You could be forgiven for never having heard of Manhatta. Filmed in 1920 on one of the most expensive movie cameras available at the time, it gained quite a reputation for its herky-jerky rhythms, Cubist sensibilities, and uniquely artistic view of the areas of Lower Manhattan it depicted; it was later described as the first American avante-garde film. But it soon fell out of print, and even dedicated cinephiles rarely saw it for decades. It became one of the many early films that it was far easier to talk about than to see.
A recent article by Dave Kehr in the New York Times about a new digital restoration of Manhatta is well worth a look, though, even if you aren't particultuar interested in the movie itself. It sheds a fascinating light on various aspects of film restoration, from the economics of the process to the social politics of why it becomes necessary. In the case of Manhatta, the main print of the film that was circulated for decades was horridly bleached out, poorly timed, and of awful quality (it can be seen on YouTube here, in a print described by Kehr as looking like "a fifth-generation photocopy that someone's dog had been sleeping on for several years"). Kehr notes that there it's unlikely that a photograph by Paul Strand or a painting by Charles Sheeler, the two men behind Manhatta, would be allowed to fall into such a state of disrepair. He quotes Josh Siegel, a curator at MoMA, as saying "There is a misconception about film that because it's a mass-produced medium, that all these films are easily accessible and easily reproduced. And of course, they're not."
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