In 1986, The New York Times ran a screed against a film-restoration trend gaining steam.
Published in the thick of the “colorization” craze of the 1980s, the late critic Vincent Canby argued that the process of altering black-and-white movies with modern visual flourishes “desecrated” those classics, writing that “nobody connected with the original[s]…had anything to do with this artistic revisionism” and “of the half-dozen [colorized] films I’ve seen to date, all but one were virtually unwatchable.” The problems in Canby’s view were both ethical and aesthetic, ultimately betraying that key quality of any artwork — that it belongs to the time in which it was made.
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Forty years later, Canby’s impassioned argument fits rather neatly into a raging debate around a new technological movement: The use of Generative Artificial Intelligence to expand upon, alter or simply “complete” movies that were made decades before. The Sphere in Las Vegas thrust
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