{"id":643,"date":"2014-12-08T23:14:58","date_gmt":"2014-12-09T04:14:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=643"},"modified":"2020-12-06T21:24:34","modified_gmt":"2020-12-07T02:24:34","slug":"kongo-lessons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=643","title":{"rendered":"Kongo Lessons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Yp0mbhZdI6k\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><br \/>\nRestoration Demo for <em>King of the Kongo<\/em> (it looks even cooler in HD!)<\/center>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Some of you may not be aware that I\u2019m in the midst of restoring <i>The King of the Kongo<\/i> (1929), which is the first sound serial ever made.\u00a0 You\u2019d think that people would be happy that I\u2019m doing it, but I get frequent complaints about it, and a lot of questions.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to answer some of these today.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q1: Why are you restoring a serial that\u2019s bad and the prints aren\u2019t great?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A: Because it\u2019s bad and the prints aren\u2019t great.\u00a0 The archives weren\u2019t interested in this one.\u00a0 I tried.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t care.\u00a0 They probably shouldn\u2019t care, either, because part of their job is triage. \u00a0I think it&#8217;s important\u2014it\u00a0<em>is\u00a0<\/em>important\u2014it&#8217;s just that there are a lot of films in worse shape that are in line ahead of it, so I&#8217;m doing this myself.<\/p>\n<p>The bottom line is that I knew that if I didn\u2019t restore it, then no one would, and I knew where all the elements were, so I wanted to get it done while we could.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q2: Is the whole serial sound?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A: The serial is part silent and part talkie.\u00a0 The trade papers are a little confused about this, so I can\u2019t prove this theory.\u00a0 The trades at the time announced <i>The King of the Kongo <\/i>as being available in silent and sound versions.\u00a0 There\u2019s even an announcement that the silent version is finished and they\u2019re starting on the talkie version.\u00a0 But there\u2019s no mention that I can find anywhere of the serial being played without sound.\u00a0 I suspect that there was only a sound version released, and that is part silent (with synchronized music and effects) with one scene per reel with synchronized dialogue.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q3: What survives on the serial?\u00a0 Are you restoring the whole thing?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A: The entire picture exists.\u00a0 There were 21 reels initially and we have 10 reels of the sound.\u00a0 That\u2019s a little less than half of the original sound that survives.\u00a0 Of those, Chapters 5, 6 and 10 exist with complete sound.\u00a0 Three other chapters have one reel of sound with the other still being lost (each chapter is two reels and hence two discs of sound.)<\/p>\n<p>I restored Chapter 5 with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kickstarter.com\/projects\/1622418422\/king-of-the-kongo-film-and-sound-restoration\">Kickstarter<\/a> funds, Chapter 10 with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.filmpreservation.org\/about\/PR-2013-09-18\">National Film Preservation Foundation<\/a> funding, and Chapter 6 is being done now.\u00a0 For all three Chapters, I owe thanks and funding support to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.silentclowns.com\/\">Silent Cinema Presentations, Inc<\/a>. (There&#8217;s a lot of drama about how Silent Cinema saved my bacon in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=364\">previous blog installments<\/a>.) \u00a0I may go back and restore the the picture for the rest of the episodes and drop in the sound for those parts that survive.\u00a0 The complete chapters that survive have been archived to film.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q4: This is the digital age.\u00a0 Why waste money on film?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A: The restorations were done digitally and archived on film because film never crashes and goes beep when you turn it on.\u00a0 Film is archival.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q5: Are you going to put this on YouTube?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A: No.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q6: Will it be available on Blu-Ray?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A: I hope so.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q7: A friend of mine told me that UCLA has 35mm prints of this serial and so you\u2019re wasting your time on this bad print you\u2019re restoring.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A: I hear this rumor all the time.\u00a0 You know what I did about it?\u00a0 I contacted UCLA.\u00a0 You know what they told me?\u00a0 They have a 16mm print, just like mine and it\u2019s under a donor restriction, so I couldn\u2019t access it anyway.\u00a0 There is one more print in the US that I\u2019ve heard about in private hands, and I couldn\u2019t access that.\u00a0 There\u2019s another 16mm print in France that\u2019s not better than mine.\u00a0 There\u2019s a partial 35mm in an unnamed US archive that\u2019s also under donor restriction, meaning we can\u2019t get to it.\u00a0 So that\u2019s it, folks.\u00a0 I contacted the donors for permission and they said no.<\/p>\n<p>You want footwork to find the best materials?\u00a0 I did it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q8: It\u2019s frustrating to watch a serial a chapter at a time and then out of sequence.\u00a0 Why don\u2019t you wait until you find all the sound and restore it then?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A: Because we may never find all of the sound.\u00a0 And right now, we\u2019re at a point where I can sync the sound and picture with the help of some people I know.\u00a0 Later on that might not happen.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q9: Why did you restore Chapter 10 and then Chapter 6?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A: Because we found the complete sound for Chapter 6 after Chapter 10 was already underway.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q10: There\u2019s a whole group of people who do serial restorations who are spreading bad rumors about you.\u00a0 Do you hate them?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A: No.\u00a0 I can\u2019t hate people who do restorations.\u00a0 I contacted those people some time ago, offered to pool resources, and was told to go away.\u00a0 So I went away.\u00a0 They were convinced that they could do a better restoration than I could do, and that they knew where all the sound discs were.\u00a0 To date, they have not done a restoration.\u00a0 I would still be happy to pool resources with them.\u00a0 I feel that films should be restored from the best elements.\u00a0 If they know where better materials are (and they might exist in private hands), then I\u2019m willing to help.\u00a0 I suspect that the elements they thought were complete were the same incomplete ones that I found in private hands, and I bought them so I could do my restoration.\u00a0 But I would still help them if they asked.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q11: I heard that Library of Congress has all the sound discs.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A: I heard that too.\u00a0 I asked them, and I contacted the film people and the audio people.\u00a0 Do you know what they told me?\u00a0 They don\u2019t have them.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q12: Does this look better than the DVD that I bought of this?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A: You bet it does.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q13: The DVD I bought is silent with music, but has long stretches with no titles.\u00a0 Is your music the same?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A: You have the sound version missing the dialogue track.\u00a0 About half of each episode was silent with intertitles.\u00a0 The remaining half had dialogue. The music on your DVD is patched in later to go with the action.\u00a0 The original score by Lee Zahler is on the discs, plus dialogue in all those long stretches with no titles.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q14: I heard a rumor that you may start a Kickstarter program to release a Blu-Ray.\u00a0 That seems kind of crooked to me, since you got grant money to do the restorations.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>A: I got grant money to do the <i>lab work <\/i>for the restorations. The lab work (scanning, track re-recording, and digital film out) was covered.\u00a0 All the by-hand work (sync, image restoration, etc.) was free.\u00a0 And we\u2019d need to do that work on the 7 chapters that still need their picture restored.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q15: Did you learn anything of historical significance while you were restoring the serial?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Yes, some.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nitrateville.com\/viewtopic.php?f=3&amp;t=15834\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Ben Model\u2019s undercranking theories<\/a> are borne out here.\u00a0 The silent sequences are shot at about 21-22 fps and then played back at 24.\u00a0 The actors haven\u2019t adjusted to this yet, so they\u2019re still playing slower for 21-22 which makes the dialogue deadly slow.\u00a0 Once again, we see that audiences in the silent days were used to seeing films played back slightly faster than they were shot.<\/p>\n<p>This film has some very interesting set design and some interesting lighting, almost expressionistic.\u00a0 It\u2019s mostly lost in the prints we see today.<\/p>\n<p>Despite the fact that the film has that deadly 1929 slow pacing, I note that director Richard Thorpe has put some interesting touches in it.\u00a0 There\u2019s a long shot in which Robert Frazier is tailed by Lafe McKee and William Burt.\u00a0 It\u2019s staged to show off the set and so that we get a sense of distance between McKee and Frazier, but it\u2019s all done in one shot with no cutting.\u00a0 There\u2019s not a second where nothing is happening onscreen, but it\u2019s done very economically.<\/p>\n<p>Mascot used black slugs (pieces of leader) to resynchronize shots that had drifted out of sync.\u00a0 I\u2019ve seen this in <i>The Devil Horse<\/i> (1931), <i>The Whispering Shadow<\/i> (1933) and <i>The Phantom Empire<\/i> (1935).\u00a0 I could have taken them out, but it\u2019s part of the Mascot \u201cfeel\u201d and \u201chistory,\u201d so I left them in.\u00a0 There are several in Chapter 10.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a little throwaway line in which Lafe McKee refers to Robert Frazier as \u201cblack boy.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s 1929 racism.\u00a0 I left it in (you probably wouldn\u2019t have noticed if I\u2019d cut it.)<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q16: You were talking about donor restrictions.\u00a0 Do you mean that the donor of the film restricted access to the films after donating them?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s exactly what I mean.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q17: You mean that we spend taxpayer money housing and cooling films that the donors won\u2019t let us see?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I do mean that, yes.\u00a0 And that\u2019s the topic of another blog post.\u00a0 Remember, I don\u2019t make the rules.\u00a0 I just live with them.<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Restoration Demo for King of the Kongo (it looks even cooler in HD!)&nbsp; Some of you may not be aware that I\u2019m in the midst of restoring The King of the Kongo (1929), which is the first sound serial ever made.\u00a0 You\u2019d think that people would be happy that I\u2019m doing it, but I get &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/?p=643\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Kongo Lessons&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"powered_cache_disable_cache":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,207],"tags":[35,34,36],"class_list":["post-643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dr-films-pocket-rants","category-film","tag-boris-karloff","tag-king-of-the-kongo","tag-restoration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=643"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1901,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions\/1901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}