M (1931)

Restoration supervisor Torsten Kaiser of TLEFilms:

Another major difference between the Criterion and Universum releases is in regards to the audio. There is a very distinct noise floor in M which can really get to your ears after a while, as it's very, very noisy. On the Criterion edition, that audio noise has been reduced. Unfortunately, in getting rid of the noise, they also got rid of a lot of detail in the upper frequencies – in the top frequencies, from 1kHz and above – and they scraped a lot of detail from the lower bandwidth as well. It was quite indiscriminatory. For the 2011 Restoration, we went back to the 2000/2001 preservation sound element – which is based on the complete sound negative and copied to a positive in order to retain proper demodulation. In 2000, a guy named Martin Sawyer did a tremendous job copying things to a positive. The problem was that he couldn't possibly do anything about the moisture and intense dust, debris, scratches and everything that had come into the negative element over the years. He couldn't prevent any of that, and the material could not be washed with an ultrasonic shower. It was a blank element where the sound had been glued on – literally glued on – and there was no way he could have treated it like a normal film element and put it in a washing machine…

...Well, eventually, what he did was carefully copy it to a positive, at the cost of extreme noise. You don't hear it on the Criterion edition, but you certainly hear it in the new Universum edition as we included both Martin Sawyer's preservation track from 2000 and our new 2011 restoration track where we reduced but did not eliminate the noise, all in an effort to keep the entire bandwidth intact. We pre-mixed it in such a way that we found things, details, that you wouldn't believe. On the 2011 restoration track, you can hear someone lighting a match. You can barely hear it on the preservation track. You can also hear sound cuts in the restoration track – a sound cut near the end where the material had been glued on. After the match is lit, Fritz Lang wanted the rest of the sequence to be silent. Dead silent. How do we know this? Because the film – the sound element – doesn't contain anything except blank film material. There's no glue, no trace of glue… nothing. Nothing fell off, it was just never there. And we know from Fritz Lang interviews and from his instructions to the lab that sequences are supposed to be 100% silent. On the previous positive and previous prints, there was always some kind of sound. There was no sound per se, but because of scratches, moisture and wear and tear there was always an optical sound head. It's typical from old analog film. It was heard at the time, but it was not supposed to be heard, regardless of whether it came during a sound or a silent sequence. But Lang's intention was very, very clear. There were sound sequences and then there were silent sequences, and the silent sequences have been, for the first time since 1931, reinstated in the 2011 Universum Film edition.

The Criterion and MoC audio tracks are basically the same, and there's no question that the restoration track on the Universum blu-ray sounds better. There is some detail on the Universum preservation track that has disappeared from the restoration track, but the preservation track sounds unbearably bright at times, and its noise floor is uncomfortably high. Hopefully when the film is inevitably restored again, the sound negative can be digitised directly.