Return of the sepia

Note: above image not rep­res­ent­at­ive. Well, not wholly rep­res­ent­at­ive, any­way. I’ll get to that in a moment. 

One of the many salutory fea­tures of Warners’ new Blu-ray disc of Gone With The Wind is the spe­cif­ic qual­ity of its res­tor­a­tion, which I believe brings it closer to the ver­sion David O. Selznick signed off on and movie­go­ers swooned over in 1939. As Richard W. Haines notes in his extremely use­ful book Technicolor Movies: The History of Dye Transfer Printing, “Selznick attemp­ted a sepiatone look for two of his pro­duc­tions of the ’30s. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, released in 1937, the entire fea­ture was prin­ted with a sat­ur­ated sepia hue that util­ized few primary colors…For Gone With The Wind, a sim­il­ar sepia look was used in the early sequences of the pre­war South. After the Civil War broke out, the yel­lows and reds were emphas­ized dur­ing the burn­ing of Atlanta scenes. Fleshtones were richly tanned and sat­ur­ated throughout.”

The vari­ous re-releases of GWTW make a mini-history of how not to preserve/restore a film. Haines cites a 1988 Eastmancolor so-called-restoration as “com­pletely inaccurate…printed with ‘cold’ desat­ur­ated fleshtones, dis­tort­ing Selznick’s look.” He also tells of the film being reis­sued in some­thing of a “widescreen” ver­sion: “A 1.66 X 1 mask­ing was used by MGM for their ‘flat” films (includ­ing reis­sues of The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind)…appar­ent grain was increased and sharp­ness decreased when films were cropped and enlarged in this man­ner.” Now ima­gine the dis­aster poten­tial when going into the next step of trans­fer­ring to video…

We live in more enlightened times today, and this new ver­sion of GWTW has more of that sepia feel in the first half than any ver­sion I’ve seen. The above snap­shot from my plasma screen, while abso­lutely less than ideal, con­veys, I think, some of that; as does the below rip from DVD Beaver’s review of the disc.

Selznick’s strategy of chan­ging the film’s col­or scheme after the war, and the con­cur­rent fall of the South, seems almost…meta, does­n’t it? I ima­gine it cer­tainly informed Martin Scorsese’s “Technicolor” muta­tions over nar­rat­ive time in The Aviator.