“A Work in Process: The Restoration Work of the Wim Wenders Foundation” A Workshop Report from the Film:Restored_2 Festival

From October 26th until the 29th the second annual “Film: ReStored” festival took place at the Filmhaus in Berlin, Germany. The four-day festival—organised by the Deutsche Kinemathek on behalf of the Deutscher Kinematheksverbund—premiered digitally restored films in combination with lectures and workshops focused on questions surrounding the digitisation of film heritage.

Included in the festival schedule was a workshop report delivered by German film director Wim Wenders, speaking as Chairman of the Board for his foundation The Wim Wenders Stiftung, on their raison d’être and restoration work. As the author of the films housed by the foundation, Wenders offered an intimate perspective on starting the foundation, the trials faced during the production of the films in question, and some of the more interesting and challenging aspects of their restorations.

Wim Wenders at Film:ReStored_2 October 2017 (Credit: Britt Patterson)

Throughout the 70s and the 80s Wenders enjoyed what he described as a special relationship to his entire body of work through exclusive rights to them via his production company Wim Wenders Produktion. When the market shifted to digital in the early 2000s Wenders lost the company along with the ownership of all he had produced — over 50 films were redistributed into private hands.

It was through the substantial loss of influence over his own work that the director was confronted with the problematics of ownership, and eventually came to realize that a foundation was its ideal form. A foundation such as Wenders’ allows “the films to own themselves — no one personally owns them”, it provides a structure meant to outlive the original creators, with all revenues directed back into the productions. With the revenues of his foundation Wenders was able to buy back the rights to all of his lost films and began funding what are now 17 restorations in 4K (so far!).

On his role in the restorations he observed that:

The “downhill” of which he spoke was illustrated through his tale of the long-term damage inflicted on the original 16mm black and white negative of Alice in the Cities (Wim Wenders, 1974, Germany) and the journey of restoring it with both old and new visions for the film in mind. He recollected of himself and his filmmaking team at the time the project was completed in 1973 that “we were naive and young, we didn’t know anything about preservation, so if we had a film finished we were happy and we thought that was it and then, we made prints (small wry chuckle) and tried to distribute the film in the world.” For the following decade around 120 prints were made from that one original negative.

Needless to say, by the early 80s the negative was chewed to shreds. From it a duplicate 35mm interpositive was created for further printing purposes. Wenders lamented that this only served to augment the extensive damage to the film to the point that he no longer recognized it nor wanted it shown out of shame for its marred images.

When the foundation took it on for digital restoration in 2014, the original negative of Alice in the Cities was the most damaged material employees of the foundation had worked with so far. Wenders emphasized again and again how incredibly compromised the negative was and how challenging it was to revive it to something he accepted. Due to the extensive physical damage of the material the project required tedious manual repair work spanning over 120,000 frames prior to scanning. From the presentation it could be gathered that the damages included many torn frames, scratches, broken perforations, and other heavy alterations that obscured parts of the image, though he did not go into specific detail.

Before and After Stills from Alice in the Cities (1974) (Credit: Britt Patterson)

Once scanned, the film underwent digital repair and color grading. Wenders described this neck of the project as maintaining a balance between correction and the original aesthetics of the film: he was wary of making the finished version too sharply digital in appearance, and preferred maintaining the glow of 16mm grain and the frame hairs captured in the first print. He chose to make some new changes, such as the removal of all cue marks — which he seemed to despise, describing them as a “massacre” that no one needs to see in a digital projections.  And finally, at the tail end of the restoration he had the film re-framed in the dimensions he and his DOP had bitterly wished for during the original 16mm filming and resulting 4:3 projections: 1:66. The film was scanned, restored, and re-framed in 1:66 by ARRI Berlin.

Before and After stills from Alice in the Cities (1973) (Credit: Britt Patterson)

As another, quite different example of the foundation’s work Wenders described the intricate audio reworking required to save one of his early films. The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (Wim Wenders, 1972, Germany) was only Wenders’ second full-length feature when he shot it in 1972. In his self-described naivety as a young filmmaker, he filled scenes with his pick of songs from impossibly famous names in classic rock: Elvis, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Van Morrison, to list a few:

“I had, as innocent as I was, used everything I liked; nobody had told me in film school that you had to pay!”.

When it came time to finish the project and distribute the film internationally (to his surprise it had been well-received in Germany and was in demand elsewhere), he realized that he could not move forward without the unaffordable rights clearances for the music. By the time this became apparent he had only the finished magnetic mono mix track from which it was impossible to alter or extract the offending songs. The film as he described it “was dead, and stayed dead for a long time.”

Since re-acquiring the rights to his films Wenders had always made it a priority to see what could be done about saving The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. Though even with the resources of the foundation, purchasing the rights for each song was still astronomically expensive. Even more complicated, a majority of the tracks were under dialogues in the film, making any attempt at removing them near impossible without mutilating the overall sound. Although Van Morrison gave the rights to use “Gloria” (Them, 1964, UK), which plays throughout many scenes, there were still many tracks under dialogue. One particularly troubling point was the Elvis song “Good Luck Charm,” as it was used in a portion of the film in which it mingled with many other sounds and would have been impossible to eliminate without cutting the scene entirely. As a solution Wenders and a team of audio restorers carefully substituted a re-recorded version of the song into the film.

The challenge was for the substitute song to replicate as closely as possible the tone of Elvis’ version. In order to accomplish this the replacement song was recorded strictly on analogue material from the 1960s under original recording room circumstances. The new song copied the beat of the original one down to the last millisecond so as to line-up with the rest of the audio. Integrating it into the film involved a complex kind of “audio painting” for which Ansgar Frerich (whom Wenders referred to as “his ears”)  of Die BASIS BERLIN post-production company used a software to manipulate the various layers of original and new sound. Here is Mr. Frerich outlining the process:

Following his description of the painstaking and heroic audio re-working of The Goalie’s Anxiety, Wenders shared some details from the ongoing restoration of his well-known 1987 film Wings of Desire (1987, Germany). As the story of this project so far deserves a spotlight of its own, please check back in the next coming weeks for a short piece on what the director had to share, including anecdotes about working with the great Henri Alekan as DOP and unique characteristics of the original material that made its beautiful photography possible but digital scanning a challenge.

In closing, Wenders offered a characterisation of the lives of films that warmed this little archivist’s heart, and I’ll leave you with that:

For further information on the Wim Wenders Stiftung, consult their website at:

http://wimwendersstiftung.de/en/