The 15-and-a-half-hour epic Berlin Alexanderplatz was scanned at Arriscan’s 2K mode to prepare for a digital intermediate and blow-up of the 16mm negative to 35mm.

World cinema's pantheon of narrative masterpieces has been expanded to include a 16mm production: Berlin Alexanderplatz. But due to its Wagnerian 15-hour, 21-minute running time, R. W. Fassbinder's magnum opus has not been blown up to 35mm. (The distributors estimate the cost at $500,000.) This leaves first-run commercial theaters in a quandary: Rent 16mm projection equipment or forget the whole thing. The theater I attended found it difficult to keep the right and left sides of the screen focused at the same time.” — The Independent, December 1983.

I wrote this in an early article about Super 16 at a moment when VHS and Betamax were at war, CDs had just appeared, and indie filmmakers were investigating alternatives to 35mm. (DVDs were 15 years in the future.) In that ancient time, there were just two options for theatrical release: 16mm and 35mm — and 16mm wasn't much of an option at all. That theater in 1983, the Lincoln Plaza, was top-shelf, located across from Lincoln Center — yet it had to rent small, portable 16mm projectors for the occasion. Which is why I was writing about Super 16 as an answer to better 35mm blow-ups.

In the same 1983 article, I also mentioned a new Super 16 production underway in Florida: A Flash of Green, directed by Victor Nunez and starring a young Ed Harris. It was later successfully blown up to 35mm at New York's DuArt Film Lab, then an indie mecca for blow-ups, and released theatrically in 1985. As fate would have it, last November, I was at Goldcrest Post New York as master colorist John Dowdell put the finishing touches on a new 2K digital intermediate of A Flash of Green, scanned from the original Super 16 on Goldcrest's Arriscan film scanner for output to 35mm. In other words, a digital restoration of what once had been achieved optically.

Full disclosures: In the late 1970s, I ran DuArt's optical printing operation. My successor and fellow former Cornell filmmaker, Tim Spitzer, later supervised the blow-up of A Flash of Green among other indie milestones. Spitzer is presently the managing director of Goldcrest Post New York.

Spitzer and I, therefore, are extraordinarily well acquainted with A Flash of Green — as well as a 1979 Nunez film shot in standard 16mm, Gal Young 'Un, also optically blown up to 35mm at DuArt. Last fall, at the behest of IFC Films, which has undertaken restoring these early 1980s indie classics, Goldcrest scanned the original 16mm negative or A&B rolls of each and reassembled them both as a 2K DI. Needless to say, the Arriscan results were spectacular.

What's not to like about pin registration, perfect flat-field resolution, no contrast build-up, and no generational loss? In tandem with Goldcrest's Quantel iQ 2K for editorial/effects and Pablo for color correction, Arriscan consigns venerable liquid-gate optical printers such as DuArt's to the scrapheap. I think it's accurate to say that Spitzer, Dowdell, Nunez, and I — graying veterans of film post, all — found ourselves astounded at the prowess of today's DI (more on Arriscan below).

My larger point is this: In an ideal world free of financial constraints, all 16mm and Super 16 — not to mention 16mm film classics — would be reproduced and preserved in this manner. But there remains that vexing little issue of big DI costs, which refuses to go away. When I learned last year that all 15 hours-plus of Berlin Alexanderplatz had been scanned to a 2K DI and reproduced as 35mm for the first time ever, I had to pick my jaw off the floor.

There have been many superb digital restorations of cinema masterpieces lately — Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Jacques Demy's Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Sam Fuller's The Big Red One — but none from the vast store of fragile, deteriorating 16mm masterpieces. In this, IFC Films and Goldcrest Post are pioneers, as are the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation and Bavaria Film in partnership with Arri Film & TV and CinePostproduction (both Munich, Germany-based). Financial support came also from New York's Museum of Modern Art and a host of German film funds.

Berlin Alexanderplatz is an adaptation of Alfred Döblin's 1929 James Joyce-like novel set against Weimar, Germany's accelerating vertigo of petty criminality and social disintegration. It is the story of one Franz Biberkopf, a fleshy, disheveled, slow-witted everyman released from prison for killing his girlfriend in a drunken rage. Heartbreakingly played by master actor Günther Lamprecht, Franz is less a monster than a crudely charming lumpenprole of few prospects except the chain of less-than-reputable women who find him irresistible. This being a Fassbinder film, poor Franz could do worse: elegant Hanna Schygulla, Diane Keaton twin Elisabeth Trissenaar, and a young Barbara Sukowa, who brings virginal radiance to one of the great screen performances of all time.

What better film to start this promising trend in 16mm film preservation than Alexanderplatz, which, despite its television debut in serial form — 13 episodes and an epilogue — Fassbinder conceived of as a single work of cinema, arguably the longest film ever made? (Each episode begins, “Ein Film von Rainer Werner Fassbinder.”)

The evolution of Arriscan

Until commercial 2K-4K film scanning came along in the mid-1990s — DuArt, for instance, acquired its Kodak Cineon Genesis Plus in 1996 — nearly all color film was duplicated by means of contact or optical printing, either directly to a film print or to an intermediate low-contrast duplication stock called “interpositive” or “dupe negative.” The introduction of 2K/4K film scanners in tandem with high-resolution film recorders made possible the non-photographic process we now call digital intermediate, initially limited to special effects and scene restoration due to exorbitant costs. The first Hollywood feature to be finished entirely as a DI was the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?, released in 2000.

Early pin-registered scanners were expensive and slow. The first Kodak Cineon Genesis cost $1.5 million. 2K-4K scans by scanners from Oxberry, Imagica, and Quantel took 10 seconds to 15 seconds per frame. By late 1997, even Kodak had bailed out of the scanner/recorder business and thrown its support behind Philips BTS (renamed Thomson, then Grass Valley). Together, they developed the telecine-based Spirit DataCine Film Scanner, capable at its 1996 debut of 2K file transfers at a breezy 6fps to 10fps. O Brother, Where Art Thou? was scanned on a 2K Spirit DataCine. (The legacy of Kodak's Cineon is the widely-used DPX file format, a SMPTE standardization of the original Cineon file format.)

Spirit, a hot-rodded HD telecine, lacked pin registration and was derided for its sub-2K luminance sampling (1,920 pixels horizontally) and subsampling of color at 960 pixels. At IBC 2003, Arri responded with a quantum leap in scanning technology: the Arriscan.

Like the original Cineon, Arriscan provides interchangeable 16mm and 35mm pin-registered gates, but almost every other feature breaks new ground. The light sources are red, green, blue, and infrared LEDs instead of hot xenon or halogen bulbs. Not only does this provide precise separation and control of RGB for better color management, but the infrared LEDs invisibly illuminate dust and scratches (film dyes are transparent to infrared) to create a digital “defect matte” for realtime dust busting and scratch removal without blurring or softening. The underlying algorithms are none other than the latest version of Kodak's outstanding Digital ICE technology, embedded in Arriscan under license. Flaws too large to be automatically corrected are recorded in the defect matte for later manual correction.

Instead of an RGB line-array sensor, Arriscan uses a 2K×3K area-array CMOS sensor, the size of a 35mm film frame. Sound familiar? It's the same sensor used in Arri's D-20 digital cinema camera, minus the Bayer filter. (No color filter is needed because red, green, and blue LEDs are pulsed separately during the exposure of each frame.) Like the D-20, Arriscan actually produces a 3K “oversampled” scan which is then reduced to 2K, enhancing the viewer's sensation of sharpness and detail while eliminating even micro-aliasing.

Similarly, 4K is output from an oversampled 6K scan. To create a 4K×6K scan in the first place, Arriscan uses a remarkable technique called micro-scanning. For each frame of picture, exposure of the CMOS sensor is repeated at two physical positions: normal and with a half-pixel offset horizontally and vertically. Arri uses a second unique dual-exposure technique to extend capture of film's dynamic range. In this technique, each film frame is exposed twice — once at a normal LED brightness and a second time at a much higher brightness. The second exposure better penetrates and reproduces the near-maximum densities of the color negative, which correspond to highlight detail. Victor Nunez's Flash of Green contains a daytime pool scene in which, remarkably, detail can now be seen in the glinting reflections of Florida sunlight off water.

Arriscan's initial 2K scanning speed of 1fps (micro-scanning and dual exposures increase scan time) was hiked to 3fps last year — and this year, a faster 8fps mode was added to enable the use of Arriscan for film dailies. Pin-registered dailies, no less.

Alexanderplatz meets Arriscan

Berlin Alexanderplatz was scanned at Arriscan's 2K mode — widely considered ideal for 16mm (if not 35mm), and more so when images are heavily filtered or diffused. (Notice the four-point, rainbow-like, star filter effects on specular highlights in Biberkopf's flat, which suggests a diffraction grating over the lens — part of the bleary signature look of Berlin Alexanderplatz.) In an exemplary gesture toward cinematographic authorship, the Fassbinder Foundation invited Director of Photography Xaver Schwarzenberger to direct the long and detailed restoration process, from scanning, repair, and DI to 35mm film-out. That's like inviting Michelangelo to oversee the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel.

The 19th-century Alexanderplatz of Döblin's novel was long ago flattened by Allied bombs and replaced by gray East German redevelopment, namely an iconic TV tower and department store. Since I first saw Berlin Alexanderplatz in New York in 1983, Alexanderplatz has further changed. The Berlin Wall is now a memory (I was there when it fell), and Alexanderplatz, no longer off-limits to Westerners, attracts renovation funds and city planners. But thanks to the vision and perseverance of the Fassbinder Foundation, Bavaria Film, Arri, MoMA, and others, Franz Biberkopf and his rathskeller demimonde will live on forever — in focus — in the dank, desperate corners of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Outside Help

While a ready market exists for hit series such as The Sopranos to turn up on rental shelves, bringing R.W. Fassbinder’s German-language TV miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz to a DVD release wasn’t so simple. Produced for and originally shown on German TV in 1980, the 15-and-a-half-hour miniseries was kept from distribution by problems that included missing film negative and rights clearance.

Now, 25 years after the controversial filmmaker’s death, the Criterion Collection release of the multi-disc set this fall brings back a “masterpiece” from “the most brilliant and least conventional filmmaker of his generation,” as The New York Times’ Vincent Canby described the film and filmmaker in a 1983 review written for the original U.S. debut screening.

Originally shot in 16mm over 156 days, it took a transatlantic effort from foundations, the German government, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the efforts of Arri Film & TV to save the television series. We spoke with Juliane Lorenz, credited as chief editor on Berlin Alexanderplatz and a key player in the restoration. Lorenz runs the Berlin-based Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation (RWFF).

(See more on RWFF at www.fassbinderfoundation.de.)

millimeter: Restoring a long, complex miniseries originated on 16mm such as Berlin Alexanderplatz (BA) is unique. How did you plan a postproduction budget?
Lorenz: At the beginning, the budget was not the main focus. We—Xaver Schwarzenberger, the original DP of the film and the artistic leader of the restoration, and I—were aware that we had to get ourselves into the reality of all “possibilities of restorations.” We also decided with the original producers of BA, Bavaria Film [now Bavaria Media], that we want the highest possible quality, and as well a new negative.

For different reasons, we decided to have a new 35mm negative made from the original 16mm. We knew the budget would be bigger than a normal restoration budget of mastering a 35mm film.

We then received positive signs of substantial support from the German Cultural Foundation [Kulturstiftung des Bundes] as well as a promised support from MoMA. We knew we now had to create very precise numbers along with a precise budget.

At the beginning of my restoration researches in 2004—that was begun only after four years of clearing subsidiary rights—we contacted a number of [labs] in Europe and got numbers and different proposals. Bavaria Studios and RWFF had decided to have the best restoration possible, which meant the highest definition for the scan process. After a number of tests from the original 16mm negative, we felt the best result was from a 2K scan made with the Arriscan.

We discussed the project with a restoration expert in Germany, appointed by the Cultural Foundation, who seemed to ask us every possible question. But finally he supported our decision of 2K mastering and the creation of a new 35mm negative via the Arrilaser from the 2K master data.

What was project’s budget? The total amount was [approximately U.S. $1.9 million]. But please don’t forget, that is for a 15-and-a-half-hour-long film! [BA’s total 1980-era production and post budget was US $6 million.]

What materials did you send to Criterion, the DVD producer? Criterion got HD PAL masters on Digi Beta.

–Dan Ochiva

Larry Kardish, senior curator, department of film, the Museum of Modern Art, has long supported Fassbinder’s work. That respect goes both ways. The New York museum’s imprimaturs—and promise to invest in the restoration—was crucial in convincing others of the Fassbinder project’s importance.

"By an American organization committing some funds for the project,” Kardish says, “it signaled to the German authorities that this was work that was highly regarded abroad and part of a cultural legacy which should be supported.”

But floodgates of support won’t necessarily open for other deserving 16mm work held in various archives. “For MoMA, [investment in] Berlin Alexanderplatz is unique,” Kardish says.