company with great ambitions. After all, the num- ber of companies undertaking their own restorations, with as many extras as we do, can be counted on one hand with some fingers missing, as far as the UK goes. We do try to impress on people that support is important.”


And they’ve got it. Consumer support for Arrow product led directly to the crowning restoration achievement of 2014 with their Walerian Borowczyk box set.


“That was probably the riskiest project we’ve ever done,” says Simeoni. “Largely down to its scale—so many restorations, all at once, in a big box, by a filmmaker who was derided and com- pletely misunderstood. We really went all in, and it was worrying at times, especially as the costs built up, but the Kickstarter [campaign] really helped, not just in terms of the funding but the awareness. I think that was a key thing. The icing on the cake, of course, was that the Kickstarter was a success and everything got restored rather than having a lame duck SD master, so that made the whole project that much sweeter.”


It’s that same ground level support that has allowed Arrow to recently expand its operations into America, again via Kickstarter. If US labels have upped their game while this was in the pipe- line, Simeoni still feels that Arrow has something extra to offer in Arrow’s title selection, deluxe packaging (extensive booklets, or sometimes books) and, of course, the quality of their transfers and restoration work.


“When I attended film school, we still worked with film,” says Arrow’s Head of Restoration and


Technology Services, James White, chatting to VW about the need for an understanding of film history as well as production methods and tech- nology when restoring a film for BD. “We shot, edited—and most importantly—handled film ev- ery day. We were able to have a physical, tan- gible relationship with the medium, to see what you could do with it, how you could damage it, how you could repair it. It sounds pretty simple, but it’s not something that students generally get access to anymore. Digital technology is wonder- ful but it does take away that intimate, hands-on experience, so how is one supposed to learn about lab processing, printing, film stocks, except in an abstract way?


“I guess the answer to that is to try to get work in a film archive. That’s the path I took after I gradu- ated from film school, at the George Eastman House in New York and it certainly opened up my mind to considering all these different aspects to film and film history I hadn’t considered before. And I was


Bava’s BLOOD AND BLACK LACE [Sei donne per l’assassino, 1964]. VW editor/Bava biogra- pher Tim Lucas was helpful in getting the lush, vi- brant color scheme right, and White is overjoyed at the results.


surrounded by the stuff! If one wanted to look at a film, you took the reels off the shelf and examined it on a bench. You compared different elements and learned the differences between negative and posi- tive elements, as well as nitrate, acetate, polyester by the color, the feel, the smell. Most importantly you learned to respect the fragility of these elements and how easily they could be damaged if mis- handled, wound or stored incorrectly, left exposed to the trauma of humidity, temperature, etc. And from this you learned what an honor—what an ab- solute privilege it is—to have access to original film elements and how important it was to respect the artists who produced this work. And hopefully, this respect is what you bring along every time you’re presiding over the restoration of a film today.” Of Arrow’s initial US releases, the one most likely to have VW readers licking their chops, is Mario


“Lush is putting it mildly,” he beams. “Those colors really sing! Much as I love many of his other films, this feels like the culmination of so much of what Bava’s cinema was about. The over-the-top color scheme is a true fever-dream, with deep reds and lurid purples contrasted with liquid blacks throughout. With the colors, the flowing camera- work, the music, the framing, the set design, the costumes, and the casting, you can feel that Bava was literally creating a new genre as he was making this picture.


“This is the first Bava film we’ve done with no outside collaboration or reliance on someone else’s master,” White continues. “It was an opportunity to really present Bava at his best. To do this right, there was really no substitute, we had to access the original negative. Of course, it’s always a possibil- ity that the negative will be in rough shape, even to the point of being unusable. But once we made the first set of scans I breathed a huge sigh of relief. The neg looked rich, vibrant, sharp and hadn’t faded one bit. There was still plenty of work to do, but the foundation was sound.


“Once we began grading we set our black levels and our highlights and started pushing our con- trast and saturation levels, these gorgeously lurid reds and purples started popping into the images. The main thing was not to allow these colors to bleed into the blacks or the highlights, which should appear white. It’s easy now to see the shortcom- ings of previous DVDs, and one of the things we immediately noticed when referencing some of these


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