MEDIA BIZ 227

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The Ancient Law
As part of the Berlinale Classics programme, the 68th Berlin
International Film Festival will be presenting Ewald André
Dupont‘s silent Das alte Gesetz (The Ancient Law, Germany,
1923) as a special screening with live music. The film, digitally
restored under the auspices of the Deutsche Kinemathek,
and accompanied by new music by French composer Philippe
Schoeller, will have its world premiere on February 16, 2018
in the Friedrichstadt-Palast.
The Ancient Law is an important piece of German-Jewish
cinematic history; it contrasts the closed world of an Eastern
European shtetl with the liberal mores of 1860s Vienna, and
tackles the issue of the assimilation of Jews in 19th century
Europe.
The Deutsche Kinemathek undertook the first efforts at reconstructing
the film in 1984, trying to get as close to the original version
as possible, as far as the sources available at the time allowed.
When the original censor’s certificate was later uncovered, containing
the text of the title cards, it would eventually provide the
impetus for renewed research efforts world-wide and finally for a
new, digital restoration.
Das alte Gesetz (The Ancient Law)
Ewald André Dupont, Germany, 1923
World premiere of the digitally restored version
in 2K DCP
Quelle: Deutsche Kinemathek
“With its authentic
set design and an
excellent ensemble
of actors, all captured
magnificently
by cinematographer
Theodor Sparkuhl,
The Ancient Law is an
outstanding example
of the creativity of
Jewish filmmakers
in 1920s Germany“,
says Rainer Rother,
head of the Retrospective
section and
artistic director of the
Deutsche Kinemathek
– Museum für Film
und Fernsehen.
The new music by Philippe Schoeller was commissioned by ZDF/
ARTE. Schoeller gets to the heart of the film with meticulously
composed ensemble music that employs all the techniques of
a modern soundtrack. It consciously establishes some historical
distance to the film itself and uses a tapestry of translucid sounds
to emphasise the visual excellence of the silent classic. The composition
will be performed by the Orchester Jakobsplatz München,
with Daniel Grossmann at the podium.
The new restoration drew upon nitrate prints in five different languages
found in archives in Europe and the US. The text of the
original German title cards was long thought lost. It was not until
the censor’s certificate listing the intertitles was unearthed that the
restoration team from the Deutsche Kinemathek could accurately
reconstruct them, as well as correcting and finalising the editing.
The colour concept was based primarily on two found prints nearly
identical in their colourisation. So this is the first time that a
version corresponding to the 1920s German theatrical release will
be shown, both in its original length, and with the colourisation
digitally restored.
The Berlinale screening marks the start of the film’s tour to several
cities, mainly in Eastern Europe, that were once hubs of Jewish
life, including Vilnius, Budapest, Warsaw, and Vienna. It will also
be shown at the Silent Film Festival in San Francisco.
The restored version will debut on television on February 19, 2018
on the ARTE channel. Simultaneously, absolut MEDIEN will release
a DVD as part of its ARTE EDITION series, containing a wealth of
bonus material on the restoration process.
www.berlinale.de
© NOA
Future Proof Archiving Innovations
Many institutions, including broadcasters and media
library agencies, have come to realize that the race is on
to transfer media to secure archives before replaying of
tapes becomes impossible. However, transferring from
tape is only half the story as many assets were recorded
before proper metadata annotation was introduced and
in many cases the existing information describing archived
content is disjointed and minimal at best.
In response to these needs and in collaboration with
broadcasters, the Vienna based AV digitizing and archiving
specialist NOA GmbH has developed tools to automate
and simplify the process of digitization, storage
and retrieval
of media
content
as well as
appropriate
metadata
annotation
and management.
“Sustainable
long term preservation of media content is guaranteed and
continuous checks for transfer integrity during digitization
ensure that only highest possible quality of audio and video
content is going into the archive”, states Christophe Kummer,
Managing Partner of NOA.
The mediARC system includes the three fundamental areas
of an archive project; metadata (description of the media
content), media storage and conversion, and workflows (controlling,
creating and processing information).
Open Archival Information System (OASIS), a framework
designed to future proof archives, is at the core of NOA’s
database design. Part of its application is the use of open
source resources, especially concerning video encoding, to
ensure that archival content remains accessible for decades
to come; high performance open source video codec FFV1
provides mathematically lossless intra-frame compression
with competitive bit rates while ensuring longevity of archival
content.
“Archive storage is only as good as information retrieval and
there is no point in storing anything if we cannot recover it
later”, says Christophe Kummer. “Metadata is the key to asset
retrieval and NOA has gone to great lengths to make our
database work with many different data types and metadata
standards.”
Integration of QC processes and metadata edit validation
into production workflows is another core feature. Both mediARC
and jobDB provide a highly flexible workflow engine,
which is used for all basic input/output tasks around the archive,
including ingestion and exporting. Therein, workflows
can be adjusted manually to create individual sets of specialized
workflows.
NOA’s systems easily scale to meet the needs of broadcasters
as their libraries and archives expand, either in datacentres
or cloud.
To date, more than 7,000 users worldwide successfully digitized
and archived over 3.3 million hours of legacy video and
audio material using NOA technology, which is installed in
more than thirty international institutions including Austria’s
ORF, Sweden Radio (SRF), Yleisradio Finland (YLS) or Vlaamse
Radio- en Televisieomroep (VRT).
NOA will be exhibiting at CABSAT 2018 (January 14 – 16).
“Our presence at CABSAT 2018 coincides with some important
large-scale projects in the region that will be completed
this year. We’ll be showing our cutting-edge and easy-to-use
archiving innovations”, explains Christophe Kummer.
www.noa-archive.com
MEDIA BIZ