Restoring the image of Mr Hulot
Why restore Mr Hulot’s Holiday?
Over the years, exhibition prints have circulated widely, the internegatives and intermediate elements have been worn by excessive printings. Apart from the restoration of Mr Hulot’s Holiday, the aim of this project is to produce preservation master elements for long-term conservation and to make the film available to the widest possible audience in high-quality release prints. The restored version of Mr Hulot’s Holiday reflects the picture and sound as Jacques Tati conceived them.
The different versions of Mr. Hulot’s Holiday
In 1951, Jacques Tati began the shooting of Mr Hulot’s Holiday, his second feature film, two years after Jour de Fête. Refusing to take the easy way out and despite the success of his first film, Tati decided not to bring back his comic hero, the postman, despite the character’s popularity. Thus was born the distracted Monsieur Hulot, in 1951, who would quickly enjoy an international success. Over the years, however, Tati re-edited his film for three major commercial re-releases. The film was first released in 1953. Then, in the early 60s, Tati re-edited the film, cutting out shots and extending others. He had Alain Romans’ score re-orchestrated and overhauled the music and sound mixing. It was at this point that he also added the final color shot of the stamp and postmark, indicating the postman’s invisible hand. Later, in 1977, a delighted new generation discovered the film. Encouraged by this new success and inspired by Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, Tati shot new footage on the beach at St-Marc-sur-Mer, which he then cut into the last version in 1978.
The camera negative
Fortunately, the restoration of Mr Hulot’s Holiday was made possible thanks to the availability of the film’s master element: the camera negative. In the wake of the film’s various versions and the addition of the visual effects, the camera negative — a blend of mostly nitrate film stock and acetate film stock – endured re-cutting and re-splicing in the course of a creative process covering more than 25 years.
Feared because of its highly flammable nature, nitrate film stock (nitrocellulose) was used from the origins of motion pictures in the late 1890s until the mid 1950s when it stopped being manufactured. Mr Hulot’s Holiday was made during this historic transitional period. Unfortunately, in France, it is against the law to project nitrate film prints but in the United States, a handful of film archives still offer the possibility of seeing them on the cinema screen. Few people today can claim to have enjoyed the actual sensory experience of a nitrate film print – its singular texture and the warmth of its pictures! Yet apart from its excellent physical properties, one of the major qualities of nitrate film resides in its photographic capacities, its luminosity and rich visual quality.
Before and after restoration
The restoration of Mr Hulot’s Holiday: objectives and challenges
In order to protect the camera negative, it was crucial to have it restored manually by the Preservation Department of Technicolor North Hollywood. Their expertise revealed how the negative was riddled with splices as well as a multiple grading notches on the edges of the film, which made it difficult to put it through the printer. To cope with these technical defects, a contact printer was calibrated and adjusted so as to stabilize the image in the gate during its printing.
The interpositive made, it was scanned to assemble the complete cut of the film with the addition of the opening credits and the insertion of the final shot, the only color shot. Documentation and analysis of available sources showed how there were different versions possible for this final shot (appearance of stamps and postmarks, one after the other or simultaneously, montage with or without fade to black). The accounts of Pierre Etaix in particular contributed to defining the appropriate sequence. This element was in poor condition, making it impossible to include it in the final cut. Only digital tools allowed us to recreate this shot punctuated by a fade and to reproduce the stamp’s original sheen. All the digital work was done and supervised by Tom Burton at Technicolor Digital Services in Burbank, California, one of the labs capable of carrying out this kind of complex restoration, equipped as it is with high-performance digital platforms to deal with specific film damage.
It was indeed this question of balance between photochemical and digital procedures that had to be dealt with. In the case of Mr Hulot’s Holiday, a major part of the restoration involved the improvement or toning down of the transitions between shots. Physically, these transitions are consistent with the editing splices which, when printed and scanned, sometimes created distortions in the image or the splice bumps. As for the fades to black, the digital tool certainly helped improve the smoothness of these effects which facilitated the narrative flow of the film.
Morever, the restoration of Mr Hulot’s Holiday reconstituted the panchromatic harmony of the colors of summer. The nitrate base of the picture negative played a dominant role in preserving the original tones of the black and white movie. The grading by Tim Peeler, a master in matters of black and white movies, allowed us to restore the rich range of grays that illuminate Mr Hulot’s summer days at the seaside.
