will this replace “the real McCoy”?
Peter Becker, a partner in Janus Films and Co-President of The Criterion Collection, explaining the effort to bring out of a remastered, 50th anniversary release of the film, “A Hard Day’s Night.”
This is the real deal. There is a thing here that was the piece of film that passed through the camera that the Beatles walked in front of and that’s the piece of film that we are scanning and honoring, but with it come all of the same conditions of age and if this was a thing from the Renaissance, there would be a shrine to this little piece of film. It’s the actual thing. It is the ‘Shroud of Turin’ of whatever it is. It’s what the image is recorded on. It’s the original thing and there’s a sacred quality to that when you’re working with one of the great films and this is a piece of film itself but it also is subject to the same ravages of time that anything else is. In fact, film is very perishable as we well know. You can leave Michelangelo’s David out in the Piazza Della Signoria for 200 years and take it inside later and clean it off and it’s still in pretty good shape, but you can’t leave a can of film out in the sun for an afternoon. (emphasis mine)
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