Lana Topham‘s obsessive quest for the perfect Pink Floyd at Pompeii film cut began in 1994, when guitarist David Gilmour requested unedited footage from the concert shot in 1971. If found, says Topham, the band’s restoration director, these rushes could have been used for a more evocative edit of Pink Floyd‘s only major concert film, which documented the band in happier, more experimental days, long before they turned into feuding rock megastars. But, she recalls: “Despite my extensive search, I was unable to locate the rushes. I found every laboratory that existed in Britain and France and every storage facility.”
Then came a breakthrough. In 2020, working with film technician Marie-Louise Fieldman, Topham discovered a trove of film cans labeled “Pompeii” at a London storage facility, where they had been relocated over the years from Gilmour’s own warehouse. These were not the film rushes, or unedited raw footage, which could have provided alternate camera angles and unseen footage. But they were almost as good: The original, 35-millimeter “first-cut negatives,” as Topham calls them, which provide “the ultimate source of quality,” allowing for more sophisticated color-grading and film restoration. “Restoring from a negative is a whole different ballgame from a print,” she says. “These prints that are out there, back in the day, were used for running in cinema and used over and over again. Once you find one, it’s not ideal.”
Those negatives became source material for Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII, which opens a worldwide IMAX run on Thursday (April 24). A remixed Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII album is also due May 2, marking the first time a full-length live album will document the concert.
Shot at the Roman Amphitheatre in Pompeii, Italy, in 1971 and first released in 1972, Pink Floyd at Pompeii captures the band looking impossibly young, performing a full concert to a small group of spectators consisting of camerapeople, roadies and “a few local kids that had talked their way in,” according to Mark Blake’s 2008 book Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd. Drummer Nick Mason‘s massive gong matches the drama of the ancient-ruin surroundings, complete with gargoyles and other sculptures, as the band emphasizes material from 1971’s Meddle, including “Echoes” and “One of These Days.” In subsequent versions of the film, filmmakers added performance material from London’s Abbey Road Studios and a Paris soundstage.
“It is a crucial film, because it’s the closest you’ve got to a Pink Floyd concert film during the ’70s,” Blake says. “They did film The Wall, but that was never released, and it’s floating around the Internet, and it’s not very good. It’s like Led Zeppelin — you’ve got The Song Remains the Same. It’s the only thing available to the public.”
The band has reissued the film numerous times, including a director’s cut DVD in 2003. And while the version shown at select IMAX theatres contains no revelatory content — “People have already seen it,” Blake says — it’s startlingly vibrant, the Italian sky impossibly blue, the multicolored butterflies on Mason’s T-shirts poised to float into real life. (The new version is also a boon for Sony Music, which purchased some of Pink Floyd’s recorded-music assets last October for $400 million and now owns the rights to the film; the new release will also likely improve the band’s streaming numbers and social-media views.)
The recently discovered negatives allowed for this kind of coloring, with help from colorist Andy Lee. “The problem with working from a print is there are limitations of what you can do, restoration-wise,” Topham says, describing Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII as having “a three-dimensional feeling” that brings to life even trivial details such as “the logo on the speakers and the red tape on Nick’s drumkit.”
“The technology now has enabled us to get the full, glorious detail of the film. You can literally see the fingerprints on David Gilmour’s Strat,” Blake adds. “It’s a cliche, but it kind of puts you right there in the amphitheatre with them.”
