Synopsis

Movie Name: The Making of The Brilliant Biograph
Language: English (Chinese subtitles)
Category: --
Duration: 9 minutes
Director: Unknown
Story: A team from Eye Filmmuseum offers a short history of the Biograph films and discusses the technical challenges in digitising and restoring the museum’s Biograph 68mm film collection.

Movie Name: The Brilliant Biograph: Earliest Moving Images of Europe
Language: Silent with score (English intertitles & Chinese subtitles)
Category: --
Duration: 51 minutes
Director: Unknown
Story: In the early years of cinema, Mutoscope's US crew travelled to Europe with their newly-invented film and camera equipment to capture the oldest surviving moving images of the continent. Due to film rarity and absence of compatible projectors, most of these film stocks have been either remaining in archives or copied onto 35mm films for projection and digitally transferred, with image quality greatly reduced. Only until recently, advances in film scanning technologies allow audience to experience these images' full glory. Divided into five chapters containing over fifty one-minute clips, this compilation offers glimpses of life in Europe at the turn of the 19th century like one-minute time capsules from 120 years ago, from natural landscape and rural and urban environments, to people at work and recreation, capturing movement with rich detail demonstrating the major changes brought about by the Second Industrial Revolution.

*Eye Filmmuseum digitised and restored the original 68mm materials in its and the British Film Institute’s collections. 4K DCP was then produced.

Movie Name: The Bat Whispers
Language: English (Chinese subtitles)
Category: --
Duration: 84 minutes
Director: Roland West
Story: A mysterious criminal known only as 'The Bat' announces his escape to the country as a decoy for him while he robs a bank. In the banker's country mansion, meanwhile, occupants—each with their own ulterior motives—were 'haunted' by mysterious noises, a threatening note and then murder, leading to suspicion that the Bat is among their midst. West's sound film remake of his own silent picture from 1926 based on the Broadway play The Bat is highly original for its time featuring roof-hopping sequences with German Expressionist touches, and has become an inspiration for Bob Kane's creation of Batman.

*The film was shot in three versions: a pair of 1.33:1 aspect ratio, 35mm negatives for US domestic and foreign prints; and a 2.13:1 aspect ratio 65mm widescreen Magnifilm version, which is one of the first widescreen films ever made. In 1988, the UCLA Film and Television Archive restored and preserved the 35mm foreign version and the 65mm Magnifilm in cooperation with the Mary Pickford Foundation, with the latter in 35mm reduction prints upon photochemical restoration.

Roland West (1885-1952)
Renowned for his noir films in the 1920s and 30s, West defied convention in his pursuit of delivering sensational visual effects. The Bat Whispers is one such film made with his self-devised equipment and methodologies.

^Online talk by Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi (Curator of Silent film at Eye Filmmuseum) in English