Date: Thu, 3 May 2012 15:58:32 +0100
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[log in to unmask]Subject: Reply: Assistance for the colleagues in Doha?
To:
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The recent BFI re-release was on 2K DCP only, not 35mm.
When I worked at the NFT/MOMI in the late 80s/early 90s, they did have a 35mm print of
Tokyo Story, but it was unsubtitled, and part of the "360 Classic Films" season, and thus restricted to screening in what was then the MOMI cinema (since renamed NFT3 the last I knew). They may still have that print and the loan conditions may have changed in order to permit its loan to Doha - I don't know. The last time I had dealings with the BFI over print loans
Kathleen Dickson was the contact, but that was over a year ago.
Her best bet is probably to contact
Akira Tochigi at the the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo (phone +81 3 3561 0823, but you will probably need to speak Japanese to get past the switchboard). However, being in Qatar, I'm guessing that she'll want an Arabic-subtitled print and I wouldn't have thought the chances of getting one of those would be very high.
As a general observation, if she is not equipped to screen DCPs as yet, she probably needs to make that a priority. 35mm is almost obsolete as a theatrical screening medium (according to the most recent figures I've seen, we're at around 80% conversion in Europe and 70% in North America), international shipping costs for 35mm prints are huge (up to £1.5k for long haul air freight), and archives are likely to impose ever more stringent film handling and projection standards as film stock and lab supply manufacturing winds down, and thus the replacement of damaged prints becomes firstly more expensive, and then impossible.
We've already reached this stage with 70mm mag prints: because there is no facility left in the world that can magstripe 70mm print stock (the chemistry needed to do it has now been banned in both the EU and the US, thanks to greenie dogma), archives tend now to require a full-scale visit and technical examination of any screening facility that wants to show one, at the venue's expense. I've done several such visits in the last couple of years, and have been in the heartbreaking position of having to recommend to an archive that they do not loan a 70mm print to a certain festival, because there was a significant fault with one of the mag preamp channels that the venue could not afford to get fixed and that, if unfixed, could have damaged the signal on the track. We're going to reach a similar stage with 35mm soon: it won't just be a question of no platters, but of maximum temperature in the gate area, gate pressure calibration, take-up tension calibration, condition of the sproket teeth one each machine etc. all having to be certified as satisfactory before prints will be lent. One major US archive already requires such checks to be made.
I predict that within two years at most, all but a tiny fraction of repertory distribution releases and the majority of archival screening loans will be DCP only if the screening venue wants anything above consumer resolution/colour depth (i.e. BD).
Leo
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