This documentary explores how Nijinsky’s original controversial choreography of The Rite of Spring was restored. The Joffrey Ballet performs the restoration of the ballet which resembles folk dance more than ballet. It has replicas of the costumes, reconstructed choreography, and a reconstructed backdrop. This restored video is from the US broadcast has stereo Hi-Fi sound with clarified video.
The "ballet" was the brainchild of Nicholas Roerich, Igor Stravinsky, and Vaslav Nijinsky. Millicent Hodson, Kenneth Archer, and Robert Joffrey worked together to reconstruct the original, using notes by Marie Rambert. It discards the ideal at the time of ballet as grace and beauty. Instead it resembles folk dances and modern dance. It depicts a mythical Slavic tribe where a virgin dances herself to death as a sacrifice to appease the gods in spring.
The UK broadcast of the same documentary differs slightly in the commentary and also was in the PAL format which had 25fps with higher resolution rather than 30fps. Due to some interference and bad tape alignment a section was restored using another source. The ballet has excellent HiFi stereo sound. Some frame editing removed spots, lines, and vertical jitter in various sections. The ballet had some sections for about a second each with missing frames which were restored by interpolation and frame editing. There are probably still some unobvious missing or duplicated frames which may affect the smoothness. The video was refocused, with careful adjustment of the brightness and saturation levels. Better quality could be obtained from the master tapes if they still exist or from a good PAL HiFi stereo videotape dub.
Unfortunately YouTube changes the original formatting which somewhat degrades the quality.
