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Time travel through music: Presentation of a restored and musicalized version of El automóvil gris

Aranza Flores @Alvayeah

Founder an general director of the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM), Daniela Michel, in the company of Oriana Sánchez and Itzel Razo, coordinators of the Cineteca Nacional circuit, as well as Enrique Rosas, great-grandson of the filmmaker with the same name, and pianist José María Serralde, presented the screening of the restored version of the film El automóvil gris with live music.

El automóvil gris (1919), a work by filmmaker Enrique Rosas is considered one of the gems of silent films, not only nationally, but also in the history of international cinema. Originally, it was conceived in twelve chapters, as if it were a series, but the restored version is made up of all the fragments and lasts three hours and forty minutes.

“This film belongs to a genre between fiction and documentary; it tries to create criminal events of the time, but there are also touches of the post-truth era. It is an uncatalogued genre but one that could belong,” expressed Enrique Rosas, whose family has arduously worked to preserve their great-grandfather’s work.

As part of a film-concerts tour organized by the Cineteca Nacional, this restored version has been taken to states such as Guanajuato, Tijuana, Oaxaca and Aguascalientes by the Digital Restoration Laboratory. “The restoration took more than four years, the restoration team received the materials in 35 millimeters; there are sequences that have not been seen in a hundred years and that you will be able to see thanks to the work that the team has done.”

The restoration was performed in image stabilization, color correction and sound.

In addition, according to Sánchez, the music was not found in the archive, because the musician José María Serralde composed scores especially for the film: “It is an improvised score in the style of the cinema of the time. We approached the music from the question of what would have happened if a young soloist of those years had been invited one afternoon at the cinema to musicalize that version.”

“The reels that appeared to restore it somehow rewrite the history that was originally presented, as a posthumous message that is about to be deciphered. We are working on pouring that information to be able to transmit it and rewrite our own history,” said Enrique Rosas before beginning one of the most special screenings of this edition of the FICM.