The definitive restoration of F.W. Murnau’s silent classic “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans” opened the 40th edition of Italy’s Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival on Saturday, with some 7,000 spectators packing Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore square to catch the 1927 masterpiece accompanied by a new score performed live by the Teatro Comunale di Bologna orchestra.
The San Francisco Film Preserve initiated this 35mm restoration and undertook the 4K digital restoration that allows audiences to view “Sunrise” in a way that very closely resembles its original appearance, nearly a century after the movie became a multiple winner at the first-ever Academy Awards.
“The biggest challenge with [restoring] ‘Sunrise’ is there is no original material; you are working with later generation materials the whole way,” San Francisco Film Preserve president Robert Byrne told Variety.
Despite the loss of the “Sunrise” negatives in a Fox vault fire in the 1930s, they scoured archives around the world to identify the highest quality surviving materials.
“Sunrise” had previously been restored several times, the last one about 20 years ago. “But never with the options that we have now, in terms of actually cleaning the image, removing the dirt and going as far as we can to ethically perfectly restore the film,” Byrne added.
