To Save and Project: The Second MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation
June 13–July 4, 2003
Every year, the member institutions of the International
Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) preserve hundreds of
motion pictures, working together to find the best-surviving
materials for each film. Spanning the history of the moving
image, these preserved films are vivid reflections of
the diverse cultures that produced them, making this annual MoMA
International Festival of Film Preservation a tribute to the passion and
commitment of film conservators and archivists around the world.
The films in this second edition of To Save and Project were preserved
through the collaborative efforts of FIAF archives, as well as
commercial studios and distributors. Virtually all are having their New
York premieres; some are shown in versions never before seen in the
U.S. In addition, we inaugurate “Conservator’s Choice”:
this year’s selection, Harry Hurwitz’s The
Projectionist (1970), was chosen by its restorer, MoMA’s own Peter Williamson.
Organized
by Steven Higgins, Curator; Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator; Anne
Morra, Assistant Curator; Samantha Safran, Executive Assistant;
and William Phuan, Intern, Department of Film and Media.
Made
possible in part with a grant from the Ira M. Resnick Foundation.
.
1933–50.
Great Britain. Written, directed, and starring Richard
Massingham. A spotlight on Britain’s forgotten
comic genius, Massingham, the bemused, rumpled everyman who taught
civilians on the home front how to cross roads, bathe in five inches
of water, sneeze into a handkerchief, and post early
for Christmas. A program of fifteen short films preserved
by the bfi National Film and Television Archive, London.
82 min.
. 1943. Great Britain. Directed by Carol Reed. Screenplay
by Peter Ustinov, Eric Ambler. With Ustinov, Stanley
Holloway, Ian Fleming. By 1942, the British army had
become increasingly forced to conscript under- and overage
men. The Directorate of Army Psychiatry commissioned a team of
some of Britain’s finest writers, directors, and actors
to make this morale-boosting film for new recruits.
The irreverent result did not amuse army top brass.
Preserved by the Imperial War Museum Film and Video Archive, London.
43 min.
. 1925–26.
Wales. Directed by Sid Griffiths, Bert Bilby. Three
of more than forty rare Jerry cartoons that were recently discovered
and preserved by the National Screen
and Sound Archive of Wales. Approx. 15 min.
. 1925. USA. Directed by Allan Dwan. Screenplay by Forrest
Halsey. With Gloria Swanson, Lawrence Gray, Gertrude Astor.
Swanson shines as a waitress in a small-town diner with
dreams of an acting career (and designs on the handsome
cook). Preserved by George Eastman House, Rochester. Silent. 78 min.
.
1953. Italy. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Screenplay by Antonioni,
Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Francesco Maselli, P. M. Pasinetti. With
Lucia Bosé, Gino Cervi, Andrea Checchi. The rags-to-riches
story of a shop girl who becomes a movie star. Antonioni offers
a pessimistic glimpse of postwar Rome and its film industry. In
Italian with English subtitles. Preserved by RAI Cinema, Rome. 105
min.
.
1968. USA. Written and directed by Jacques Demy. With Anouk Aimée,
Gary Lockwood, Alexandra Hay. Demy’s only
American film, gloriously restored to pastel perfection
by Sony Pictures Entertainment, Los Angeles. In this “loveless
love story”set on the seedy
fringes of L.A., a frustrated young architect has a brief
encounter with an exquisite model who poses for lonely
amateur photographers. 95 min.
MoMA worked with the late Stan Brakhage to acquire and preserve all
of his films. This memorial screening includes recently
made 16mm prints of some of Brakhage’s older silent work.
. 1971. USA. “I have
been many times very ill in hospitals; and I drew on all that experience
while making Deus
Ex in West Penn. Hospital of Pittsburgh” (Brakhage).
Silent. 34 min.
. 1959. USA. “I was coming to terms with decay
of a dead thing and the decay of the memories of a loved
being” (Brakhage). Silent. 11 min.
. 1986. USA. “A multiple-super-imposition
hand-painted visual symphony of animal life on earth” (Brakhage).
Silent. 45 min.
Total running time 90 min.
. 1957. USA. Directed by Paul Wendkos.
Screenplay by David Goodis. With Dan Duryea, Jayne Mansfield.
In this edgy noir drama, influenced by Welles and Kubrick,
Duryea plays a sexually repressed burglar who can’t
quite figure out what to do with Mansfield, much less with the necklace
he’s stolen. Preserved by Sony Pictures Entertainment.
90 min.
. 1912.
France. Directed by Georges Méliès. The most complete
version of Méliès’s classic trick movie,
one of the earliest sci-fi films. Tinted print preserved by the Filmarchiv Austria, Vienna. Silent.
20 min.
. 1951. USA. Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. Screenplay by
Jack Pollexfen, Aubrey Wisberg. With Raymond Bond, Margaret Field,
Pat Goldin. This 1950s sci-fi classic follows Professor
Elliot, his daughter Enid, and the cunning Dr. Mears as
they set up a space observatory on a foggy Scottish island
to study a rogue planet hurtling toward Earth. Preserved by The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 70 min.
. Advertisements
by the esteemed animator Gyula Macskássy. Preserved by the
Hungarian National Film Archive, Budapest. 12 min.
. 1931. Soviet Union. Directed by Boris Barnet.
As a village on the Volga undergoes collectivization,
the conflict between rich and poor peasants worsens. A
violent meditation on the Soviet cultural revolution, directed
by Russia’s pioneering filmmaker and first theorist
of montage. Preserved by the Cinémathèque
Française, Paris.
Russian intertitles with simultaneous English translation.
Silent, with piano accompaniment by Ben Model. 66 min.
. 1924.
Austria. Directed by Hans Karl Breslauer. With Johannes
Riemann, Hans Moser. Hugo Bettauer’s
1922 novel about the deportation of Viennese Jews, transformed
into this Expressionist film two years later, was intended
as a satire. By the mid-1930s, however, Bettauer’s
dystopic vision had come to pass. German intertitles with simultaneous
English translation. Silent, with piano accompaniment by Ben Model
on
June 15 and Jon Spurney on June 19. Preserved by Filmarchiv Austria.
Approx. 80 min.
. 1981. USA. Directed by Ron Blau. Home movies
of a refugee from Hitler’s Germany were manipulated
to form this haunting evocation of a proud German-Jewish
family in the early 1930s. Preserved by the National Center
for Jewish Film, Brandeis University. 15 min.
. 1961.
India. Written and directed by Satyajit Ray. With Anil
Chatterjee, Chandana Banerjee, Soumitra Chatterjee. Ray’s
masterful adaptation of two stories by Rabindranath Tagore. In “The
Postmaster,” a young girl becomes devoted to
a civil servant posted to a small rural village; in “Samapti,” a
student rebels against an arranged marriage. Restoration
of the first American release version by the Academy Film Archive, Beverly Hills. In Bengali with English subtitles. 112
min.
. 1908. France. Director unknown.
An impressionistic portrait of Paris’s central market, which
was destroyed in the early 1870s. Preserved by the Cinémathèque
Française. 7 min.
. 1926. France. Directed by Jean Renoir. Screenplay by Pierre
Lestringuez, based on the novel by Emile Zola. With Catherine
Hessling, Werner Krauss. A fusion of rich set-design and
complex character constructions, Nana marked a turning
point in Renoir’s naturalist style. Preserved by
the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna and the Cinémathèque
Suisse, Lausanne, this stunningly tinted print most closely
approximates the film’s original release
version. French intertitles with simultaneous English
translation. Silent, with piano accompaniment by Ben Model. Approx. 122 min.
. 1963.
Portugal. Written and directed by Manoel de Oliveira.
With Nicolau Nunes Da Silva, Ermelinda Pires. Based on
a sixteenth-century religious text, this retelling of the Passion
of Christ is set in a remote Portuguese village. In Portuguese
with English subtitles. Preserved by the Cinemateca Portuguesa, Lisbon. 85 min.
.
1949. USA. Directed by Lewis Milestone. Screenplay by John Steinbeck.
With Myrna Loy, Robert Mitchum, Peter Miles. Steinbeck’s
timeless story of a ten-year-old boy’s coming of
age on a California ranch, set to the music of Aaron Copland,
has been beautifully restored from the original three-strip Technicolor negative by Paramount Pictures, Los Angeles.
89 min.
By turns shocking and tender, structurally intricate and defiantly
anticlassical, Austrian experimental filmmaking has
been an important contribution to postwar world cinema.
This program, drawn entirely from the Oesterreichisches Filmmuseum,
Vienna, focuses on films from the 1960s, when Viennese Actionism was assaulting bourgeois sensibilities.
. 1960. Directed by Kurt Kren. 5 min.; . 1963–64. Directed by Kurt Kren. 4 min.; . 1969. Directed by Ernst Schmidt, Jr. 3
min.; . 1963–66. Directed by Ernst
Schmidt, Jr. 21 min.; . 1969. Directed by Peter
Weibel. 2 min. . 1966. Directed by Peter Kubelka. 13 min.
Total running time 48 min.
A rich sample of the Oesterreichisches Filmmuseum’s superb
collection of American experimental cinema, from the biographically
inflected celebration of film-as-material in Fisher’s
Standard Gauge and the single tracking shot across a sunny
garden in eye-popping Viewmaster colors in Bruce Baillie’s
All My Life, to Robert Nelson’s anarchic burlesque
Oh Dem Watermelons! and George Landow’s structuralist explorations.
. 1966. Directed by Bruce Baillie. 3 min.; . 1977. Directed by George Kuchar. 6 min.; 1965. Directed by Robert Nelson. 11 min.;
1965–66. Directed by George Landow.
5 min.; . 1963–64. Directed by George
Landow. 6 min.; . 1969. Directed
by George Landow. 5 min.; . 1975. Directed
by George Landow. 3 min.; . 1984. Directed by Morgan
Fisher. 36 min.
Total running time 75 min.
. 1931.
France. Directed by Jean Lods. While accompanying Lods
on a boat trip along the Seine during the making of this
film, Vigo was inspired to make L’Atalante. Preserved by the Centre National de la Cinématographie, Bois
d’Arcy. 24 min.
. 1934. France. Directed by Jean Vigo. Screenplay
by Vigo, Jean Guinée, Albert Riéra. With
Dita Parlo, Michel Simon, Jean Dasté. Vigo’s last film before
his sudden death at age twenty-nine is a work of transcendent beauty, in
which a barge captain, his country wife, and a crusty old seafarer
are borne along the peaceful waters of the Seine. Preserved
by the Cinémathèque Gaumont, Paris. In French with English subtitles. 89 min.
. Rare unused scenes preserved
by the Cinémathèque Française. 20
min.
Total running time 133 min.
. 1932. USA. Directed by Leslie Pearce.
Screenplay by W. C. Fields. With Fields, Billy Bletcher,
Elise Cavanna. In this Mack Sennett two-reeler, Fields
plays a misanthropic and unskilled dentist who, in one famously risqué gag,
gets straddled by a patient as he drills into her mouth. Preserved
by The Library of Congress. 21 min.
. 1970. USA. Written and directed by Harry Hurwitz.
With Chuck McCann, Ina Balin, Rodney Dangerfield, Hurwitz.
Hurwitz’s
truly independent film follows a theater projectionist
as he fantasizes about becoming his favorite superhero,
Captain Flash. Selected by Peter Williamson, MoMA’s Film
Conservation Manager, as To Save and Project’s inaugural
Conservator’s Choice selection. 85 min.
These Western studies of indigenous peoples reveal the tension in
ethnographic cinema between the scientific ideal of
unbiased empirical observation and the cultural reality of Eurocentric stereotyping.
. 1949. France. Directed by Jean
Rouch. Shot in Kodachrome with a handheld 16mm camera,
this early Rouch film depicts the circumcision rites of
the Songhay people of Niger. Preserved by the Centre National de la Cinématographie. 6 min.
. 1950. Sweden. Directed by Sven
Nykvist. A boy in the former Belgian Congo becomes a medical
doctor in this short film by Nykvist, best known as Ingmar
Bergman’s and Woody Allen’s
cinematographer. Preserved by Svenska Filminstitutet,
Stockholm. English narration. 19 min.
. 1971. USA. Directed by Timothy Asch, Napoleon Chagnon. Between
1968 and 1974, filmmaker Asch and anthropologist Chagnon made dozens
of field studies of the Yanomamo, the imperiled Indian group of the Amazon
basin, including this controversial examination of a sudden outbreak of
violence. Preserved by Documentary Educational Resources, Watertown,
MA. 30 min.
. 1912–25. The Netherlands.
A program from the Netherlands Filmmuseum of colonial
films made for educational, scientific, and propaganda
purposes rather than exotic entertainment. Silent. Approx. 30
min.
Total running time approx. 85 min.
. 1977. Australia. Written and directed
by Philip Noyce. With Gary Foley, Bill Hunter. This debut
feature by the director of Rabbit Proof Fence (2003) takes
us on a vivid journey into the lives of Gary, a young Aboriginal Australian,
and Jack, a drifter, who share a common desire to escape their pasts. 61 min.
. 1977. Australia. Directed by Gillian Armstrong. Screenplay
by John Pleffer, Armstrong. With Ruth Cracknell, Elizabeth Crosby. Armstrong
traces the relationship of two women trapped by male definitions of
their sexuality—a prelude to her acclaimed 1979 feature
My Brilliant Career. 52 min. Program preserved by ScreenSound Australia, Canberra.
. c. 1937.
Mexico. Directed by Alfonso Vergara Andrade. A rare animated
short, preserved by the Cineteca Nacional, Mexico City. 9 min.
. 1941. USA. Directed by John Ford. Screenplay
by Philip Dunne. With Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O’Hara,
Roddy McDowall. Richard Llewellyn’s classic novel
of a Welsh mining family is brought lovingly to the screen
by Ford and producer Darryl F. Zanuck. A joint restoration by the
Academy Film Archive and the UCLA Film and Television Archive, Los Angeles.
120 min.
. 1930. France. Directed by
Jean Vigo. Vigo’s impressionistic chronicle of Nice at Carnival
satirizes the idylls of the rich and exposes the deprivations of
the poor. Preserved by the Cinémathèque Gaumont. 23
min.
.
1931. France. Directed by Jean Vigo. An experimental portrait of
the famed French swimmer. Preserved by the Cinémathèque
Gaumont. 9 min.
. 1935. Spain. Directed by
Jean Grémillon. Screenplay by Grémillon, Juan José
Lorente. With Rosita Díaz Gimeno, María Amparo Bosch.
A young woman enters a convent after her lover abandons her. Grémillon’s
evocation of the Spanish countryside recalls the paintings of El
Greco and Salvador Dalí. Preserved by the Filmoteca Española,
Madrid. In Spanish with English subtitles. 70 min.
Total running time 102 min.
. 1926. France. Directed by Raymond Bernard.
With Charles Dullin, Yvonne Sergyl. Presented in both its silent
and sound versions, this grandiose epic recounting
King Louis XI’s unification of France has been compared
to D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) and was an influence on Sergei Eisenstein’s
Alexander Nevsky (1938). Preserved by the Cinémathèque
Gaumont and the Centre National de la Cinématographie. Approx.
120 min.
. 1919. Germany. Directed
by F. W. Murnau. Screenplay by Robert Wiene. This tinted fragment,
a sultry seduction scene with
Fritz Kortner and Margit Barnay, is all that survives of an early
Murnau feature. Preserved by Filmoteca de Zaragoza and Filmoteca
Española. 2 min.
. 1924. Germany. Directed by F. W.
Murnau. Screenplay by Carl Mayer. With Emil Jannings, Maly Delschaft.
Jannings stars as the downtrodden doorman of a luxury hotel in this
previously unknown American release version of Murnau’s masterpiece.
A joint preservation project of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Stiftung,
Wiesbaden, and L’Immagine Ritrovata, Bologna. Silent with piano
accompaniment by Ben Model. Approx. 88 min.
. 1967. Hong
Kong. Produced by the Shaw Brothers. Directed by Zhang Che. Screenplay
by Ni Kuang, Zhang.
With Jimmy Wang Yu, Qiao Qiao. “Zhang Che’s riveting
revenge thriller is often identified as the key transitional film
between the old school wuxia swordplay picture and what we now think
of as the kung fu movie…. The eponymous hero, Fang Gang, played
with sullen charisma by Jimmy Wang Yu, is an orphaned ‘scholarship
student’ at a ritzy martial arts academy, a resentful commoner
persecuted by the sneering gentry. He endures their bullying stoically,
until his sifu’s spoiled daughter (Qiao Qiao) happens to spy
on him as he chops wood. Infuriated by her own desire, she [lops
off one] of his arms. During a sojourn in the wilderness Fang masters
the unfamiliar art of fighting left-handed with his broken blade,
and returns home to trounce his astonished enemies” (David
Chute). Preserved by Celestial Pictures Inc., Hong Kong. Courtesy
the UCLA Film and Television Archive, Los Angeles. In Mandarin with
English subtitles. 111 min.
. 1971. USA. Directed by Peter
Fonda. Screenplay by Alan Sharp. With Fonda, Verna Bloom, Warren
Oates. Fonda’s
directorial debut has been hailed by Martin Scorsese, Kon Ichikawa,
and Quentin Tarantino as one of the great unsung American Westerns
of the postwar era. In this paean to marital fidelity, Fonda plays
a drifter who returns from the open range to the wife and child he
abandoned years before, penitentially settling on their farm as a
hired hand. With breathtaking cinematography by firsttimer Vilmos
Zsigmond (who the following year would photograph Robert Altman’s
Western McCabe and Mrs. Miller), production design by Oscar nominee
Lawrence G. Paull (Blade Runner), and densely layered editing by
Frank Mazzola, The Hired Hand is a revelatory experiment in style.
Preserved by Fonda, Mazzola, Hamish McAlpine of Tartan Films, Great
Britain, and Bob O’Neil, Executive Director of Restoration
for Universal Pictures, Los Angeles. 90 min.
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