Search And Rescue: Restoring Varick Frissell’s The Viking
by Tom McSorley
Let us begin in absentia. After all, the history of feature filmmaking in Canada starts here. As much as it sounds like the name of an outport fishing village somewhere in Newfoundland, it is not an actual place but rather a state of being. Canadian cinema is an enterprise always fraught with peril. It is difficult to get films made and even harder to get them seen. As if production, distribution and exhibition were not problematic enough, there is the pressing, unsettling, even dizzying issue of preserving our cinematic heritage from oblivion. A dramatic reminder from the realm of in absentia is Canada’s very first feature film, E.P. Sullivan’s and William Cavanaugh’s Evangeline (1913). This film no longer exists, except for a few stills taken from promotional material. Evangeline exists only as an absence. Its fate gives additional resonance to Peter Harcourt’s famous description of Canadian film as “the invisible cinema.”
Thankfully, the fate of celluloid oblivion has not been met by all early Canadian films. In fact, since the mid–1970s, David Hartman’s Back To God’s Country (1919) and Bruce Bairnsfather’s Carry On Sergeant! (1928), among others, have been restored by and preserved in Ottawa at the National Archives of Canada. Now, another important title has been rescued from in absentia. With funding from the AV Preservation Trust and Telefilm Canada, and bolstered by a recent NFB documentary (Victoria King’s excellent White Thunder, 2002), the National Archives has recently completed the
set of original Lobby Cards for The Viking
in the Northernstars Collection.
In many senses, legal and otherwise, The Viking is not a Canadian film. It is an American production, funded by Paramount Pictures and stocked with Hollywood personnel, not to mention Frissell, its New York–born producer/writer. Moreover, it was shot on location in Newfoundland almost two decades before the island became a province of Canada. Yet, as Peter Morris and other Canadian film historians have pointed out, The Viking’s astonishing location shooting, its literal and metaphorical use of harsh natural environments, and its combination of documentary, actuality footage and staged dramatic sequences connect it closely to the style and substance of films made in Canada both before (particularly Back To God’s Country) and after it was made. In addition, its status as an early example of a Canadian Northern makes it, in spirit at least, an honorary entry in Canada’s early and tenuous feature–film catalogue.
The story of The Viking is very much the story of its creator. Born in 1903 in New York to a wealthy, influential family, the peripatetic Frissell developed a great interest in and a genuine love for the landscape and people of Newfoundland. In the 1920s he made two short documentaries, The Lure of Labrador (1925) and The Great Arctic Seal Hunt (1928), the latter of which would serve as the foundation for The Viking. His actuality footage of the seal hunt stunned audiences throughout the United States, garnering critical praise from Variety and The New York Times for the compelling drama inherent in the daring, dangerous hunt.
Unlike the fugitive Evangeline, however, there were extant prints of The Viking in circulation and elements were collected, not without difficulty, at the National Archives of Canada. Says O’Farrell, “The film was in distribution by the Canadian Film Institute throughout the 1960s up through the 1980s on 16 mm, as it was a fairly important icon in the then nascent film–studies programs. Around 1989, I asked Dale Gervais on my staff to do a comparison of a few reels of the existing nitrate and prints we had to determine what the earlier copying to 16mm was like. The initial test showed we could make very definite picture quality improvements. With the Archives’ move to its new preservation facility in Gatineau in 1996, we now had in–house processing capacity for black–and–white duplicate stocks, and so our team set to work. This restored version was literally years in the making.”
While image restoration was challenging enough, an even more daunting task was cleaning up the original soundtrack. Itself an incredible technical accomplishment for the period, most of the sound on The Viking was actually recorded on location, in accordance with Frissell’s wishes for authenticity. O’Farrell describes the painstaking process of rescuing the often muddy, obscure, deteriorated sound on the remaining original elements. “The sound restoration was undertaken by Chace Productions in Burbank, California, because it has custom–designed equipment for shrinkage and sprocket–pitch adjustments and can read vintage density–track signals far better than most labs. In fact, during the sound work, Chace was able to locate some trace evidence of a musical score that no one could see by eye. The Chace gear was able to do a full and complete recovery, and that musical outro, which occurs after the ‘The End’ titles, has now been restored. It was a fortuitous addition to the project.”
Canadian cinema may have begun in absentia, but, as the riches of the rescued The Viking reveal, we should not allow it to end in that same permanent exile of erasure.
Also see: The cast & crew of The Viking.
This article by Tom McSorley was originally published in issue No.46 of Take One Magazine. Northernstars acquired the digital archives of Take One in 2007. Tom McSorley is executive director of the Canadian Film Institute in Ottawa.