This warning was in reference to Armenian movies that are being digitized by CS Films, cjsc. According to Ruben Gevorgyants, director of the artistic department, CS Films is actively digitizing films, and has digitally remastered ten films thus far.
Before the privatization of HyeFilm, Bagrat Sargsyan, director of Armenia Studios, promised in the press, “Within a year you will see HyeFilm movies digitized – with new quality of color, sound and picture.”
According to Albert Yavuryan, who heads the department of Television and Photography at Khachatur Abovyan Pedagogical University and was the cameraman for many old Armenian movies, it will be impossible to digitize 200 films in the course of one year, since even if there are qualified professionals and high-quality equipment it will take at least a half a month to digitize one movie. In other words, if Bagrat Sargsyan were to keep his promise it would mean spending a day and a half on digitizing each film, one film after another, without interruption.
“It’s very hard to bring movies from Moscow and have them cleared by the customs department, and also Moscow doesn’t give us all the movies, but I think that in one year’s time we’ll have quite a number of new films,” Ruben Gevorgyants said. He said that they plan to preserve 120 out of 200 movies and they are going to digitize them quickly. If we multiply 120 movies by 15 days, it turns out that in order to have high-quality digital movies CS Films will need five years.
The company uses a Da Vinci Resolve digital mastering suite. Zhanna Petrosyan, who operates the equipment, was unwilling to talk to us about training personnel and remastering films after she spoke to CS Films director Ruben Hovhannisyan. Former HyeFilm cameramen Albert Yavuryan and Levon Atoyan remember Zanna Petrosyan as a qualified professional.
Levon Atoyants noted that it took him long time to learn how to work with a computer properly since no matter how good the employees and the equipment are, the professional who digitally remasters the movies must know the equipment perfectly: “The equipment should be operated by a person who has the requisite knowledge and pays great attention to the work. A group of filmmakers, usually, is a team that is united with common views and tastes and their movies differ from other movies in color and light. And people who digitize movies must be sophisticated enough to understand the differences in these movies. Otherwise it will just be mechanical work.”
Atoyan believes that CS Films is doing important work but there are certain flaws that are unacceptable. “One should not create the same coloring in movies, and what is being done today, is done in very similar colors; the faces are very pale or very red. I watched Tghamardik (Men) – it is generally clean but in the part when they sing all together the woman’s face looks like it’s covered in chalk.”
Gevorg Gevorgyants, formerly the director of HyeFilm, later CS Films director and now the director of the National Cinema Center of Armenia, a not-for-profit organization, has also noticed such problems: “No film was ever sent to the Ministry of Culture to see what kind of digitization it is; professionals haven’t even seen this Da Vinci equipment. Are they restoring from the negative or did they take the positive and change the colors? It is easy to deceive the viewers.” Gevorkyants says the experts at his center have discovered copyright infringements in certain digitized movies. “For example, in the movie A Piece of Sky the dark colors that were supposed to depict poverty are presented as bright, giving the opposite impression. And this is not a restoration, it’s just brightening the colors.”
Government Decree727-A of 2005 privatizing HyeFilm Studio states that the buyer “will use and preserve the film collection at its own expense and in accordance with the law for a period of 50 years and will respect the authors’ copyrights.” Article 20 of the Law on Copyright and Related Rights states that cameramen are considered to be co-authors of integrated audiovisual work. And Article 11 states that the author has “the right of the inviolability of the work (prohibiting possible distortions, misrepresentations of the work, or other infringements.)”
“The material is in very bad condition,” Ruben Gevorgyants says, “But all the frames that were burnt have been restored with high quality. Of course, it’s better to restore from the negative but we don’t have negatives of all the films and we are trying something in between the negative and the positive. Those who operate the Da Vinci equipment have been retrained, but we still need new people.”
Albert Yavuryan and Gevorg Gevorgyants are not convinced that those who operate the Da Vinci equipment have been trained in Europe, and they don’t know whether the negatives are brought from Russia or Armenian copies are used. “The work is done hastily and this prevents people from understanding what is going on. Not every scribble is a masterpiece and now a process of scribbling Armenian movies is taking place,” said Yavuryan, who saw a digitized version of his movie Hello, It’s Me when he was invited to a TV program to express his opinion on it. “I was there once, for twenty minutes, and just tried to check what had they done. I didn’t know what to do. I was bewildered – the light was more then the norm, the shadow less then the norm, the same concerns the sound. The digital system has one defect – the spectrum of brightness is quite narrow. A professional can ensure that the rule of light and shadow law is not violated, but just moving the dial toward the light or just cutting and throwing out is a mechanical approach, and there is a device attached to the monitor that goes off when there are such defects. Hello, It’s Me is full of defects like that.”
Atoyants believes that some practice is needed to have high-quality films. And Yavuryan is mostly concerned about the fact that CS Films has started with the best Armenian movies. “If we tolerating this we will gradually reach a situation where we will have digitized Armenian movies that have little relation to their originals.”
Albert Yavuryan says that during the Soviet era cameramen worked for twelve hours a day with specialists in charge of color work and worked for months to raise the quality of movies. He and Levon Atoyants believe that during the digitization they should advise the color specialists since this is a one-time process and must be done expertly.
“Now some movies of a very good friend of mine, Sergey Israelyan, are being digitized,” Atoyants said. “These movies were shot in Tbilisi and I lived there and know very well the coloration and the mood of Tbilisi. I said I didn’t want money, I just wanted to go and help them in memory of my friend, but no one called me back.”
“The creative team of the films are not around anymore, they need professionals who are still alive who understand these movies,” Yavuryan said. “If they don’t do that they need the master copy, because from the picture standpoint it is the genuine one, but they use a print.”
One thing assuages Yavuryan’s concern – the fact that the master copies of the Armenian movies are kept in Moscow and it will be possible to work from them in the future.
“The films are kept in the Beliye Stolbi archives,” Atoyants explained. “The Soviet Union collapsed but the negatives are housed under perfect conditions: it’s very clean there, the temperature is appropriate, the films are well catalogued. The employees even use special shoes inside the archives and use special gloves when they touch the films, touching the movies…”
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