A peek at our upcoming SOLOMON KING restoration.

While the preservation/restoration efforts done by the Cinémathèque suisse are beautiful, there are limits to what can be done in a purely analog workflow. Their preservation efforts provided us with a spectacular source element to use for our final digital restoration work. This shot is an excellent example of damage that simply could not be fixed without digital tools.

Deaf Crocodile is currently working on a new restoration of John Carpenter’s explosive 1976 urban action classic ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 in collaboration with the film’s executive producer Joseph Kaufman. Utilizing the original 35mm camera negative and sound elements, this pristine and painstaking restoration will be the first-ever 4K version of the film available. ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, 1976, 90 min. Dir. John Carpenter. This stark modern homage to Howard Hawk’s RIO BRAVO updates the action with a youth gang attacking a closing police station in a blighted ghetto neighborhood. Rapid-fire banter flies fast and furious between charismatic convict Darwin Joston and policewoman Laurie Zimmer as the faceless, virtually supernatural marauders attack. This remains one of Carpenter’s most effective pictures, an edge-of-your-seat thriller that put him on the map as an imaginative, creative force to be reckoned with.

It's not often you get a chance to literally side-by-side compare your work with others. One of our clients had an associate who was unhappy with work done elsewhere. Our client suggested they contact us, and see if we could help them out. We were given the other company's final work, as well as the raw scans. There wasn't the budget to have us redo everything from scratch so we mostly used the previous company's output as our base element, but for this shot we went back to the raw scan as the client had specifically asked them to retain the vignetting of the original scan - and as you can see they didn't.

A work in progress. 4K scans from OCN. Unrestored audio.

One of the greatest achievements in recent art house cinema and a seminal work of “slow cinema,” Sátántangó, based on the book by László Krasznahorkai, follows members of a small, defunct agricultural collective living in a post-apocalyptic landscape after the fall of Communism who, on the heels of a large financial windfall, set out to leave their village. As a few of the villagers secretly conspire to take off with all of the earnings for themselves, a mysterious character, long thought dead, returns to the village, altering the course of everyone’s lives forever. Shot in stunning black-and-white by Gábor Medvigy and filled with exquisitely composed and lyrical long takes, Sátántangó unfolds in twelve distinct movements, alternating forwards and backwards in time, echoing the structure of a tango dance. Tarr’s vision, aided by longtime partner and collaborator Ágnes Hranitzky, is enthralling and his portrayal of a rural Hungary beset by boozy dance parties, treachery, and near-perpetual rainfall is both transfixing and uncompromising. Sátántangó has been justly lauded by critics and audiences as a masterpiece and inspired none other than Susan Sontag to proclaim that she would be “glad to see it every year for the rest of [her] life”. Sátántangó is being restored in 4K from the original 35mm camera negative by Arbelos in collaboration with The Hungarian Filmlab. The new restoration is slated for theatrical release in 2019, with a digital release and special edition Blu-ray to follow. #36 on the Sight & Sound / British Film Institute’s Critic’s Poll of the 100 Greatest Films Ever Made. Order the blu-ray here: https://bit.ly/30Ain4h

Long unavailable in the U.S., director Toshio Matsumoto’s shattering, kaleidoscopic masterpiece is one of the most subversive and intoxicating films of the late 1960s: a headlong dive into a dazzling, unseen Tokyo night-world of drag queen bars and fabulous divas, fueled by booze, drugs, fuzz guitars, performance art and black mascara. No less than Stanley Kubrick cited the film as a direct influence on his own dystopian classic A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. An unknown club dancer at the time, transgender actor Peter (from Kurosawa’s RAN) gives an astonishing Edie Sedgwick/Warhol superstar-like performance as hot young thing Eddie, hostess at Bar Genet — where she’s ignited a violent love-triangle with reigning drag queen Leda (Osamu Ogasawara) for the attentions of club owner Gonda (played by Kurosawa regular Yoshio Tsuchiya, from SEVEN SAMURAI and YOJIMBO). One of Japan’s leading experimental filmmakers, Matsumoto bends and distorts time here like Resnais in LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, freely mixing documentary interviews, Brechtian film-within-a-film asides, Oedipal premonitions of disaster, his own avant-garde shorts, and even on-screen cartoon balloons, into a dizzying whirl of image + sound. Featuring breathtaking black-and-white cinematography by Tatsuo Suzuki that rivals the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, FUNERAL PARADE offers a frank, openly erotic and unapologetic portrait of an underground community of drag queens. Whether laughing with drunken businessmen, eating ice cream with her girlfriends, or fighting in the streets with a local girl gang, Peter’s ravishing Eddie is something to behold. “She has bad manners, all she knows is coquetry,” complains her rival Leda – but in fact, Eddie’s bad manners are simply being too gorgeous for this world. Her stunning presence, in bell-bottom pants, black leather jacket and Brian Jones hair-do, is a direct threat to the social order, both in the Bar Genet and in the streets of Tokyo. A key work of the Japanese New Wave and of queer cinema, FUNERAL PARADE is being beautifully restored in 4k from the original 35mm camera negative and sound elements for re-release in June 2017.