It is the film Charlie Chaplin never wanted audiences to see that has been painstakingly restored to 4K for a project that has taken literal decades to complete.
When The Gold Rush was released in 1925, it was a silent movie. But that’s not how most people know the movie, which was transformed into a “talkie” by Chaplin circa 1942. The most famous actor of his generation added narration, sounds, and a musical score.
He also cut 16 minutes from The Gold Rush — a movie about a gold-hunting mission in Alaska — and rearranged scenes. It wasn’t just about Chaplin’s artistic vision; it was wartime, and he wanted it to strike a different, more upbeat tone.
Chaplin was proud of his re-edit and declared it an improvement. Although it was well-received at the time, critics have since lamented the loss of the 1925 silent version of The Gold Rush.
“Many fans and cinephiles have said, ‘What did he do to the film?’” Arnold Lozano, the managing director of the Chaplin Office, tells Popular Science. “They respectfully disagree that it was an improvement. But Chaplin was the artist, and who are we to say otherwise?”
But Chaplin ordered the destruction of all copies of the original movie and even zealously hired lawyers to help him erase the 1925 version.
Restoring a Classic
Popular Science reports that efforts to recover the 1925 version began in earnest in the 1980s, when film historians Kevin Brownlow and David Gill began collecting surviving reels. Their work culminated in a partial reconstruction in 1993, using a Japanese full-aperture print from the Chaplin archives as a base.
That version is described as “a work in process,” and over the years, the Chaplin Office has continued searching for materials and received contributions from six archives, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the George Eastman Museum.
Preservationist Elena Tammaccaro of L’Immagine Ritrovata oversaw the restoration. “The duplicate negative that Brownlow [and Gill] produced in ‘93 for the previous restoration was our starting point,” she tells Popular Science. “Seventy percent of that duplicate negative was the best we had in terms of image quality and full frame.”
The remaining 30 percent was reconstructed from various archival sources, including a 4:3 nitrate reel from the silent era. Tammaccaro credited the survival of those materials to unofficial preservation practices. “People worked like pirates… making copies they were supposed to eliminate,” she adds.
It is similar to Star Wars fans hunting down the original movie reels to watch the classic sci-fi films as they were shown in theaters in the 1970s, without George Lucas’s subsequent controversial edits.
A Century Later
The final 88-minute version of The Gold Rush took 10 months to complete. A new 35mm print was also created, though it will be reserved for preservation purposes at the Chaplin Office archives.
“It’s good to have an actual print made of this restoration and, if need be, can be rescanned by robots or whatever in the future,” Lozano tells tells Popular Science.
The restoration was shown at the Cannes Film Festival this year, as well as 250 theaters across the world on June 26 to mark the film’s 100th anniversary.
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