Vlčie diery [Wolves' Lairs] ◾︎ Paľo Bielik ◾︎ 1948

The disc starts with the SFI logo, followed by an ad for Klapka.sk. The latter is actually a short interview with Marián Labuda (1:00, in Slovak), who speaks about his role in Peter Solan's "Kým sa skončí táto noc" ("Before Tonight Is Over").

From SFI's press release:

The "Slovak Cinema of the 40's & 50's" edition was supposed to be released last year [2010] already, however, given the physical condition of these older titles and the complexity of the restoration work, it was moved to this year. All the films in this edition are thus brought to the viewers in a high quality presentation with restored picture and sound. Because of the extensive print damage, the complete digital restoration took two whole years, the most difficult part being the image restoration. The colour grading on "Šťastie príde v nedeľu" was done by its own cinematographer Vladimír Ješina, who, as a close collaborator and friend of Paľo Bielik, corrected also "Kapitán Dabač" and "Štyridsaťštyri". The grading on "Čert nespí," also shot by Vladimír Ješina, was, due to Ješina's health problems, done by Peter Csordás. For the other films, whose cinematographers are not among us any more, the work was delegated by the Slovak Association of Cinematographers to Stanislav Szomolányi ("Katka," "Rodná zem," "Štvorylka," "Dáždnik svätého Petra") and Vladimír Holloš ("Varuj...!," "Vlčie diery").

Ladislav Dedík from Studio 727, who participated in the digitalisation and restoration of the films, describes the process: "The films we worked on were heavily damaged due to their age, quality of film stock, and the technological processes used in production and the creation of film prints. Because some of the films were used as propaganda material, the numbers of prints made were considerable, each new copy further damaging the original negative. In case of the war films, the authentic World War II archival footage used differed from the rest of the material in terms of grain structure and the amount of print damage. These parts made the restoration process much more difficult. The most frequently appearing types of damage were dust, dirt, splices, tramlines, scratches, tears and breaks, instability, gate hairs, jumps in grain density, and even missing frames. The most effort-demanding titles were "Varuj...!," "Vlčie diery," "Kapitán Dabač" and "Katka." To give you a better idea, while there were 1.5 million blemishes on average in each of the films in the previous edition [Slovak Cinema of the 60's], the majority of titles in this edition contained more than 20 million. This fact is the reason why some of these films took over a year to restore."

Note: The parts in italics below denote information I have been told by one of the people who participated in the restoration of "Vlčie diery."

This is a tough one; on the one hand, given that the film's (nitrate) negative apparently does not exist anymore, and the "backup" copy assembled in the 50's / 60's had lots of "damage" optically printed in (having been put together from prints multiple generations away from the OCN),

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one can't but take one's hat off to the effort that's been made here - there's not a blemish to be seen anywhere, the picture is rock stable (compare with Řitka Video's older release most probably based on an analogue tele-cine of a distribution print made sometime in the 90's; admittedly, the bit I chose was a mangled reel end, but nevertheless... Note: On the right, a JavaScript anima-tion), and even the authentic WW2 footage has been spruced up to match the then newly shot material (see e.g. frame 78468).

On the other hand, there are still problems that, perhaps, could have been avoided; firstly, at certain points, the level of detail is actually lower than what the older, unrestored edition's got to offer, and I'm not talking about the generally oversharpened picture thereof - check e.g. the texture of the woman's pullover in the following shot: