pa­ny Sil­ver Salt, who scanned the film into 4K dig­i­tal files with all the infor­ma­tion in the image present. Then it went through hun­dreds of hours of man­u­al clean­ing. We went through the film frame by frame, remov­ing sparkles (dirt), and worked on scratch­es one at a time. We sta­bilised the image so it’s not shak­ing; it stays true from shot to shot. And then we used ref­er­ences like old­er mas­ters and 35mm prints to make sure it’s as accu­rate as pos­si­ble for the colour grade. Last­ly, we made a 4K DCP for the­atri­cal screen­ings and a new HD Mas­ter for home entertainment.

The Queen of Spades is in black and white, with vivid con­trast between shad­ows and snow. Are there par­tic­u­lar chal­lenges when restor­ing black and white films as opposed to colour films?

JH: The biggest chal­lenge is black lev­els and main­tain­ing infor­ma­tion on the dark­er side of the image. You don’t want noisy shad­ows. When we scan it in 4K 16 bit, we cre­ate a log scan. This takes the entire dynam­ic range and infor­ma­tion in the image and presents it so that the colour grad­er can work with it all. It’s def­i­nite­ly about the bal­ance and noise lev­els when it comes to con­trast in black and white.

You men­tioned the snow. When you see dirt – which we call sparkles – on film, it is lit­er­al­ly like tiny bits of snow. When we start to clean a film, we do a dig­i­tal scan where the com­put­er goes through and cleans up sur­face lev­el infor­ma­tion before we go through each frame man­u­al­ly. When it comes to snow, you can’t do that, so Sil­ver Salt had to work man­u­al­ly in many scenes.

Com­pared to oth­er restora­tions, were these prints for The Queen of Spades challenging?

JH: Com­pared to oth­er films over 50 years old, it wasn’t in the worst con­di­tion – dirty, but as expect­ed. A few sec­tions were scratched, but noth­ing that stood out. The BFI kept it in good con­di­tion in their stor­age. You have to be gen­tle and care­ful when film prints go through a feed­ing or scan­ning machine so the holes and pins line up, espe­cial­ly when rolls have been joined together.

What’s the impor­tance of film stor­age for future restora­tion and digitisation?

JH: One impor­tant aspect of preser­va­tion is the met­al cans reels are kept in. Over years they can rust and the chem­i­cals from the film dam­age the cans. So it’s impor­tant to re-can film reels to keep them in good con­di­tion. Some­times when film degrades in terms of the image, we are able to bring it back with colour grading.

When we fin­ish restor­ing a film, we take the full case scans cre­at­ed at the first stage and archive them onto secure LTO tapes, which we put in stor­age. If God for­bid any­thing hap­pens to the neg­a­tive, we can use those. There have been times where we’ve restored a film, per­haps 10 years ago when HDR 4k wasn’t as preva­lent, and we’ve gone back to that data and cre­at­ed an HDR Dol­by Vision remas­ter with­out using the more frag­ile negative.

We also have an entire stor­age facil­i­ty of mag­net­ic sound­tracks. Mag­net­ic sound­tracks can phys­i­cal­ly degrade eas­i­ly and severe­ly, so we’ve been work­ing to scan and upload the audio onto our secure media asset man­age­ment sys­tem so we have a good copy before any­thing hap­pens to the track negatives.

Film preser­va­tion is a big top­ic; stream­ers treat orig­i­nal films care­less­ly but dig­i­tal is a large-scale archival tool to com­bat phys­i­cal archives’ lim­i­ta­tions. How do you see dig­i­tal technology’s role in giv­ing films a new life for new generations?

JR: We are con­scious of our role as archive cus­to­di­ans. It’s always impor­tant we cre­ate a preser­va­tion mas­ter from a 4K scan. We can then go back and cre­ate a 35mm safe­ty negative.

The oth­er aspect is pre­serv­ing the film in the col­lec­tive cul­ture. It’s not enough to restore a film, peo­ple have to see it. We’re in a world of myr­i­ad ways of access­ing con­tent across all media. The job is to be as active as pos­si­ble across all dif­fer­ent areas now and in the future. We have to think about buy­ers to reach audi­ences who may not actu­al­ly know our cat­a­logue, so there’s the job of explain­ing, cham­pi­oning, and curat­ing. All these activ­i­ties are about pre­serv­ing cul­tur­al arti­facts in the pub­lic imagination.

What do you want peo­ple to take away from the restored Queen of Spades?

JR: I hope peo­ple enjoy them­selves and appre­ci­ate that art is long. We’re talk­ing about The Queen of Spades today because it’s a great work and genre piece on many lev­els. The ghost sto­ry is a med­i­ta­tion on greed, ambi­tion, and resent­ment. In 4K, it’s like see­ing a restored paint­ing brought back to life.

We want to take peo­ple on a jour­ney. We’re lucky cus­to­di­ans. We’re the kids in the can­dy store, but we have to be aware of our respon­si­bil­i­ty to pro­tect the works and get them out to a wide audience.

Stu­dio­Canal and the BFI’s restora­tion of The Queen of Spades is in cin­e­mas on 23 Decem­ber and on home video on 23 January.