As reported on Wired.
BY NATHAN MATTISE
Black Angel was screened before Empire back in 1980. Then it disappeared.Photo: Courtesy of Rogers Christian
It’s been a legend on geeky message boards for decades: a beautiful sword-and-sorcery flick made by a key person behind Star Wars. Many distinctly remembered seeing it as children, but no one could track it down. Well, it turns out the mythical movie really does exist and will be back in circulation soon.
The 25-minute film called Black Angel was the directorial debut of Star Wars art director Roger Christian, made with financial assistance from George Lucas. It centers on a knight returning from the Crusades who is transported to a mystical realm where he must rescue a princess from a black knight. “When George read the script, he felt it was very suitable to go with the Star Wars legacy,” Christian says. (It was shown in 1980 as a short in Europe and Australia, before Empire Strikes Back.)
The movie’s gorgeous art design and cinematography influenced many Arthurian myth films that followed, from Excalibur to Legend. Christian slowed and elongated the action scenes with a technique called step-printing, which Lucas then used for a lightsaber battle in Empire. “Fans had rarely seen images like this on the big screen,” Christian says.
The short was never released on VHS or DVD, and Christian himself was unable to track down the original negative. The director believed it was lost—until he got a call from an archivist at Universal Studios last December. “He said, ‘We found this tin of film labeled Black Angel, and it seems to point to you,’” Christian recalls. “I wrote back, ‘You just made my Christmas for the last 20 years.’ ”
Christian is still debating how to share Black Angel with fans. “Probably the best way is a downloadable version,” he says. “I think it would be great to see it in a cinema again on a program with Empire Strikes Back. That’s how it was intended to be seen.” I suppose we can sit through Empire one more time, if we must.