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Before the outbreak of WWII, George Stevens had already developed into a great filmmaker, a comic master with a lyrical visual sense and an extraordinary sensitivity to changing moods within relationships, one shading into or delicately layering over the next. During the war, Stevens led a Signal Corps film unit through enormous swaths of the European theater—they were present at D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge and the liberation of Dachau. In 1974, when Joseph McBride and Patrick McGilligan asked Stevens how he thought his experience of the war had affected his films, he answered: “It causes a most profound adjustment in your thinking. I don’t suppose I was ever too hilarious again.” He was, after the war, on every possible level, a different kind of filmmaker.

Stevens did indeed set aside humor, but his sensitivity to human affairs only deepened. He shifted to an epic canvas, partly as a way of adapting to changing conditions in Hollywood and the “threat” of television, but more importantly because it afforded him a kind of double perspective. In A Place in the Sun, Shane and Giant, Stevens chose narratives in which contentment and melancholy, fulfillment and tragedy, freedom and entrenched exploitation, abundance of space and human immediacy, communal cooperation and the violent exercise of power always go hand in hand, one always shadowing the other. The many dramatic shifts in scale in those films and the frequent use of the optically-achieved long dissolve as a transitional device embody Stevens’ wider perspective on ever-changing reality. At the level of artistry, spectacle and emotional and thematic complexity, Giant is a peak moment in American cinema.

In 1995, Giant had its first photo-chemical restoration. A vastly improved digital restoration led to the creation of an HD master in 2013. In the decade since, technological developments have led to vastly expanding possibilities in film restoration, which have made the glorious, painstakingly achieved 4K restoration done by Daphne Dentz and Bob Bailey and their team at Warner Bros. possible (the restoration was supported by The Film Foundation and Turner Classic Movies). The restoration will have its big screen premiere tonight as a highlight of the TCM Film Festival (happily in person once again after two years in virtual limbo). Appropriately, the screening will take place on one of the biggest screens left in the country, the TCL Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard.

“We actually over-sample,” said Bailey when I talked with him and Dentz the other day. “We scan on a device that does 6K scanning, 16-bit. We did that to the YCMs (yellow, cyan and magenta separation masters) and the OCN (original camera negative)—which has faded, so we recombined the blue layer for the entire project. Some of the fading in the OCN was so bad that we had to put in the YCM. We did that literally cut to cut. And we were working on opticals for days at a time to make sure that everything was cleaned to a pristine level that you’ve never seen before. There was a lot of movement in opticals in those days, and a natural weave in the film just going through the camera, so now we can stabilize everything. We lock that down.”

The other thing to add,” said Dentz, “is the improvements in the actual tools themselves—Baselight has improved greatly in the management of grain, and we also use Neat, another grain management tool that is able to, on a frame-by-frame basis, manipulate and remove grain in some sections and then add it back and blend it in. So that's happening as well throughout the film. But there's a lot of that work happening on the opticals, which is why I think they look so good.”

“Our goal,” added Bailey, “is to have the exact same experience you would at the movie theatre if you saw the first print ever released. That's our goal.”

“We're purists,” said Dentz, “so we don't want to change the image, the look of the image, the feel of the image. There's a constant dialogue around what to do on every  title—with the colorists, with the scan artists, in this case with Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, and, of course, with George Stevens, Jr.”

I can only repeat what I’ve said before about other figures in the world of restoration: if you love film, whether you know it or not, Daphne and Bob are among your heroes.

- Kent Jones

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GIANT (1956, d. George Stevens)
Restored by Warner Bros. in collaboration with The Film Foundation. Special thanks to George Stevens Jr., Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg.

Martin Scorsese’s nonprofit The Film Foundation is officially launching a free virtual screening room to showcase film restorations. The Film Foundation Restoration Screening Room, which will showcase both foundation restorations as well as those from partners, will launch on Monday, May 9, with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1945 romantic comedy “I Know Where I’m Going!” starring Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey. The restoration was overseen by The Film Foundation and BFI National Archive, in association with ITV and Park Circus.

The film and subsequent titles will be available for a 24-hour window and will feature introductions and conversations with filmmakers and archivists, providing an inside look at the restoration process. The Film Foundation Restoration Screening Room will offer “appointment viewing,” with screenings starting at a set time and available for a limited period, which is unlike other classic streaming options.

The restoration of “I Know Where I’m Going,” which received its world premiere at Cannes Classics last year and U.K. Ppemiere at the BFI London Film Festival last October, was selected by Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones, who serve as co-curators of the Restoration Screening Room. The film will be introduced by Scorsese, and include interviews with Thelma Schoonmaker Powell, “The Souvenir” director Joanna Hogg, Tilda Swinton, and Kevin Macdonald, all of whom count the film among their favorites. The screening is co-presented by Janus Films.

“We’re looking forward to making these beautiful restorations available to a wide audience,” said Martin Scorsese, The Film Foundation’s founder and chair. “Many of these presentations will feature restorations that are rarely seen, with myself and other filmmakers sharing why these films are important, how they have impacted our lives, and why it’s crucial that they be preserved.”

On the streaming side, The Film Foundation currently hosts many of its titles over at the Criterion Channel. Restorations on the streaming platform include “The Broken Butterfly,” “The Red Shoes,” “How Green Was My Falley,” “Ugetsu,” “La Strada,” “Wanda,” and “Mysterious Object at Noon.”

Restoration funding for “I Know Where I’m Going” was provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation with additional support provided by Matt Spick.

The Film Foundation is partnering with Oracle and DelphiQuest to create and power the platform, which will be available online at film-foundation.org/restoration-screening-room. The programming will showcase a broad range of restorations, including classic, avant-garde, independent, documentary, silent and short films from every era, genre, and region of the world. Upcoming monthly presentations include “La Strada,” “Kummatty,” “Detour” and “The Chase,” “Sambizanga,” “One-Eyed Jacks,” “Moulin Rouge” (1952), “Lost Lost Lost,” and more.

Turner Classic Movies is expanding its partnership with The Film Foundation with a multiyear financial commitment to fund education and the restoration of classic movies, it was announced Friday.

The fruits of this relationship will be on full display — in 4K, no less — at next week’s TCM Classic Film Festival with an April 22 screening of a restored version of Giant (1956) at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

At 7 p.m. before the start of the film, TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz will host a conversation with Film Foundation board member Steven Spielberg, executive director Margaret Bodde and George Stevens Jr., whose father won an Oscar for directing the sweeping Texas-set family saga that starred Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean.

Since its launch by Martin Scorsese in 1990, The Film Foundation has restored more than 900 movies. Scorsese and fellow board member Spielberg hand-picked Giant as one of the group’s latest restoration projects, working with the Warner Bros. archives team for a year to complete the process.

“Anything that presumes to call itself ‘Giant’ better have the goods to keep such a lofty promise,” Spielberg said in a statement. “Both [novelist] Edna Ferber and George Stevens far exceeded the title to bring such an epic American story to the big screen, and I’m proud to have been a small part of the restoration team of this classic motion picture.”

The restoration was completed by Warner Bros. Post Production Creative Services: Motion Picture Imaging and Post Production Sound by sourcing both the original camera negatives and protection RGB separation master positives for the best possible image, then color corrected in high dynamic range for the latest picture display technology. The audio was sourced primarily from a 1995 protection copy of the Original Magnetic Mono soundtrack.

The restoration also will be available on HBO Max this year.

“Working with The Film Foundation allows us to preserve these important films for future generations to experience across multiple platforms,” TCM GM Pola Changnon said. “There is so much to learn from classic movies, and we are honored to host the world premiere screening of the 4K restoration of Giant.”

Added Stevens Jr.: “I was with my father during the writing of the Giant screenplay, and he measured films by how they stood the test of time. Giant has more than met that test, and he would be grateful that Steven, Marty, The Film Foundation and Warner Bros. have achieved this brilliant restoration so a new generation can see Giant on the big screen, streaming and Blu-ray.”

I was recently looking at an interview that Dick Cavett did with Billy Wilder around the time of Buddy Buddy, his last movie. At one point, they start discussing WWII, in which Wilder lost his mother, his stepfather and his grandmother, all of whom died in Auschwitz in 1943. “I was here and there was nothing that could be done,” he says, hauntingly. “It’s very strange how people react to all that,” adds Wilder. “A friend of mine told me that he went to see The Diary of Anne Frank, the play. And he went with a young man, not necessarily German—he was European, I think, or maybe American. After the play, my friend said, ‘Would you believe that things like this could happen?’ And the guy just looked at him and said, ‘Well, let’s hear the other side. This is just one man’s perspective. Let’s not rush to judgment.’ How quickly it is forgotten.”

The art of cinema developed in the shadow of two world wars that left whole cities in ruins, millions dead, and many more millions displaced or shattered inside and out. During those years, the movie business developed on the back of the art form, forever knocking on its door, intruding, prodding, strongarming, insisting on its right of ownership. When Lewis Milestone showed the first cut of his adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front to Universal executives, someone in the room wondered about the necessity of the “downbeat ending.” Milestone sarcastically suggested that maybe he could shoot a happy ending where the Germans won.

In the case of All Quiet, the director prevailed. Universal later went ahead with an adaptation of Remarque’s sequel, The Road Back, directed by James Whale. In the middle of production, 60 cast members received a letter from Georg Gyssling, the German Consul, informing them that their future films would not be screened in Germany as a consequence of their involvement in the project. The studio later reshot scenes and watered down the film’s suggestions of impending fascism. In the case of The Road Back, the business won. As an aside, it was later revealed that Gyssling was an American spy, but his cover activity kept references to fascism at a minimum and Jewish-sounding names off of credit rolls for too many years.

The moral urgency of accounting for and struggling to justly represent so much wholesale destruction, from 20 million dead in WWI to over three times that number in WWII to those lost in the many horrors that followed, has been an essential part of the story of cinema. That urgency can be felt at the heart of the art form at its greatest. It’s there in many titles restored over the years by The Film Foundation that have dealt either directly or indirectly with the wars and their aftermaths. These include Milestone’s classic and Whale’s compromised sequel (returned to something close to its original version with the Library of Congress’ 2015 restoration), George Stevens’ adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, Milestone’s A Walk in the Sun, Herbert Kline, Hans Burger and Alexander Hammid’s Crisis: A Film of ‘The Nazi Way,’ Marcel Ophuls’ The Memory of Justice (more about that in the coming weeks) and Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory as well as The Best Years of Our Lives, Jonas Mekas’s Lost Lost Lost and Reminiscence of a Journey to Lithuania, So Ends Our Night (another Remarque adaptation), Visconti’s Vaghe Stella dell’Orsa and Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu.

The heroic spirit of cinema now exists only in the work of individual filmmakers, a few fine threads left from what was once a rope of the greatest tensile strength. The tidal wave of mass-manufactured worldwide entertainment has overwhelmed everything. In common media discourse, the very idea of cinema has been systematically demeaned and sidelined and everything has been reduced to a matter of numbers. Concurrently, the idea of history has been lazily reimagined as malleable, alterable, and censorable. The young man in Wilder’s story would have a lot more company today. And now, we’re in the shadow of another war—or is that an insane revival of the same European war? What is transpiring right now in the Ukraine brings to mind a haunting exchange from the extraordinary 2013 documentary Return to Homs. A young Syrian freedom fighter proclaims victory in the early days of that nation’s uprising and predicts that Assad is finished. Don’t be so sure, cautions the older man he’s talking to, who adds: “These people would sooner drown in their own blood than give up power.” That the comment seems applicable to current circumstances seems blindingly obvious.

But then, when armed conflicts have come to some kind of stopping point, the cinema has often been present as a regenerative force. I have no doubt that it will be there in the Ukraine, probably led by Sergei Loznitsa, maybe invigorated by the spirit of Alexander Dovzhenko’s silent films. It won’t revive the dead, replace severed limbs or rebuild homes, but it will speak from and for the best in us.

- Kent Jones

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ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (1930, d. Lewis Milestone)
Preserved by the Library of Congress with funding provided by The Film Foundation. 

A WALK IN THE SUN (1945, d. Lewis Milestone)
Preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive, in cooperation with the British Film Institute, with funding provided by The Film Foundation. Special thanks to: Schawn Belston, Twentieth Century Fox.

THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (1946, d. William Wyler)
Restored by The Academy Film Archive, The Library of Congress and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

CRISIS: A FILM OF "THE NAZI WAY" (1939, dirs. Herbert Kline, Hans Burger and Alexander Hammid)
Restored by The Museum of Modern Art and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK (1959, d. George Stevens)
Restored by Twentieth Century Fox in collaboration with The Film Foundation.

LOST LOST LOST (1976, d. Jonas Mekas)
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation.

THE MEMORY OF JUSTICE (1976, d. Marcel Ophuls)
Restored by the Academy Film Archive in association with Paramount Pictures and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding provided by the Material World Charitable Foundation, Righteous Persons Foundation, and The Film Foundation.

PATHS OF GLORY (1957, d. Stanley Kubrick)
Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive in cooperation with MGM Studios with funding provided by The Film Foundation and The Hollywood Foreign Press Association. 

REMINISCENCE OF A JOURNEY TO LITHUANIA (1971-72, d. Jonas Mekas)
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from The Film Foundation.

THE ROAD BACK (1937/1939, d. James Whale)
Restored by the Library of Congress in association with UCLA Film & Television Archive, Universal Studios, and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation and the Library of Congress.

SO ENDS OUR NIGHT (1941, d. James Cromwell)
Preserved by George Eastman Museum with funding provided by The Film Foundation. 

UGETSU (1953, d. Kenji Mizoguchi)
Restored by The Film Foundation and KADOKAWA Corporation at Cineric Laboratories in New York. Special thanks to Masahiro Miyajima and Martin Scorsese for their consultation on this restoration. Restoration funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in association with The Film Foundation and KADOKAWA Corporation.

VAGHE STELLA DELL'ORSA (1965, d. Luchino Visconti)
Restoration by Sony Pictures Entertainment in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata, Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee di Venezia and The Film Foundation.