#Charles Joholske

[thefugitivesaint]

‘Curious Alice’ was an anti-drug production created by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) targeting 8 to 10 year olds on the dangers of using drugs. The messaging is muddled, overshadowed by the wonderfully alluring cut-and-paste montage animation (described in many reviews of the film as “Monty Pythonesque”).  “...the film shows young Alice reading Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland in a sunny dappled meadow before nodding off. She soon finds herself plunging down the rabbit hole and in a wonderland … of drugs. The King of Hearts is hawking heroin. The Mad Hatter is tripping balls on LSD. The hookah-smoking Caterpillar is stoned out of his gourd. The Dormouse is in a barbiturate-induced stupor and the March Hare, who looks like the Trix Bunny’s ne’er-do-well brother, is a fidgeting tweaker. “You oughta have some pep pills! Uppers!” he exclaims. “Amphetamines! Speed! You feel super good.” You can essentially ignore the confused anti-drug narrative of the film while appreciating the animation. And, it’s the animation that I wanted to focus on here, namely, how the “scratched, torn, and spliced print” whose “color had faded so that all of those vibrant hues were reduced to pasty pink” held by the National Archives was resuscitated by the film preservation specialist Charles Joholske (who died of cancer in 2009). After a copy of ‘Curious Alice’ was found in a defunct lab in Pennsylvania, it was taken to the Motion Picture Preservation lab of the National archive where:  “Charles Joholske took on the task of making new prints of Curious Alice, despite the fact that he could not use the color analyzer to time the negative. That meant he had to look at the image and make his best guess at what light values to use for the printer. Only it wasn’t a wild shot in the dark: Charlie had decades of experience and the ability to look at the negative and assign light values by eye. With a couple of short tests to confirm his educated guess, Charlie created the three polyester film prints that the National Archives holds today.” Another aspect of this story, as noted in the above article, is the fact that this kind of accumulated skill and talent is slowly being lost as specialists like Joholske die (or move on to other careers) and the labs dedicated to film preservation gradually evaporate for various reasons.  Give it a viewing.