Christopher Nolan’s Grand “Unrestoration” of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY opens August 31 at AFS Cinema
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY’s new 4K unrestoration opens at AFS Cinema on Friday, August 31. Get tickets.
Few movies can top both the lists of best movies made of all time and most boring movies of all time. A work of art must have greatness in it – a la “Moby Dick” – to produce such a polarity of opinion. It’s likely that many of those heretical people who find 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY boring have never seen it properly projected on the big screen and Christopher Nolan is trying to change that.
Christopher Nolan—an avid fan of 2001 ever since his father took him to see it at the age of seven—has been working alongside Warner Brothers to “un-restore” one of the most divisive films ever made.
What is an “un-restoration” exactly? Unlike many modern restorations which tinker or even correct past “mistakes,” Nolan wanted the exact opposite of a restoration, to return the film to the way it was projected back in 1968, the way he remembered it as a child.
Warner Brothers had begun the process of restoring the film in 1999, making interpositives (film stock that is essential in going from an original camera negative to a final print) from the original camera negative. Soon after seeing the major costs to restore a project like this, they put it on hold, leaving the reels in a Burbank storage facility where they’d wait until Nolan picked up the project.
Under the supervision of Nolan, the film lab began work on a deep clean of the film, spending six months polishing the fifty year old negative and fixing any past mistakes on the reel. Then using Kubrick’s original notes, Nolan’s DUNKIRK cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, and a complex method of color correction to revamp the faded negative, the so-called “un-restoration” began.
“None of what we did was interpretive,” Nolan claimed to The LA Times, further solidifying his idea that the best way to see a massive movie such as 2001, is exactly the way it was seen fifty years ago now, projected onto the big screen.
Nolan is not against the benefits of digital technology in restorations, but he still has a fondness for the power of projection, emphasizing the power of understanding that “the same shadows the filmmaker saw are the ones you watch” in the theater.
And while 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY was a childhood favorite for him, he urges audiences that it’s not about nostalgia, instead it’s the value of understanding a totally different way of watching a movie, one that is in danger of being lost.
The 4k presentation of Christopher Nolan’s “unrestoration” of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY comes to the AFS Cinema this September. You can find showtimes and tickets here.
- Contributed by Claire Hardwick
