Film Restored – Workshop report “On the restoration of Werner Herzog’s films”

Workshop report “On the restoration of Werner Herzog’s films” with Thomas Bakels (Alpha-Omega digital GmbH) 

In German

In 2012, Thomas Bakels (Alpha-Omega digital GmbH) and Lucki Stipetić (Werner Herzog Foundation) began working together on the digitization and restoration of Werner Herzog’s films. They started with ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God’ (FRG, 1972), ‘Nosferatu the Vampyre’ (FRG, FR, 1979), ‘Woyzeck’ (FRG, 1979), and ‘Fitzcarraldo’ (FRG, 1982), with the films’ cinematographers Thomas Mauch and Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein collaborating on the color grading. One particular challenge, for instance, was transferring the darkly-lit scenes in ‘Nosferatu’ into an appropriate digital color palette. Missing source material also presented hurdles to creating the best possible and most authentic digital versions. They made sure that the digital cinema packages (DCPs) contained audio apart from just the German, and subtitles in various languages. In addition, since 2018, accessible versions of Herzog films have been produced with audio description and subtitles.

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