Until now, the only way to hear Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), the 1964 Palme d'Or winner and love drama "in song," as its director, Jacques Demy, called it, has been a mono magnetic tape, with voice, music and sound effects all on the same medium. The restoration of the work, on the occasion of its 60^th anniversary, gave rise to a veritable treasure hunt.

"For over six months, we investigated and searched everywhere with the help of Universal Music Publishing," said Rosalie Varda. Since 2016, the filmmaker's adopted daughter has been the director general of Ciné-Tamaris, which looks after the films of Demy and Agnès Varda – "my beloved little dead," as she calls them.

She eventually got her hands on the three separate tapes of Les Parapluies, "in a regional stockpile," which made it possible to clean up the stereo, improving the clarity of a voice or instrument. This opened up the possibility for a film in concert version: A première took place at the Philharmonie de Paris on December 21 and 22. The images from Les Parapluies de Cherbourg have been restored in 4K, a very high digital resolution.

'No immediate return on investment'

"Jacques [Demy] told me that he was inspired by [Henri] Matisse's flat tints of color, without fear of mixing fuchsia pink and warm orange," said Rosalie Varda at the Parisian laboratory L'Image Retrouvée, which carried out the restoration. "These tones, for a musical drama depicting broken love at the time of the Algerian War, are the opposite of mawkish, and they come out even more vividly in digital than in film."

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