....and now “Ashes of Time Redux”
Ten years ago the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai went to retrieve original negatives of one of his early films from a lab going bust. He was startled to find reels of that martial-arts film, "Ashes of Time," made only four years earlier, already disintegrating. It was a rueful coincidence for an auteur whose work ("In the Mood for Love," "Chungking Express" ) often mines the terrain of the ephemeral present, the disappearing past and the longing for what might have been.
Mr. Wong began hunting down prints of the film, some tucked away in vaults of far-flung Chinatown theaters abroad. "It was like looking for overseas orphans," he said. Then he spent five years restoring, reassembling, color-correcting and rescoring the film.
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/movies/05cheng.html
...in an act of aesthetic resurrection, he gathered together all the prints of "Ashes of Time" he and his team could find, shuffled and tweaked its scenes, underlined still-fuzzy relationships between characters, added some cello soul from Yo-Yo Ma , redesigned the credits and deepened the palette.
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/movies/10ashe.html
