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By Jacqueline van den Driest

The Israel Film Archive at the Jerusalem Cinematheque has a vast collection of classic films from around the world, as well as every film ever made in Israel, and has been working hard for years to preserve these movies digitally. In the last week of June the cinematheque presented a program of these restored gems, Re-Film: Restored, Rediscovered, Revisited, which featured 15 restored films from Israel and around the world.

Present were also several guests who are world leaders in digital restoration, a time-consuming process that requires a great deal of expertise and painstaking work.

Amongst the movies shown were one of Stanley Kubrick’s earliest films, The Killing (1956), a slow-burn film noir crime drama starring Sterling Hayden and featuring one of the most strikingly photographed chase sequences of all time. Another classic film noir fans rushed to see on the big screen was Carol Reed’s The Third Man, one of the all-time great movies. For Pop music lovers there was ABBA: The Movie, a 1977 movie directed by Lasse Hallström, about an incompetent DJ trying to get an interview with the beloved hit-making group during their tour of Australia. Some Like It Hot, the classic comedy by Billy Wilder, an Austrian-Jewish refugee who was one of the greatest Hollywood writer/directors of all time, could be savoured once again on the big screen at the Cinematheque as part of this series.

In 2017, the Israel Film Archive–Jerusalem Cinematheque commenced a pioneering project for the digitization, digital restoration, and the rendering accessible of over 5000 hours of audio-visual documentary and creative works from pre-state Palestine and the State of Israel. These include rare heritage treasures and films (shot on film) from the very first visual documentation of Jerusalem and Jaffa in 1896, just one year after the invention of cinema.

In the framework of the project, a professional laboratory of the highest international standards and the first of its kind in Israel, was established for the conversion of film reels into digital formats, including disintegrating reels, often the only surviving print, not fit for screening. Thus, the archive is realizing its designated purpose: to be a home for Israeli and Eretz Israel cinema and audio-visual cultural-historical assets which together create a mosaic of different narratives that shed light on this place in which we live: feature films, documentaries, news reels, advertisements, experimental films, home movies, public announcements, culture, society, and many more. These heritage treasures join hundreds of new “digital-born” films from the finest of