Tag Archives: Film Scanning

After More Than 30 Years, Ana Mendieta’s Films Are Digitized

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BY NOELLE BODICK | FEBRUARY 03, 2016

Ana Mendieta was just 36 years old when she fell from the window of a New York high-rise apartment in 1985. The Cuban-American artist’s tragic death, and the controversy surrounding its circumstances, have cast a shadow over her legacy from which, more than 30 years and 30 solo exhibitions later, it is still emerging. The obscurity has been particularly deep for one part of that legacy, the artist’s film work. But now Mendieta, best known for her body and earth art, is getting her due as film artist, after an extensive three-year project to digitize her entire filmography.

A show of fifteen of Mendieta’s works in this medium — nine of them never before seen — will debut this week at Galerie Lelong, in New York. These are a small sample of the more than 100 artist films she made between 1971, when she was a student at the University of Iowa, and 1981, when she moved on to creating sculptural objects in the studio.

“There are a lot of artists who are known for making films, and she is not usually on those lists just because we hadn’t yet discovered all of these works,” said Mendieta’s niece, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, who is the film archivist for the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection and led the restoration project.

 

“For the next three years, Raquel Cecilia digitized and restored these works at Cinelicious, a boutique lab in LA. A portion of them appear in the exhibition “Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta,”

 

Today based in Los Angeles, Raquel Cecilia was just graduating high school when news of her aunt’s death reached her and her mother, Raquelin Mendieta, who serves as the administrator of the artist’s estate. The young niece already knew that she would go into the arts, like her aunt, and indeed went on to become a filmmaker, earning an MFA from the School of Theater Film and Television at UCLA in 2005. In 2012, while shooting a feature documentary about her aunt (currently in postproduction), she began digging through the Mendieta archive and found never-before-seen filmed pieces in outdated formats: half-inch reel-to-reel video, super 8, 16mm.

For the next three years, Raquel Cecilia digitized and restored these works at Cinelicious, a boutique lab in LA. A portion of them appear in the exhibition “Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta,” which premiered at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis and will travel to Fort Lauderdale’s NSU Art Museum later this month.

The Galerie Lelong show includes some of Mendieta’s earliest works. These reveal a young artist mastering her medium through playful acts and bold experimentation. In one, Mendieta scratches the emulsion of the celluloid film; in another she creates an X-ray film depicting the motion inside her skull; still in another, she increases the contrast to achieve polarized graphic colors.

“But it is also interesting to see how quickly she moved away from that,” Raquel Cecilia said. “When you line up all the films in the filmography, you can see how quickly it progresses from ‘here we are experimenting with the medium’ to ‘here I am’ — here’s Ana’s voice.”

At the University of Iowa, Mendieta also collaborated with school children at Henry Sabin Elementary (where Raquel Cecilia went to kindergarten). One of the resulting films shows a mutating blob in a field whose exact nature is a mystery — one of Mendieta’s landscape works, perhaps? — until a student passes by, and it becomes evident that those are children’s heads bobbing up and down underneath a large tarp.

Within the context of Mendieta’s overall oeuvre, these collaborative pieces and school-day experimentations, along with the other rediscovered filmic pieces, are more illuminating than revolutionary. They do not overturn the established art historical understanding of the artist and her ritualistic works in nature. Rather, they give us a better sense of how Mendieta considered and deployed her technical tool. It’s as if we get a glimpse of a painter learning how to wield a brush and make her mark. “It wasn’t just the dirt and the trees and the landscape. It was also: ‘How are you going to record this?’ And the camera was always in the forefront of her mind,” Raquel Cecilia said. “It is just a different way of thinking about her work.”

 

 

Belladonna of Sadness 4K Restoration Invades Tumblr

Belladonna on Tumblr

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Cinelicious has launched a Tumblr page in support of their new 4K restoration of the 1973 Japanese animated feature Belladonna of Sadness. The page will feature behind-the-scenes looks at the restoration process, including many before-and-after images showing off the amazing beauty that a 4K restoration from original 35mm negative can produce. We’ve selected some of our favorite images from the film featuring the incredible artwork of Kuni Fukai and will be posting them regularly!  Be sure to follow so you don’t miss anything!

ANIME NEWS NETWORK – Cinelicious Pics To Restore Belladonna of Sadness For U.S. Release

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Cinelicious Pics has signed an exclusive deal to restore and distribute the long-unavailable 1973 Japanese animated masterpiece BELLADONNA OF SADNESS, as its first major restoration and re-release. The last film in the groundbreaking Animerama trilogy produced by the godfather of Japanese anime & manga, Osamu Tezuka (METROPOLIS, ASTRO BOY) and directed by his long time collaborator Eiichi Yamamoto, BELLADONNA is a mad, swirling, psychedelic lightshow of medieval tarot-card imagery with horned demons and haunted forests. Never before released in the U.S., BELLADONNA OF SADNESS unfolds as a series of spectacular still watercolor paintings that bleed and twist together like an animated version of Chris Marker’s “La Jetée.” Cinelicious will restore the feature using the original 35mm camera negative and sound elements in anticipation of a 2015 theatrical, VOD, and home video re-release in North America.

Cinelicious Pics, which launched earlier this year, is uniquely positioned to restore film through its parent company Cinelicious. “It took months of negotiations to convince the Japanese rightsholders to entrust us with the original camera negative of the film which we’re restoring in-house,” says Cinelicious Pics’ President Paul Korver. “People will be simply blown away by the wild, hallucinatory images and soundtrack,” he adds. “BELLADONNA OF SADNESS belongs on a short list with Rene Laloux’s FANTASTIC PLANET and Ralph Bakshi’s WIZARDS as one of the trippiest animated films ever conceived,” adds Cinelicious Pics’ EVP of Acquisitions & Distribution Dennis Bartok. “This is a major rediscovery – and I have to give credit to Hadrian Belove at The Cinefamily here in L.A. for bringing the film to our attention.”

An innocent young woman, Jean (voiced by Katsutaka Ito) is savagely assaulted by the local lord on her wedding night. To take revenge, she makes a pact with the Devil himself (voiced by Tatsuya Nakadai, from Akira Kurosawa’s RAN) who appears as an erotic sprite and transforms her into a black-robed vision of madness and desire. The film is fueled by a Japanese psych rock soundtrack by Masahiko Sato. The deal was negotiated by Cinelicious Pics’ President Paul Korver, President of Business Affairs Kristine Blumensaadt and EVP Dennis Bartok with Japanese rightsholders Gold View Co. and Mushi Productions.

Cinelicious Pics brings handpicked, delicious cinema to U.S. audiences for the first time via theatrical release, VOD, Blu-Ray and 4K Television. The company’s current slate includes GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE, METALHEAD, GANGS OF WASSEYPUR, and Josephine Decker’s BUTTER ON THE LATCH and THOU WAST MILD & LOVELY. Key ingredients include an eclectic mix foreign and independent features & docs plus 4K-restored art house and cult classics, lovingly brought to pristine viewing quality by sister post & digital restoration studio Cinelicious.

Cinelicious Puts Film First For Three Sundance Premiere Projects

Cinelicious is excited to have contributed post services for three Sundance 2014 premiere films, Michael Tully’s Ping Pong Summer, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, and Jeff Preiss’ Low Down, all shot on 16mm and 35mm film.

“Film is alive and well even at the independent level, and we are excited to have worked three films included in this year’s Sundance line-up, including the US Dramatic Cinematography Award winner Low Down” says Cinelicious’ Paul Korver. “If you look at the award winning films each year, overwhelmingly they are shot on film. It’s a great validation of the enduring beauty of celluloid.”

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POST MAGAZINE: Picture and Sound Restoration

Cinelicious (www.cinelicious.tv), in Hollywood and Santa Monica, is restoring 458 half-hour episodes of Death Valley Days, the syndicated western series, which aired from 1952-1970 and was introduced by a number of iconic western figures, including Ronald Reagan (1964-1965). The show was sponsored by US Borax Company, and Cinelicious was tasked by its multinational corporate parent, Rio Tinto, with preserving the series’ legacy.

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Cinelicious Provides Frighteningly good Super 8mm DI Scans for SINISTER

Sinister

Super 8 Scans from SINISTER – Click Above to Watch the Trailer



Sinister DP Chris Norr was on a mission – To find the highest quality DI scans for the Super 8 footage in his upcoming feature Sinister, directed by Scott Derrickson and distributed by Summit Entertainment. As part of his research he put up his test footage on every high resolution Super 8mm scanner he could find. In the end Cinelicious combination of technical capability and talent won the job.

Super 8 played a key plot point in the film is when the lead character Ellison Oswalt (played by Ethan Hawke) moves into a new house and discovers some vintage Super 8mm snuff films in the attic. Here’s Chris in his own words from a recent article on the process from ICG magazine “I started researching Super 8 on Sinister, where Ethan Hawke’s character finds this frightening old footage. I was able to shoot Vision 3 stocks, Leica lenses, and get a gorgeous 2K scan at Cinelicious in LA, all for a very reasonable price. It’s cool to be using two format extremes – HD with the ALEXA and Super 8 – in the same movie.”