Restoration
The current version released on DVD by Koch-Lorber Films is a completely restored version of the original.
The film was originally shot on Eastman negative stock which rapidly faded and became almost unusable. In addition, the various copies of the film used in the cinema circuit also gradually lost their quality, which meant that Umbrellas could never be seen with the rich colours that Demy had originally intended.
Knowing that the Eastman stock would fade over time, Demy fortunately, had the three main yellow, cyan and magenta color separation masters made on black and white negative films that couldn't fade (a process similar to the creation of the older Technicolor process: see the article on Technicolor for an explanation of this 'three-strip' process).
These black-and-white prints had greater longevity and in the 1990s, Demy's wife, film director Agnès Varda, headed a project to create a new colour negative from the three black and white separations from which newly-restored full-color prints could then be made. The resulting film recaptured Demy's vision of a fantastically colourful Cherbourg.
In addition, composer Michel Legrand assisted in restoring the original 4-track stereo sound masters to digital and remastering his score to produce a higher-quality version, now available on CD.
Read more about this topic: The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg
Famous quotes containing the word restoration:
“I claim that in losing the spinning wheel we lost our left lung. We are, therefore, suffering from galloping consumption. The restoration of the wheel arrests the progress of the fell disease.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)
“The King [Charles II] after the Restoration accused the poet, Edmund Waller, of having made finer verses in praise of Oliver Cromwell than of himself; to which he agreed, saying, that Fiction was the soul of Poetry.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“In comparison to the French Revolution, the American Revolution has come to seem a parochial and rather dull event. This, despite the fact that the American Revolution was successful—realizing the purposes of the revolutionaries and establishing a durable political regime—while the French Revolution was a resounding failure, devouring its own children and leading to an imperial despotism, followed by an eventual restoration of the monarchy.”
—Irving Kristol (b. 1920)