This 20th anniversary edition of To Save and Project includes more than 80 newly preserved features and shorts from 18 countries, many having world or North American premieres and presented in original versions not seen since their initial theatrical releases. The festival opens with the North American premiere of the Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler The Black Pirate (Albert Parker, 1926), introduced by filmmaker Alexander Payne. MoMA and The Film Foundation’s complex restoration faithfully reconstructs the film’s original palette of rich browns and greens, capturing the look of Technicolor’s Process Two such as it hasn’t been seen in nearly 100 years.

Focused programs on music are introduced by the singer-songwriter Judy Collins and DEVO’s Gerald Casale. We also present the world premiere of John Ford’s Arrowsmith (1931) in its original theatrical release version, as well as Andy Warhol’s never-before-seen (1965), which screens in a special program with a newly struck 35mm print of Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Other festival highlights include the North American premieres of films by Chantal Akerman, Agnieszka Holland, Kozaburo Yoshimura, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Menelek Shabazz, Alain Tanner, Agnes Varda, and Wim Wenders, as well as Monta Bell’s Man, Woman and Sin ( 1927); Wong Tin-lam’s The Wild, Wild Rose (1960), a cosmopolitan retelling of Bizet’s Carmen starring Hong Kong’s “mambo girl,” Grace Chang; Aribam Syam Sharma’s The Chosen One (1990), which offers a rare glimpse of moviemaking in the Indian state of Manipur; and two Soviet documentaries from 1929 and 1930 by the Armenian pioneer Hamo Bek-Nazaryan. The New York premieres of William Worthington’s The Dragon Painter (1919), starring Sessue Hayakawa, and Richard Eichberg’s Weimar melodrama Pavement Butterfly (1929), starring Anna May Wong, are presented in tribute to two American actors who radically redefined the ways in which Asians were depicted in Hollywood cinema.

This year’s lineup also includes several banned or severely censored and recut films that have been reconstructed as closely as possible to their original versions, including Tsui Hark’s original, uncut version of Dangerous Encounters: 1st Kind (1980), which spooked the Hong Kong censors in a volatile climate of political instability. International cult classics in pristine new restorations include Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (1971), the wild, existential car chase movie cowritten by Chilean novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante; Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s Lovecraftian drive-in horror movie Messiah of Evil (1974) in a new 35mm print; and Flash Gordon, the 13-chapter Hollywood serial from 1936, widely regarded as one of the greatest comic book movies ever made. Sidebars in To Save and Project include a tribute to the filmmaker and visual anthropologist Skip Norman (one of several programs devoted to African and African diaspora cinema); the celebrated archivist Rick Prelinger presenting two self-curated programs featuring some of his favorite sponsored films, most of them shown in his own unique archival prints; a program of experimental films of the 1960s–80s by the Argentinian artist Narcisa Hirsch; and a program of Kafka-inspired avant-garde 1950s shorts by the London-based Italian emigre Lorenza Mazzetti.

Organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film, MoMA, with Francisco Valente, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film, MoMA, and Cindi Rowell, independent curator.

Schedule:

January 11, 2024:

4:30 pm - Lightning over Water:

Lightning over Water. 1980. West Germany. Directed by Nicholas Ray, Wim Wenders. With Ray, Wenders, Tom Farrell, Susan Ray, Ronee Blakley. North American premiere. 90 min.

During a brief respite from his ill-fated studio production Hammett, Wim Wenders collaborated with the director Nicholas Ray (Rebel without a Cause, In a Lonely Place) on a film about the final weeks of his life. Suffering from terminal cancer but defiant to the end—“I knew that he wanted to work, to die working,” Wenders recalls—Ray lectures college students about The Lusty Men and previews his latest film, the experimental We Can’t Go Home Again, in his Soho loft. Shot by Ed Lachman, Mitch Dubin, and Timothy Ray on film and video, the film’s ghostly images threaten to disintegrate or fade away—an expression, it would seem, of Wenders’s own ambivalence about capturing Ray in such a vulnerable state. Ultimately, however, Lightning over Water testifies to an enduring and unsentimental friendship, transcending mere portraiture to confront, in the starkest way imaginable, the uneasy ethical question of how to represent the dying.

4K digital restoration by Wim Wenders Stiftung at BASIS Berlin Postproduktion laboratory, using the original negative, with funding provided by the Film Foundation and Förderprogramm Filmerbe (FFE); courtesy Janus Films.

7:00 pm - The Black Pirate:

The Black Pirate. 1926. USA. Directed by Albert Parker. Screenplay by Jack Cunningham. With Douglas Fairbanks, Billie Dove, Tempe Pigott, Donald Crisp. North American premiere. Silent, with a new score composed, orchestrated, and conducted by Robert Israel commissioned by MoMA. 100 min.

To Save and Project kicks off on January 11 with the North American premiere of Albert Parker’s The Black Pirate, introduced by filmmaker Alexander Payne (The Holdovers, Election). As MoMA curator Dave Kehr, who helped oversee the painstaking and complicated restoration, observes, “Douglas Fairbanks didn’t get to be the King of Hollywood by doing anything small, and when he decided to make a pirate movie—at the urging, in Hollywood legend, of the child star Jackie Coogan—he wanted color to reflect the famous children’s book illustrations by N. C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle. And so, The Black Pirate became only the third (but by far the most prestigious) feature to be shot in Technicolor’s Process Two, a complex and finicky technology that involved prisms and filters to produce two separate red- and green-tinted filmstrips, which were then cemented together to produce show prints.

Dave Kehr continues: “Keeping the story deliberately simple, Fairbanks and his director, Albert Parker, assembled an archetypal, ur-pirate tale with Doug as an aristocrat who infiltrates a pirate band to avenge his father and rescue a kidnapped princess (Billie Dove). The spectacular stunts set a high mark for Hollywood acrobatics, including one scene—in which Fairbanks slides with a knife down the length of a sail, slicing it in half—that every subsequent pirate movie worth its salt was required to recreate.

“The restoration of The Black Pirate required returning to the original camera negatives for the first time in 50 years. Fairbanks shot the film with five cameras simultaneously, creating four color negatives and one black-and-white. The restoration process required the painstaking review of hundreds of film cans containing unedited raw footage from the B, C, and D negatives. Additionally, three edited reels of the long-lost A negative—the preferred source—were rediscovered in the process and became central to the restoration.

“Modern digital restoration techniques were used to faithfully reconstruct the film’s original color scheme. The red and green color records were precisely realigned, and missing shots were culled from across the different negatives. Although no original color prints of The Black Pirate are known to survive, an early test reel printed in Technicolor’s dye-transfer process, combined with documentation in the Technicolor archive, allowed the original look to be recreated. With its rich browns and greens, the results look quite a bit different from the thin, gray colors of the previous photochemical restoration.”

New 4K digital restoration of the image by The Museum of Modern Art and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Golden Globe Foundation. Special thanks to Alexander Payne and the British Film Institute.

January 12, 2024:

1:00 pm: Goraczka:

Goraczka (Fever). 1981. Poland. Directed by Agnieszka Holland. Screenplay by Krzysztof Teodor Toeplitz. With Olgierd Lukaszewicz, Barbara Grabowska, Adam Ferency. North American premiere. In Polish; English subtitles. 116 min.

Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa, The Secret Garden, The Wire) has recently earned the violent condemnation of the fascists for her new film The Green Border, a humane and complex drama about Syrian refugees at the border of Ukraine and Poland. But Holland, who was the focus of a MoMA retrospective in 2008, has been a fearless voice of independent creativity for the entirety of her 50-year career. She and her family have been directly affected by her country’s history of Nazism, Communism, and anti-Semitism, at times in tragic ways, and her 1981 film Fever was banned (like her film A Lonely Woman that same year) even before martial law was declared in Poland and she was driven into exile. The film, about Polish anarchist resistance to Russian forces following the failed 1905 revolution, is treated in a manner worthy of Dostoevsky (as well as her own mentor, Andrzej Wajda), and remains a powerful study in political commitment and cowardice.

2K digital restoration courtesy Wytwornia Filmow Dokumentalnych I Fabularnych.

4:00 pm - Menelik Shabazz's Burning an Illusion and Two Shorts by Fronza Woods:

Burning an Illusion. 1981. UK. Written and directed by Menelik Shabazz. With Cassie MacFarlane, Victor Romero Evans, Beverley Martin. Remastering in 2K by the British Film Institute; courtesy Janus Films. New York premiere. 106 min.

Out of the racially volatile climate of 1980s Thatcherite England, a period rent by police brutality and the criminal neglect of Afro-Caribbean and African immigrant communities, there emerged some singular, defiant voices of Black independent cinema, among them Horace Ové, Isaac Julien, and John Akomfrah. The Barbados-born Menelik Shabazz was another of these, and his feature debut, Burning an Illusion, is radical in its deceptive ordinariness, portraying a young Black woman from a supportive working-class London family whose political consciousness is awakened by her live-in lover. The film would anticipate Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, much as Shabazz’s documentary The Story of Lovers Rock would inspire Steve McQueen’s television series Small Axe.

Killing Time. 1979. USA. Written and directed by Fronza Woods. With Woods. 16mm preservation by the Academy Film Archive; courtesy Women Make Movies. New York premiere. 9 min.

The deadpan wit of Fronza Woods’s brilliant short—about a woman hung up on the most suitable outfit in which to kill herself—belies a serious reflection on the image and place of Black women in contemporary American society.

Fannie’s Film. 1981. USA. Directed by Fronza Woods. With Fannie Drayton. 16mm preservation by the Academy Film Archive; courtesy Women Make Movies. 15 min.

“Windows are a reality and a metaphor in this portrait of a 65-year-old Black woman who works as a cleaner in a Pilates studio” (Amy Taubin).

This program is co-presented with the African Film Festival New York.

Program 130 min.

7:00 pm - Les Creatures:

Les Créatures (The Creatures). 1966. France. Written and directed by Agnes Varda. With Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli, Eva Dahlbeck. North American premiere. In French; English subtitles. 116 min.

Agnes Varda described The Creatures as a “love story, between people who don’t talk.” Olivier Assayas, in turn, has called it a film that in 1966 “rivaled in audacity with Persona, Fahrenheit 451, or Blow Up ….[W]ithout a doubt the strangest entry in a body of work where fantasy and enigma, clarity and mystery, coexist in a way that is rare among filmmakers.” Set on the stark, foggy island of Noirmoutier in winter, its haunting musical score by Pierre Barbaud incorporating the perpetual echoing sound of lashing waves, The Creatures is a conceptually playful if disturbing reflection on the solitude of marriage and creativity. Michel Piccoli—acting as a stand-in for Varda’s husband, Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg)—stars as a sci-fi novelist whoinvents “imaginary adventures” for the local islanders as the inspiration for his latest project while his wife (Catherine Deneuve, standing in for Varda herself) is mutely unnerved by her own imagined dangers (a crab, a chess game, other people, a baby). Or perhaps the stand-ins are the other way around?

4K digital restoration by Ciné-Tamaris and the CNC – Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée, with the support of the CNC, SHE ECHOES, and CHANEL; courtesy Janus Films.

Keller Dorian: Film gaufré: Sonia Delaunay. 1926. France. Directed by Albert Keller-Dorian. North American premiere. Silent. 3 min.

“In 1926, Robert and Sonia Delaunay made an experimental short film in collaboration with Chevreau, the cameraman. This was the first publicly screened film to adapt the Keller-Dorian-Berthon lenticular process for use indoors under artificial lighting conditions…. The work survives only in an incomplete form. It was originally projected during the course of a lecture by Sonia Delaunay at the Sorbonne on January 27th, 1927, and represents a series of mannequins photographed against a background of textiles and paintings. The last shot of this short reel shows Sonia Delaunay herself enthroned amid brightly coloured draped fabrics” (François Ede).

4K digital restoration by the CNC – Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée; courtesy the Delaunay estate – Pracusa.

January 13, 2024:

1:30 pm - Monta Bell’s Man, Woman and Sin and other Hollywood Rediscoveries:

Man, Woman and Sin. 1927. USA. Directed by Monta Bell. Screenplay by Alice D. G. Miller. With John Gilbert, Jeanne Eagels, Gladys Brockwell. Digital restoration courtesy George Eastman Museum, with funding provided by David Stenn. North American premiere. Silent. 70 min.

Unseen for nearly a century, Monta Bell’s Man, Woman and Sin is presented on January 13 by screenwriter and biographer David Stenn, who writes, “MGM contract director Monta Bell (obscure today, but once regarded on the level of Lubitsch) used his own background as a Washington, DC, cub newspaper reporter as the basis of this sophisticated psychodrama. Teaming top Hollywood romancer John Gilbert with Broadway legend-in-her-own-lifetime Jeanne Eagels ensured a hit, but the film was withdrawn due to rights issues and long thought lost. This restoration, the first in almost a century, uses original 35mm elements and original tints.”

screening with

Adele Astaire screen test for Dark Victory : Adele Astaire. 1936. USA. With Adele Astaire, Edith Atwater. Digital restoration courtesy George Eastman Museum. World premiere. 5 min.

Arguably a bigger star than Fred Astaire when they performed on the vaudeville stage, Adele Astaire never made it in the movies. In this rare screen test for David O. Selznick’s Dark Victory, virtually the only film footage of Astaire known to exist, she plays a dramatic scene and performs “’S Wonderful,” the song that George and Ira Gershwin wrote especially for her. The test was shot by Rudolph Maté (Stella Dallas, Love Affair, Gilda) and directed by H. C. Potter (Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House).

Fox Movietone News story 5-246 [Abe Lyman Orchestra – outtakes]. 1930. USA. Digital preservation courtesy Moving Image Research Collections, University of South Carolina. 12 min.

Abe Lyman Orchestra is an understated title for a film that features what David Stenn describes as “raw, unreleased newsreel footage of America’s hottest Jazz Age band and teenage sensation Anita Page performing live on Hollywood Boulevard as people literally dance in the streets.” 5 min.

Program 87 min.

4:30 pm - Andy Warhol’sBitch and Mike Nichols’s Who’s

Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: A Loaded Conversation:

Put simply—though marriage and dinner company never are—Mike Nichols observed that "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is about a couple who comes home late after a party. She has invited another couple over for a nightcap. They drink and they argue and then the guests go home.” Celebrating the publication of a new book by Philip Gefter, Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, we’re screening a pristine 35mm print from the Academy Film Archive on a double bill with the world premiere digital restoration of Andy Warhol’s (1965). Between the two screenings, Gefter takes part in an onstage conversation with Greg Pierce, director of film and video at the Andy Warhol Museum; actor, poet, photographer, and filmmaker Gerard Malanga; and Mark Harris, author of Mike Nichols: A Life.

1965. USA. Directed by Andy Warhol. With Marie Menken, Willard Maas, Gerard Malanga, Edie Sedgwick. Digital restoration courtesy the Andy Warhol Museum. World premiere. 66 min.

“Andy Warhol called Marie Menken and Willard Maas ‘the last of the great bohemians,’ and, in 1965, made, his real-life parody of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with Willard and Marie sitting on the couch in their living room, drunk and arguing on a Sunday afternoon. Unscripted, shot with a stationary camera in his signature home-movie documentary style, Warhol’sBitch has never before been seen by the public—until now…” (Philip Gefter).

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 1966. USA. Directed by Mike Nichols. Screenplay by Ernest Lehman. With Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, George Segal, Sandy Dennis. 35mm restoration by the Academy Film Archive; courtesy Warner Bros., Park Circus. 131 min.

“Edward Albee rejected the idea of a single inspiration for George and Martha, his characters in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), although, in response to one interviewer’s question, he alluded to Willard Maas, a poet with whom he taught at Wagner College, and his wife, Marie Menken, an experimental filmmaker. Known for their drunken weekend salons and marital arguments in front of their guests, Maas and Menken were at the center of a significant bohemian circle of New York poets and artists. ‘Edward [Albee] used to come here every time to eat and just sit and listen while Willard and I argued,’ Menken recalled. ‘Then he wrote Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? That’s supposed to be me and Willard arguing about my miscarriage.’ All of this is to say that George and Martha, despite their slovenly drinking and unsavory psychological cruelty, had their origins at the center of the thriving, urban, mid-century anti-establishment zeitgeist” (Philip Gefter).

Program 252 min.

January 14, 2024:

1:00 pm - Rick Prelinger Presents “The Spectrum of Sponsorship,” Program 1:

Were it not for the lifelong heroic efforts of Rick Prelinger, an archivist, filmmaker, writer, and educator, an entire history of American cinema would be largely lost and gone forever: that of so-called “useful,” or purpose-driven, films like advertising, educational shorts, and industrials. In 2002, Prelinger’s remarkable collection of some 60,000 films was acquired by the Library of Congress, a collection that has since grown by tens of thousands with the addition of home movies and film ephemera. As a special guest of To Save and Project, Prelinger presents two self-curated programs featuring some of his favorite sponsored films, most of them shown in his own unique archival prints. He observes, “Today, corporations, associations and government agencies reach people principally through websites. But during the age of film (starting at the dawn of cinema and ending in the 1980s) they reached people through sponsored films—perhaps as many as 300,000 titles, many of which no longer survive. Sponsored films were produced to encourage consumers to buy goods and services, promote companies and organizations, train workers, and strengthen the free-enterprise system. The extant body of sponsored films expresses a near-infinite range of subjects, treatments, and esthetic strategies, which we celebrate in this program.” All descriptions by Rick Prelinger.

Beginning with two magisterial works that stage industrial production and Cold War consumerism as grand spectacles and ending with a promotional film that speaks the language of the 1950s avant-garde, this program presents four distinct non-theatrical masterpieces, all projected on film, three in archival prints.

4:00 pm - Rick Prelinger Presents “The Spectrum of Sponsorship,” Program 2:

Were it not for the lifelong heroic efforts of Rick Prelinger, an archivist, filmmaker, writer, and educator, an entire history of American cinema would be largely lost and gone forever: that of so-called “useful,” or purpose-driven, films like advertising, educational shorts, and industrials. In 2002, Prelinger’s remarkable collection of some 60,000 films was acquired by the Library of Congress, a collection that has since grown by tens of thousands with the addition of home movies and film ephemera. As a special guest of To Save and Project, Prelinger presents two self-curated programs featuring some of his favorite sponsored films, most of them shown in his own unique archival prints. He observes, “Today, corporations, associations and government agencies reach people principally through websites. But during the age of film (starting at the dawn of cinema and ending in the 1980s) they reached people through sponsored films—perhaps as many as 300,000 titles, many of which no longer survive. Sponsored films were produced to encourage consumers to buy goods and services, promote companies and organizations, train workers, and strengthen the free-enterprise system. The extant body of sponsored films expresses a near-infinite range of subjects, treatments, and esthetic strategies, which we celebrate in this program.” All descriptions by Rick Prelinger.

This program’s play of genres, including mid-continent noir, industrial musical, corporate spoof, Federal populism, and Cold War scare film, shows the breadth and the surprising course of sponsorship as expressed in non-theatrical film.

6:30 pm - Vanishing Point:

Vanishing Point. 1971. USA. Directed by Richard C. Sarafian. Screenplay by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Malcolm Hart, Barry Hall. With Barry Newman, Cleavon Little, Dean Jagger. 99 min.

One of the greatest existential car chase movies of all time, Vanishing Point was cowritten by the devilishly playful Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante (under the pseudonym Guillermo Cain, a nod to the noir mystery writer James M. Cain). We’re celebrating the publication of a definitive new book on the film and its cultural impact by inviting its author, Robert M. Rubin, to introduce the screening on January 14. “Vanishing Point,” as Rubin observes, “is nominally the saga of a speed-addled Vietnam vet on the lam in a Dodge Challenger. It’s also a modern Western, a dystopian allegory of our surveillance society, and a love letter to the muscle car, all rolled into one. No surprise it’s become a cult classic, adored and paid homage to by Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, Bruce Springsteen, Richard Prince, Alberto Moravia, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Primal Scream, Audioslave, and countless others. In the fifty-plus years since the film’s release, the lore and legends around it have grown like Topsy.”

4K digital restoration by Twentieth Century Fox, with lab work by Cineric; courtesy Walt Disney Studios.

January 15, 2024:

3:30 pm - Yam Daabo:

Yam Daabo (The Choice). 1987. Burkina Faso. Written and directed by Idrissa Ouedraogo. With Moussa Bologo, Aoua Guiraud, Assita Ouedraogo. New York premiere. In More; English subtitles. 78 min.

The excitement in Burkina Faso was palpable when, on August 4, 1983, the charismatic Burkinabe military officer Thomas Sankara staged a revolutionary coup, promising to bring Marxist reforms and an ethos of African self-reliance to his impoverished nation and, indeed, to the continent as a whole. As Mohamed Challouf, the organizer of Italy’s first African film festival, would recall, “Ousmane Sembène, Tahar Cheriaa, Med Hondo, Lionel Ngakane, Jean-Michel Tchissoukou, Haile Gerima were all at the forefront of supporting the actions of this young president who wanted to restore Africa’s dignity and free it from neo-colonialism, corruption and the crushing world economic order. In 1987, at FESPACO, I attended the world premiere of Yam Daabo. The ‘choice’ the title refers to is the courageous decision of a rural family from the Sahel to refuse international aid from USAID and set off looking for other lands, but also for their own dignity and emancipation…. My happiness was indescribable: Idrissa [Ouedraogo] proved to be a master, interacting with the great African pioneers….” Only months after the festival world premiere of Yam Daabo, on October 15, 1987, Sankara was assassinated by troops led by his former friend and associate Blaise Compaore.

4K digital restoration by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata and L’Image Retrouvee laboratories, in collaboration with Les Films de la Plaine and the family of Idrissa Ouedraogo, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the FEPACI and UNESCO—in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna—to help locate, restore and disseminate African cinema; courtesy Janus Films.

Le Senegal et le Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres. 1966. Senegal. Directed by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra. North American premiere. In French; English subtitles. 28 min.

Long believed lost, this promotional newsreel is an indelible record of a watershed moment in political and cultural history, the first World Festival of Black Arts, held in the capital of Dakar between April 1 and 24, 1966, at the instigation of Senegal’s first president, the poet Leópold Sedar Senghor, under the auspices of the influential magazine Presence Africaine and the African Cultural Society. The festival attracted an international who’s who of writers, artists, dancers, and musicians including, as seen in the film, Aime Cesaire, Jean Price-Mars, Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, Aminata Fall, Robert Hayden, and many others.

4K digital restoration by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in collaboration with the Ministère de la Culture et du Patrimoine Historique de Senegal – Direction du Cinema, with funding from the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the FEPACI and UNESCO—in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna—to help locate, restore and disseminate African cinema; courtesy Janus Films.

This program is co-presented with the African Film Festival New York.

6:30 pm - Bushman:

Bushman. 1971. USA. Written and directed by David Schickele. With Schickele, Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam, Elaine Featherstone, Jack Nance. New York premiere. 99 min.

“For a few days you are unable to think of anything else,” Il Cinema Ritrovato co-director Cecilia Cenciarelli rightly observes of this astonishing rediscovery by David Shickele, the younger brother of Peter (aka P.D.Q. Bach). Interweaving past and present (and the organ music of Henry Purcell’s Ground in C Minor with tribal chants and Yoruba percussion), Schickele’s film focuses on his friend Gabriel, who straddles two worlds with firm roots in neither. The young Nigerian, having escaped a bloody civil war back home—“entering its second year and no end is in sight”—finds himself adrift in a San Francisco riven by its own cultural antipathies and political violence. “With one eye on cinéma vérité, the European new waves and early Cassavetes, and the other on African pioneers like Sembène, Ecaré and Hondo,” Cenciarelli writes, “Schickele not only condemns the reactionary and racist America which will later frame Gabriel on the slightest of pretexts, but also the liberal America of progressive intellectuals who quote McLuhan and Malraux but lapse into rhetoric and misunderstand the deeper meaning of human experience. With irony, poetry and a delicate touch, Bushman leads us into the darkness of the beginnings of an odyssey.”

4K digital restoration by University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and The Film Foundation from the original negatives, funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Additional support provided by Peter Conheim, Cinema Preservation Alliance; courtesy Milestone Films and Kino Lorber.

January 18, 2024:

4:30 pm - Skip Norman’s Blues People, Program 1:

As a prelude to the Anthology Film Archives retrospective opening on January 19, To Save and Project pays tribute to the writer, director, cinematographer, and visual anthropologist Skip Norman (aka Wilbert Reuben Norman Jr.) (1933–2015) with new restorations of his work spanning two decades, from 1966 to 1986. These programs testify to the singular talents and unique experiences of a Black American artist who lived and worked in the US and West Germany in the late 1960s and 1970s, making still-powerful and provocative films like Blues People (1969) and Strange Fruit (1969), and collaborating with Helke Sander, Lothar Lambert, Harun Farocki, Mirra Bank, and the poet Nikki Giovanni on films that remain politically charged to this day. As Jesse Cumming, the curator of the Skip Norman retrospective, notes, “Norman was a member of the inaugural cohort of students at Berlin’s DFFB Film School, where he befriended and worked alongside a group of artists and activists interested in the revolutionary potential of film. In addition to collaborating as a cinematographer and assistant director on the work of these classmates, Norman authored a remarkable but little-seen body of documentary, experimental, and essay filmmaking in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Building upon and contributing to the incendiary work of his peers decrying the US war in Vietnam and racism back home, Norman produced a number of equally urgent films about his experience as a Black artist inhabiting, and observing, a double life on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Blues People. 1969. West Germany. Directed by Skip Norman. 17 min.

Subjektitude (Subjectitude). 1966. West Germany. Directed by Helke Sander. Assistant director of photography Skip Norman. In German; English subtitles. 4 min.

1 Berlin-Harlem. 1974. West Germany. Directed by Lothar Lambert, Wolfram Zobus. Cinematography by Skip Norman, Reza Dabui. With Ingrid Caven, Tally Brown, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Gunther Kaufmann. In English, German; English subtitles. 100 min.

Program 121 min.

7:30 pm -Skip Norman’s Blues People, Program 2:

As a prelude to the Anthology Film Archives retrospective opening on January 19, To Save and Project pays tribute to the writer, director, cinematographer, and visual anthropologist Skip Norman (aka Wilbert Reuben Norman Jr.) (1933–2015) with new restorations of his work spanning two decades, from 1966 to 1986. These programs testify to the singular talents and unique experiences of a Black American artist who lived and worked in the US and West Germany in the late 1960s and 1970s, making still-powerful and provocative films like Blues People (1969) and Strange Fruit (1969), and collaborating with Helke Sander, Lothar Lambert, Harun Farocki, Mirra Bank, and the poet Nikki Giovanni on films that remain politically charged to this day. As Jesse Cumming, the curator of the Skip Norman retrospective, notes, “Norman was a member of the inaugural cohort of students at Berlin’s DFFB Film School, where he befriended and worked alongside a group of artists and activists interested in the revolutionary potential of film. In addition to collaborating as a cinematographer and assistant director on the work of these classmates, Norman authored a remarkable but little-seen body of documentary, experimental, and essay filmmaking in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Building upon and contributing to the incendiary work of his peers decrying the US war in Vietnam and racism back home, Norman produced a number of equally urgent films about his experience as a Black artist inhabiting, and observing, a double life on both sides of the Atlantic."

Strange Fruit. 1969. West Germany. Directed by Skip Norman. 29 min.

Ihre Zeitungen (Their Newspapers). 1968. West Germany. Directed by Harun Farocki. Cinematography by Skip Norman. In German; English subtitles. 17 min.

2K digital restorations courtesy Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek (Berlin). North American premiere.

Spirit to Spirit: Nikki Giovanni. 1986. USA. Directed by Mirra Bank. Cinematography by Skip Norman. Digital restoration by the Academy Film Archive and the Women’s Film Preservation Fund, with support from the Leon Levy Foundation; courtesy Nobody’s Girls, Inc. New York premiere. 29 min.

January 19, 2024:

1:00 pm - The Go-Between:

The Go-Between. 1971. UK. Directed by Joseph Losey. Screenplay by Harold Pinter. With Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Dominic Guard. 114 min.

Marcelos Zarvos’s insinuatingly sinister music for Todd Haynes’s latest film, May December, is a clever reworking of Michel Legrand’s own darkly romantic score for The Go-Between, providing an excuse (as if we need one) to revisit Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter’s devastating adaptation of the popular 1953 novel by L. P. Hartley. A similar foray into the perils of childhood innocence, The Go-Between is told through the eyes of a boy who becomes entangled in a love triangle (Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Edward Fox) during a summer holiday spent on his schoolmate’s lavish country estate. As Haynes observes, “[Legrand’s] score sits so upfront and ahead of and beyond the ultimate events that unfold in that particular storyline, even more extraneously than they do in May December, where there is a question of criminality and culpability—you hear that music and you think it’s going to be a crime drama, there’s going to be a murder. The audience is immediately slapped into a state of alert about where the story is leading…. The music keeps sweetening that and enforcing those questions, but with a mischievous sense that this can be a pleasurable inquisition as we watch it.”

4K digital restoration by StudioCanal.

7:00 pm - Lorenza Mazzetti in 1950s London:

The remarkable and largely forgotten career of Lorenza Mazzetti (1927–2020), an Italian postwar emigrée who lived and made deeply personal films in 1950s London—earning the admiration of Lindsay Anderson and other prominent figures of the Free Cinema movement even as she went beyond their documentary concerns—is traced in this program organized by William Fowler of the BFI National Archive. Fowler writes, “Lorenza Mazzetti arrived in London from Italy in 1951. The survivor of a wartime atrocity in which her Jewish relatives were murdered, she quickly made friends with other artists. Though associated with Great Britain’s realist Free Cinema movement, her stark yet playful films, all shot on location in a bleak and battle-scarred London, take the form of psychodramas that were influenced by Kafka’s dark absurdity, the wartime horrors she had endured, and her distance from her twin sister still living in Italy. Mazzetti’s three deeply poetic avant-garde narratives, all newly preserved by the BFI National Archive, stand as a testament to her radical vision. Complementing these restorations is Brighid Lowe’s new film portrait.” Film descriptions are written by William Fowler.

January 20, 2024:

1:30 pm - Großstadtschmetterling: Ballade einer Liebe (Pavement Butterfly):

Großstadtschmetterling: Ballade einer Liebe (Pavement Butterfly). 1929. Germany/UK. Directed by Richard Eichberg. Screenplay by Adolf Lantz. With Anna May Wong, Alexander Granach, Nien Soen Ling. New York premiere. Silent, with musical accompaniment. 96 min.

Yunte Huang, award-winning author of the new book Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong's Rendezvous with American History (2023), presents the New York premiere of Pavement Butterfly on January 20. Huang observes, “Anna May Wong’s second German film, Pavement Butterfly was shot in France and set alternately in Paris and the French Riviera. It features Wong as a Chinese variety dancer who models for a young artist and in the process falls in love with him. As suggested by the title phrase, Pavement Butterfly introduces a new character type, a role that uniquely belongs to Wong. While the word butterfly implies the familiar Madame Butterfly, and the sorrowful ending confirms the film’s place in the Orientalist pedagogy, Pavement points not only to a new setting for this old character type but also to the advent of a new figure in Weimar Germany as well as European cinema at the time: the vamp.”

4K digital restoration by DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum; courtesy Beta Film

Tragodie einer Urauffuhrung aka Wenn die Filmkleberin gebummelt hat (When a Filmcutter Blunders). 1926. Germany. Directed by O. F. Mauer. With Alice Kempen. New York premiere. Silent, with musical accompaniment. 14 min.

Inspired by Entr’acte, the 1923 French Dadaist classic by René Clair and Francis Picabia, this fascinating, forgotten satire pokes fun at both avant-garde moviemaking and mainstream film production and exhibition in Weimar Germany, focusing in particular on the prudish censors and moviegoers who would scorn the hedonistic excesses of the New Woman. A filmkleberin (film splicer) escapes her workaday doldrums by drifting into romantic fantasy. Her dreams of kissing a handsome young man suddenly become a film strip across which the word “Censorship!” suddenly appears, and all hell breaks loose when she accidentally splices this together with newsreel footage of the movie star Lil Dagover and a parody of a so-called Aufklarungsfilme (sex education film).

4K digital restoration by DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum; courtesy F. W. Murnau Stiftung.

4:30 pm - The Dragon Painter:

The Dragon Painter. 1919. USA. Directed by William Worthington. Screenplay by Richard Schayer. With Sessue Hayakawa, Tsuru Aoki, Edward Peil Sr. New York premiere. Silent. 61 min.

Like Anna May Wong, the Japanese American movie star and producer Sessue Hayakawa was instrumental in redefining the ways in which Asians were depicted in Hollywood cinema, a story all-too-often marred, now as then, by racist caricature. Yunte Huang, the award-winning author of books on Charlie Chan, the “original Siamese Twins” Chang and Eng Bunker, and now Anna May Wong, presents two films starring Hayakawa. Writing of The Dragon Painter, he observes, “Palming off Yosemite as authentic Japanese mountains, The Dragon Painter is one of the finest productions by Sessue Hayakawa’s Haworth Pictures Corporation. Based on a story by Mary McNeil Fenollosa—widow of the most famous American Japanologist of the era—the film portrays a mad painter who has lived like a savage in the mountains since childhood, searching for his beloved taken away by the spirits and turned into a dragon one thousand years ago. A timeless tale of an artist both blessed and cursed by genius, The Dragon Painter is a cinematic Pygmalion in full Oriental splendor.”

35mm print from the 4K digital restoration by San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Eye Filmmuseum, and George Eastman Museum; courtesy Milestone Films and Kino Lorber.

The Last of the Line. 1914. USA. Directed by Jay Hunt, Thomas H. Ince. Screenplay by C. Gardner Sullivan. With Joe Goodboy, Sessue Hayakawa, Tsuru Aoki. . Silent. 20 min.

Jay Hunt and Thomas H. Ince’s The Last of the Line had a direct influence on Martin Scorsese in making Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorsese recalls, “I want you to see The Last of the Line, which I saw for the ?rst time when I was young, for the presence of real Lakota Natives in many key roles, and for the unusual point of view, which truly expresses the tragedy of Native experience. Interestingly enough, the son of the chief is played by Sessue Hayakawa, who was a great star around that time. In any event, [the film deals with] the destruction of the very fabric of the culture of the Indigenous people, and particularly the guy [Joe Goodboy] who plays the chief. I think he was 80 years old at the time, not an actor. The last image of him mourning his son, it’s as if it just speaks for the loss of all those cultures. There’s something about it, because it has to do with Christian symbolism—and that’s something that always stuck with me.”

35mm preservation courtesy The Museum of Modern Art, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation.

7:00 pm - Ye mei gui zhi lia:

Ye mei gui zhi lia (The Wild, Wild Rose). 1960. China. Directed by Wong Tin-lam. Screenplay by Qin Yifu (aka Nellie Chin Yu). With Grace Chang, Chang Yang, Dolly Soo Fung. North American premiere. In Mandarin; English subtitles. 134 min.

Long before Wong Kar Wai and Tsai Ming-Liang made melodrama out of popular musical ballads (and Johnnie To action out of balletic choreography), there was Wong Tin-lam, a prolific Hong Kong director of musicals, tearjerkers, and wuxia (martial arts movies). Wong found his muse in the iconic singer and actress Grace Chang—the embodiment of the New Chinese Woman as a “mambo girl”—collaborating with her on six films, including The Wild, Wild Rose, which remains beloved to this day among a certain generation of Chinese audiences. A cosmopolitan retelling of Bizet’s Carmen, the film is best remembered for Grace Chang’s nightclub numbers, about which the scholar Kevin B. Lee would observe, “The butchiness of her stentorian singing makes her ripe for camp appreciation among contemporary Sino-queers, including Tsai Ming-Liang, who offered touchingly makeshift homages to her song and dance numbers in The Hole (1999).”

4K digital restoration by Hong Kong Film Archive; courtesy of Cathay-Keris Films Pte Ltd.

January 21, 2024:

1:30 pm - The Pilgrim:

The Pilgrim. 1923. USA. Written and directed by Charles Chaplin. With Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Sydney Chaplin, Mai Wells. North American premiere. Silent, with score by Chaplin recorded in 1959 for The Chaplin Revue at Shepperton Studios. 46 min.

One of the cleverest of Charlie Chaplin’s shorts (or, more accurately, featurettes), shot in record speed to fulfill his First National contract, The Pilgrim makes short work of smalltown pieties—and according to historian Brian Cady, even the Ku Klux Klan took umbrage. As the Tramp escapes prison disguised as a newly arrived pastor in Devil’s Gulch, Texas, his pantomime sermon of the David and Goliath story alone is worth the price of admission. In fact, Chaplin intended the film as a comical homage to the Westerns of William S. Hart, and the inspired climax at the US-Mexican border takes on a whole new meaning in today’s climate of anti-immigrant nativism.

4K digital restoration by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory with material supplied by Roy Export SAS, Paris, as part of the Chaplin Project; courtesy Janus Films.

Sherlock Jr. 1924. USA. Directed by Buster Keaton. Screenplay by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, Joe Mitchell. With Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Joe Keaton. Silent, with musical accompaniment. 47 min.

When the floor sweeper and projectionist of a local cinema falls asleep on the job, he imagines he’s become a crack detective in a race against time to rescue his kidnapped sweetheart and her purloined watch. Sherlock Jr. is one of Buster Keaton’s most brilliantly crafted pieces of montage, a comical collision of the physical and the cerebral, the mechanical and the human, that the Surrealists proudly claimed as one of their own. Of this ultimate movie Dream-Work, the great Walter Kerr observes, “In his dazzling film-within-a-film Keaton illustrates basic theories of continuity and cutting more vividly and with greater precision than theorists themselves have ever been able to do. But the analysis is not in Keaton’s head. It is in the film, he worked only with the thing itself, creating what amounts to theory out of his body, his camera, his fingers, a pair of scissors.”

4K digital restoration courtesy Lobster Films.

4:00 pm - The Avant-Garde in France: Alberto Cavalcanti and Dmitri Kirsanoff:

Rien que les heures. 1926. France. Written and directed by Alberto Cavalcanti. With Blanche Bernis, Nina Chousvalowa, Philippe Heriat, Clifford McLaglen. North American premiere. 48 min.

With its lush and brooding atmosphere, the Brazilian-born Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures heralded a new film genre, the city symphony, and did for Paris what Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manahatta did in 1921 for New York: burnish the romance of the new metropolis in our collective subconscious, tracing in a melodic arc from dawn to dusk to dawn the intricate choreographies of the man in the crowd and machines in concert with nature; the rhythms of rain and regulated time; the abstract geometries of pattern and movement and shadow. Throughout, Cavalcanti experiments in dazzling ways with montage, double exposure, and slow motion while also inserting sly Marxist critiques of material want and greed.

4K digital restoration by Les Films du Pantheon, with the support of the CNC – Centre national du cinema et de l’image animee and the Cinematheque francaise, in collaboration with Les Films du Jeudi, EYE Filmmuseum and the BFI National Archive; courtesy Les Films du Jeudi.

Brumes d’automne (Autumn Mists). 1929. France. Written and directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff. With Nadia Sibirskaia. North American premiere.12 min.

One of the great avant-gardists of French cinema, Dimitri Kirsanoff was born, as historian Lenny Borger notes, “Markus David Kaplan in a Jewish Lithuanian community in Tartu, Estonia, in 1899. In 1919, his father was assassinated by the Bolsheviks. He emigrated to France the following year and adopted the name Dimitri Kirsanoff, in homage to a character in Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons. He studied music with Pablo Casals and played cello in several Paris cinema orchestras, where his contemporary and friend Jean Gremillon accompanied him on violin.” Autumn Mists, which like Menilmontant stars Kirsanoff’s wife Nadia Sibirskaia (nee Genevieve Lebas, a fresh-faced, petite Bretonne), is the interior portrait of a woman facing the end of a love affair. Cinematheque francaise founder Henri Langois observed, “There is nothing more beautiful than when, saddened, she slowly walks along the muddy path, melancholic and tender.”

4K digital restoration by Lobster Films and the Cinematheque francaise with the support of the CNC; courtesy Lobster Films.

Menilmontant. 1926. France. Written and directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff. With Nadia Sibirskaia, Yolande Beaulieu, Guy Belmont. North American premiere. 46 min.

“We have just discovered a new Lillian Gish!” Jean Tedesco, the director of the Theatre du Vieux-Colombier, proclaimed upon discovering Nadia Sibirskaia in Menilmontant (a film he premiered to great success in February 1926 on an intriguing bill with Charlie Chaplin’s The Pilgrim). Sibirskaia’s husband, Dimitri Kirsanoff, eschewing intertitles in favor of the musical language of “absolute cinema,” makes a poetic realist film avant la lettre, a seedy Parisian tale in which two orphans are brutally exploited by a pimp.

4K digital restoration by Lobster Films and the Cinematheque francaise with the support of the CNC; courtesy Lobster Films.

All films silent with musical accompaniment. Program 106 min.

January 22, 2024:

4:00 pm - Arrowsmith:

Arrowsmith [original theatrical release]. 1931. USA. Directed by John Ford. Screenplay by Sidney Howard. With Ronald Colman, Helen Hayes, Richard Bennett, Clarence Brooks, Myrna Loy. World premiere. 101 min.

To Save and Project presents the world premiere of John Ford’s Arrowsmith in its original theatrical release, newly restored by The Library of Congress from a nitrate print owned by the film’s star, Ronald Colman, that’s 10 minutes longer than subsequent versions. Based on Sinclair Lewis’ 1925 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a pioneering medical researcher on a quest to find the cure for bubonic plague—a journey that leads him to stray far from his rural Minnesota home, to an island in the West Indies and an affair with a married woman (Myrna Loy)--John Ford’s adaptation was a critical success, earning 4 Oscar nominations including Best Picture. And while a thematic departure from his silent Westerns like The Iron Horse, Four Sons, and Three Bad Men, Arrowsmith does have the hallmarks of a Ford picture in its concern for what Peter Bogdanovich described as “the burden of duty, tradition, honor and family,” as well as its unusually ennobling portrait of a Black American, the Harvard-educated doctor played by Clarence Brooks.

4K digital restoration by the Library of Congress and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

7:00 pm - An Evening with Jamie Nares:

Born in London, Jamie Nares is a transgender painter and filmmaker who moved to New York in 1974, where she quickly became a leading member of the No Wave cinema movement and the Downtown music scene, performing with James Chance and Jim Jarmusch. On January 22, she presents the world premiere of MoMA’s new digital preservation of Arabian Lights, an until now virtually unseen Super 8mm film she co-directed with Edit deAk in 1977. deAk (1948–2017), a writer, critic, occasional artist, and actress who moved to New York in the late 1960s, was a leading thinker on the downtown scene in the 1980s, and together with Rene Ricard (1946–2014) and Diego Cortez (1946–2021) she contributed to conceptual art and filmmaking in the city after Andy Warhol. deAk also cofounded the influential journal Art-Rite (1973–78) with Walter Robinson and the nonprofit artist bookstore Printed Matter, Inc.

Arabian Lights is the second of only two Super 8mm films deAk is known to have fully edited to completion, and the only work she produced outside the New York club scene. During an extended romantic holiday in Egypt in 1977 with Jamie (then James) Nares, the two young visual artists shared a movie camera and recorded intimate, carefree moments that deAk later edited into this unusual self-portrait. Tourism becomes performance art at legendary historic sites and across the bright desert landscapes as their budding romantic relationship plays out. The film was rarely screened during the period, and MoMA’s new digital preservation is drawn from deAk’s unique original Kodachrome print and a reel of assembled outtakes, both recently acquired for the Museum’s collection.

Arabian Lights. 1983. USA. Directed by Edit deAk, James Nares. 4K digital preservation courtesy The Museum of Modern Art with the support of the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation. World premiere. 75 min.

January 23, 2024:

7:00 pm - Chantal Akerman in the Golden Eighties:

With this premiere of two rarely screened films by Chantal Akerman, both from 1982, To Save and Project continues its celebration of the Royal Cinematheque of Belgium in its years-long effort to restore all of Akerman’s theatrical work.

Toute une nuit (All Night Long). 1982. Belgium. Written and directed by Chantal Akerman. With Aurore Clement, Tcheky Karyo, Angelo Abazoglou. North American premiere. In French; English subtitles. 90 min.

Chantal Akerman called this her riff on Madame Bovary, setting adolescent fantasies of romance against the stark realities of adult disillusionment during a one-night stand in “incestuous Brussels.” The arc of love is the form of the film itself, as professional and nonprofessional actors (including many of Akerman’s friends) enact timeworn patterns of amorous seduction, repetition, and rejection in a series of fleeting nocturnal encounters. And in this strange and hypnotic way, All Night Long is a dress rehearsal for the musical comedy Akerman was also completing at the time, Golden Eighties.

4K digital restoration by CINEMATEK—The Royal Belgian Film Archive, under the supervision of cinematographer Caroline Champetier, with the support of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation and the Brussels-Capital Region; courtesy Janus Films.

Hotel des Acacias. 1982. Belgium/France/Netherlands/Canada. Written and directed by the students of INSAS (Yves Hanchar, Pierre Charles Rochette, François Vanderveken, Isabelle Willems) under the supervision of Chantal Akerman and Michèle Blondeel. North American premiere. In French; English subtitles. 42 min.

By all accounts, Chantal Akerman was an extraordinary teacher. Hôtel des Acacias, another forerunner to her musical comedy Golden Eighties (1982), is the product of a workshop she and the writer-actress Michèle Blondeel conducted with students at the Brussels film school, inviting them through a series of staged amatory escapades at a hotel to contemplate the fickleness of love.

Digital restoration by Thais Play David at INSAS in collaboration with CINEMATEK—The Royal Belgian Film Archive; courtesy CINEMATEK.

Program 132 min.

January 24, 2024:

7:00 pm - Yoru no kawa:

Yoru no kawa (Undercurrent). 1956. Japan. Directed by Kozaburo Yoshimura. Screenplay by Sumie Tanaka. With Fujiko Yamamoto, Ken Uehara, Keizo Kawasaki. North American premiere. In Japanese; English subtitles. 104 min.

One of the most stunningly and subtly beautiful color films to come out of 1950s Japan, Undercurrent is a Sirkian melodrama about an aspiring young kimono and necktie designer (oh, those gorgeous layered textile patterns!) who has an affair with a married scientist. Set in the ancient capital of Kyoto, this postwar rediscovery reflects on a nation’s uncertain future and the place of a working woman in it, with Yoshimura and the great cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa (the subject of a major MoMA tribute in 2018) using the French tricolors of red, white, and blue to symbolize her wished-for independence and the encroachments of modern Western culture on native Japanese traditions.

4K digital restoration by Kadokawa Corporation; courtesy Janus Films.

January 25, 2024:

1:00 pm - Smog:

Smog. 1962. Italy. Directed by Franco Rossi. Screenplay by Rossi, Pier Maria Pasinetti, Gian Domenico Giagni, Franco Brusati, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, Ugo Guerra. With Enrico Maria Salerno, Annie Girardot, Renato Salvatori. North American premiere. In Italian; English subtitles. 101 min.

Before Jacques Demy’s own groovy trip through Los Angeles in his 1969 The Model Shop came this alluring oddity, the first Italian feature ever to be shot entirely in the US. Premiered at the Venice Film Festival before almost completely disappearing from view for 60 years, Smog tells the Didionesque story of an Italian lawyer’s accidental layover in LA, where his encounters with the flora and fauna of the sprawling and futuristic, sun-drenched city lead to an existential crisis. The film boasts a sexy cast (Enrico Maria Salerno, Renato Salvatori, and Annie Girardot); an equally sexy West Coast jazz-inflected score by Piero Umiliani, featuring Chet Baker on trumpet; shimmering black-and-white cinematography by Freddy McCord (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre); and locations that must have astonished Italians as they reveled in their own postwar economic boom: the gleaming Inglewood Airport, panoramic swimming pools floating atop the city, and architect Bernard Judge’s legendary Triponent (aka “Bubble”) House, an otherworldly geodesic residence in Beachwood Canyon.

4K digital restoration by Cineteca di Bologna and UCLA Film & Television Archive in collaboration with Warner Bros. Studio Operations, with funding provided by Hollywood Foreign Press Association; courtesy Warner Bros.

6:30 pm - Ishanou:

Ishanou (The Chosen One). 1990. India. Directed by Aribam Syam Sharma. Screenplay by M. K. Binodini Devi. With Anoubam Kiranmala, Kangabam Tomba, Baby Molly. North American premiere. North American premiere. 93 min.

The past decade has witnessed a remarkable efflorescence of film restoration in India, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Shivendra Singh Dungarpur and the Film Heritage Foundation. Aribam Syam Sharma’s Ishanou is their latest rediscovery, a drama unlike any you have ever seen from one of the least appreciated filmmaking regions in an otherwise movie-obsessed nation. As the filmmaker himself observes, in this story of “tragic sacrifice,” about a seemingly ordinary young mother who abandons her family to follow the spiritual calling of the Maibi (the priestesses of the Manipur Kingdom), ”lies the sublime art of performance—song and dance attuned to elevate souls beyond the mundane…. The music that I have used in Ishanou is the traditional music of Manipur, the creators of which have been long forgotten with the passage of time, but which has become a common treasure of Manipur. Perhaps Manipuri culture is the only one in which a whole philosophy of genesis is propagated purely through the performing arts of Lai Haraoba [the traditional Meitei religious festival of dance and musical theater in honor of forest deities]. This unique aspect of Manipuri culture is the mystical canvas against which the human tragedy of the chosen one plays out.”

4K digital restoration courtesy Film Heritage Foundation, with funding provided by Film Heritage Foundation with the generous support of Dr. Richard Meyer and Susan Harmon.

January 26, 2024:

7:00 pm - Narcisa Hirsch, A Famous Unknown Filmmaker:

It’s almost criminal that Narcisa Hirsch isn’t a household name by now, at least in the homes of those passionate about the histories of performance art and cinema. Then again, the 95-year-old Hirsch, who was born in Berlin in 1928 and emigrated to Argentina in 1937, has playfully called herself una famosa cineasta desconocida (a famous unknown filmmaker), acknowledging her own marginalization but also the freedom that comes with some degree of anonymity. This freedom enabled her to stage politically subversive Happenings on street corners in Buenos Aires and New York in the 1960s and ’70s, handing out apples and plastic toy babies to puzzled passersby; to roam throughout South America and the United States, capturing her travels in camera viewfinders; to defy tidy distinctions of genre between the diaristic, the structuralist, the epistolary, and the mythological; and to experiment with artists like Carolee Schneemann, Marie Louise Alemann, and Werner Nekes. Hirsch’s passions have encompassed the cosmic and the quotidian: the sexuality and integrity of the human body; the still and moving image; a sound composition by Steve Reich, an opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck, and a Neapolitan love song; the four archetypes of man, including that of “the alchemist”; the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice; and the concept of the Aleph, in which “each second represents an instance of life from birth to death.”

Digital restorations courtesy Filmoteca Narcisa Hirsch, in collaboration with USC Libraries, supported by a grant from USC Research and Innovation. New York premiere. All from Argentina and directed by Narcisa Hirsch.

Manzanas (Apples). 1969. With Narcisa Hirsch, Marie Louise Alemann, Walther Mejía. 5 min.

A-Dios. 1984. 26 min.

Canciones Napolitanas (Neapolitan Songs). 1971. 10 min.

Orfeo y Euridice (Orpheus and Eurydice). 1976. 12 min.

Taller (Workshop). 1974. 11 min.

La Noche Bengali. 1980. Co-directed by Werner Nekes. With Narcisa Hirsch, Katya Alemann. 6 min.

Aleph. 2005. 1 min.

Come Out. 1974. 11 min.

This screening is based on a program curated by Oona Mosna for Media City Film Festival's 26th edition.

Program 81 min.

January 27, 2024:

1:00 pm - Orphans at MoMA: Sixteen Tons—Working with 16mm:

Our collaboration with the NYU Orphan Film Symposium continues with an eclectic mix of newly preserved films, programmed by Orphan Film Symposium director Dan Streible in celebration of the centenary of the 16mm film gauge. 16mm was the longtime workhorse for documentary, student, independent, and experimental films, and while tons of prints survive, few get saved and projected in this small-gauge format. These new 16mm prints represent seven decades of filmmaking. The notable non-theatrical film distributor Thomas Brandon produced Tall Tales, a 1941 celebration of the American folk song featuring Josh White, Burl Ives, and Will Geer. In Whitesburg Epic (1971), Kentucky high school students interview locals about unemployment in their small coal-mining town. Their nascent group became the Appalshop film workshop, which still thrives and is now heroically recovering from a flood that inundated its archive of thousands of films. Artist Bill Brand’s career as a filmmaker and founder of BB Optics, a New York–based lab specializing in the preservation of experimental cinema, is represented with the work of three artists as well as himself: Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s Cowboy and “Indian” Film (1957–58), along with examples of Ortiz’s “ritual destruction” of 16mm prints, which spurred a new form of performance art in the 1950s, presented in celebration of his 90th year; Larry Gottheim’s multilayered Your Television Traveler (1991/2024), a film that remained unfinished until this new restoration; Roberta Cantow’s If This Ain’t Heaven (1983), which intimately documents the solitary life of one “Mr. G”; and Brand’s own Susie’s Ghost (2011), a meditation on personal loss through images, shot with aging 16mm film stock, of a rapidly changing neighborhood.

7:00 pm - De-Evolution Is Real: The Restored Films of DEVO with Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh:

The 50th anniversary of the group known as DEVO has occasioned a deep restoration and remastering project in the band’s film, video, and audio archives. Presenting this truly cutting-edge work at MoMA on January 27 are DEVO founders Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh and restoration head Peter Conheim. Conheim writes, “Formed at Kent State University in the grim wake of the 1970 National Guard student massacre, DEVO emerged from its spud cocoon as a hydra-headed music, art, and film collective whose rare early musical provocations would give way to perhaps the most subversive, whip (it)-smart pop group of the 20th century (with gold records to its credit). Filmmaking and music were intertwined from the beginning, resulting in the canonical short films In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution (1976), Satisfaction (1978), The Day My Baby Gave Me a Surprize (1979) and the infamous Whip Tease (aka Whip It) (1980), among others, in collaboration with co-director Chuck Statler. This program features new restorations and reconstructions of these titles, along with restored versions of the video-based works that followed, including Girl U Want (1980), Beautiful World (1981) and Peek-A-Boo (1982). Also shown is a brand-new 4K digital restoration of Bruce Conner’s Mongoloid (1977), never-before-seen 16mm film footage from their breakthrough appearance at NYC's Max’s Kansas City in 1977, the saga of long-suffering record label boss Rod Rooter, and some exciting restoration work in progress.

Film and video restoration by Peter Conheim and Cinema Preservation Alliance, from the archives of DEVO, Inc. Mongoloid restoration courtesy the Bruce Conner Trust. Additional archival footage provided by David Shaw.

Program approximately 80 min.

January 28, 2024:

1:30 pm - Hamo Bek-Nazaryan, Armenian Film Pioneer:

While Sergei Parajanov may be Armenian cinema’s most iconic and idiosyncratic filmmaker, the pioneering Hamo Bek-Nazaryan deserves to be much better known as one of Parajanov’s true forebears, having made a series of artistically original, culturally defiant fiction films and documentaries within the constraints of Soviet Socialist Realism in the 1920s and 1930s and—perhaps surprisingly given today’s regional violence in Nagorno-Karabagh—having helped to establish Azerbaijan’s own film industry in the process. Observing and preserving Armenian folkloric traditions that were still threatened with erasure in the aftermath of the genocide of 1915 and the Bolshevik revolution of 1919, Bek-Nazaryan also forged his own modernist aesthetic through experiments with film language. A celebrated actor in pre-revolutionary Russian cinema, Bek-Nazaryan began directing his own films in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and even Siberia and Iran. He also made the first truly indigenous Armenian feature, the romantic folk drama Namus (1925), and the first Armenian sound feature, Pepo (1935), with a score by the Armenian composer Aram Khatchaturyan. Both films are remarkable for their feminist depictions of Armenian and Kurdish women facing violence, and both are said to have inspired the Armenian Hollywood filmmaker Rouben Mamoulian.

Dom na vulkane (The House on the Volcano). 1929. USSR. Directed by Hamo Bek-Nazaryan. Screenplay by Bek-Nazaryan, P. Folyan. With Hrachia Nersisyan, Tigran, Ayvazyan, Tatyana Makhmuryan. North American premiere. Silent, with recorded score by Juliet Merchant, commissioned by Kino Klassika Foundation. 64 min.

“Today it’s impossible to imagine that there was a time when film studios of Yerevan [Armenia] and Baku [Azerbaijan] could cooperate.… In 1928, after 10 years of the Armenian massacres in Baku, A Home on a Volcano, a co-production of Yerevan “Armenkino” and Baku “Azgoskino” studios, was realized. The protagonist of the film is drill master Petros, who tells the story of the oil workers’ strike in pre-Soviet Baku to his adopted son, depicting the relationship between a big oil corporation and working-class people, representatives of various nationalities. The cast also comprised different nationalities; particularly, the future star of Armenian cinema, Tatyana Makhmuryan, [who] made her debut in this film. This was Beknazaryan’s last silent film in Armenia and first collaboration with Baku” (Artsvi Bakhchinyan).

4K digital restoration by One Man Studio, Yerevan, commissioned by the National Cinema Center of Armenia (NCCA) with the support of the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport of the Republic of Armenia; courtesy NCCA.

Yerkir Nairi (Land of Nairi). 1930. USSR. Directed by Hamo Bek-Nazaryan. US premiere. Silent, with recorded score by Vahagn Hayrapetyan. 56 min.

Charting Armenia’s uneasy passage from Russian colony to Soviet republic, Bek-Nazaryan uses various documentary conceits—archival footage, staged scenes, surrealist imagery, the panoramic, the particular, and the poetic—to exalt collectivization over capitalism on the occasion of Soviet Armenia’s 10th anniversary. Land of Nairi was widely shown among the Armenian diaspora of the 1930s before fading from view. This new restoration reminds us that Bek-Nazaryan was a tireless experimenter with film form; as scholar Vigen Galstyan observes, “Through his use of archival footage and his attempts at ‘visual musicality,’ Bek-Nazarian stands as a pioneer, paving a path that culminated with Armenian documentary filmmakers such as Artavazd Pelechian.”

4K digital restoration by One Man Studio, Yerevan, commissioned by the National Cinema Center of Armenia (NCCA) with the support of the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport of the Republic of Armenia; courtesy NCCA.

4:30 pm - Slike iz zivota udarnika:

Slike iz zivota udarnika (Life of a Shock Force Worker). 1972. Yugoslavia. Directed by Bahrudin Bato Cengic. creenplay by Cengic, Branko VuCicevic. With Adem Cejvan, Stojan 'Stole' Arandjelovic, Zaim Muzaferija. North American premiere. In Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian; English subtitles. 79 min.

The controversial and once-censored Life of a Shock Force Worker is a major rediscovery of Yugoslavian cinema, a film that resulted in director Bato Cengic and cinematographer Karpo Godina (the subject of a MoMA retrospective in 2018) being banned from making movies for 10 years. Thanks to a new restoration overseen by Godina himself, we can once again marvel at the film’s uniquely sooty palette—the result of shooting roughly 600 meters underground in dangerous methane-choked coal mines using only battery-powered miners’ lamps. Cengic’s portrait of the famous proletarian shock worker Alija Sirotanovic—a propaganda hero of the television airwaves and countless stilted medal ceremonies who quickly became forgotten—captures the glaring disconnect between manufactured glory and hard-bitten reality in building a new socialist utopia. Inspired by Godina’s own subversive short documentaries, Cengic exalts the thankless yet valiant drudgery of the film’s real-life coal miners in striking tableaux vivants.

Digital restoration by the Slovenian Cinematheque in cooperation with the Sarajevo Film Center, the Croatian State Archives and the Austrian Film Museum, with funding provided by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, with an additional contribution of “A Season of Classic Films,” an initiative of ACE – Association des Cinematheques Europeennes, supported by the EU Creative Europe MEDIA programme; courtesy Sarajevo Film Center.

January 30, 2024:

4:00 pm - Messidor:

Messidor. 1979. Switzerland/France. Written and directed by Alain Tanner. With Clementine Amouroux, Catherine Retore, Franziskus Abgottspon. North American premiere. In French, German; English subtitles. 123 min.

Two girls and a gun: Presaging Thelma and Louise by 12 years, Messidor ’s pair of vagabond teenage girls hitchhike their way across the Swiss Alps and are unwittingly drawn into a life of crime through their sordid encounters with predatory men. Within Alain Tanner’s gripping and at times funny road movie lies a bitter critique of cold materialism and the commodification of women. Critic David Robinson, speaking for the film’s many admirers, wrote that “[the roads] seem like the alleys in some gigantic rat-trap, always leading back to the same scenes and the same faces, the mountains, the neat villages and towns, the hygienic bars and restaurants which seem always more unfriendly and threatening…. The girls’ progress from a cheerful game to a desperate last-ditch battle against hunger, weakness, hallucination and an alien society is impeccably charted by Tanner and his actresses.”

4K digital restoration by Florian Leupin for filmo-Verein CH. Film, in collaboration with DNA Films SA, the Association Alain Tanner and the Cinematheque suisse; courtesy Gaumont.

January 31, 2024:

6:30 pm - Messiah of Evil:

Messiah of Evil. 1974. USA. Written and directed by Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz. With Michael Greer, Mariana Hill, Joy Bang. New York premiere. 90 min.

Of the countless loving homages (and blatant ripoffs) of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, this is one of the most original and compelling. Presented in a newly struck 35mm print that captures the film’s giallo-inspired widescreen color compositions—it’s no accident the film’s missing father is a painter of macabre subjects— Messiah of Evil is a time capsule of 1970s indie Los Angeles (even The Driver ’s Walter Hill and experimental filmmaker Morgan Fisher make cameos) and forgotten city monuments like Ralph’s supermarket, the Culver Center shopping mall, and the Fox Venice movie theater. It is also a Lovecraftian drive-in horror flick with the requisite undead flesh eaters, sinister preachers and Albinos, insane asylums, blood-red moons, mass hysteria, and widespread contagion. Writer-directors Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz would go on to achieve greater screenwriting notoriety with American Graffiti, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom …and Howard the Duck.

New 35mm print from the 4K digital restoration courtesy American Genre Film Archive and Radiance Films.

February 1, 2024:

4:00 pm - Il ferroviere:

Il ferroviere (The Railroad Man). 1956. Italy. Directed by Pietro Germi. Screenplay by Germi, Alfredo Giannetti, Luciano Vincenzoni. With Germi, Luisa Della Noce, Sylva Koscina. North American premiere. In Italian; English subtitles. 118 min.

A box-office success after a string of disappointments, Pietro Germi’s The Railroad Man deserves its place alongside Italian Neorealist classics like Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves. Based on a story by the relatively unknown Communist screenwriter Alfredo Giannetti (who would collaborate again with Germi on Divorce, Italian Style and The Facts of Murder), the film stars Germi himself as a railroad engineer who, blind to his own shortcomings, is driven to drink, scab, and abuse his family after a horrific train accident. Deeply sympathetic yet uncompromising, The Railroad Man is a tale of disloyalty, disillusionment, and alienation redeemed only by the grace of an innocent yet knowing young boy.

4K digital restoration by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Surf Film at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, with funding provided by Ministero della Cultura with an additional contribution of “A Season of Classic Films,” an initiative of ACE – Association des Cinematheques Européennes, supported by the EU Creative Europe MEDIA programme; courtesy Surf Film.

February 2, 2024:

1:00 pm - Di yi lei xing wei xian:

Di yi lei xing wei xian (Dangerous Encounters: 1st Kind). [original uncut version] .1980. Hong Kong. Directed by Tsui Hark. Screenplay by Tsui, Cheuk-hon Szeto. With Lieh Lo, Chen-chi Lin, Albert Au. US premiere. In English, Cantonese; English subtitles. 95 min.

Banned by Hong Kong censors for its relentlessly and brilliantly staged depiction of nihilistic, thrill-seeking teenagers and its use of graphic photos of the 1967 riots that had threatened to topple British rule, Tsui Hark’s Dangerous Encounters: 1st Kind is mostly known in its various altered versions. Now, in a restoration overseen by Tsui himself (drawn, in part, from footage that survives only on VHS), we can well understand what terrified the censors in the first place—indeed, riots again broke out in Hong Kong in 1981—and what has since led to the film’s extreme fanboy following. Hark has made an incendiary jeremiad against colonial occupation and political corruption in the guise of an elegantly anarchical and perversely comical escapade, as school-age bomb makers get mixed up with arms smugglers, Triad mobsters, rogue and Keystone cops, and a psychopathic girl named Wan-chu (Pearl).

2K digital restoration by Spectrum Films at Lab Lumiris; courtesy Fairchild Media, Canada.

February 3, 2024:

12:00 pm - Flash Gordon:

Flash Gordon. 1936. USA. Directed by Frederick Stephani, Ray Taylor. Screenplay by Stephani, Ella O’Neill, George Plympton, Basil Dickey. With Buster Crabbe, Jean Rogers, Charles Middleton. New York premiere. 245 min.

Presented on newly struck 35mm in a nonstop, thrill-a-minute Saturday matinee marathon—one fell swoop!!—Universal Pictures’ Flash Gordon serial of 1936 is still one of the greatest comic book movies ever made. “Channeled most famously by George Lucas into the Star Wars franchise, the 13-chapter Flash Gordon serial from 1936—with its mashup of ancient religion and advanced technology, cliffhanger endings, an artificial planet, and episode titles such as ‘The Destroying Ray’ —is the urtext of the contemporary science fiction blockbuster. For every charmingly (and not-so-charmingly) dated moment—the menacing iguanas shot in slow-motion, the spaceships with smoking tailpipes, a galaxy pre-colonized by Earth-bound Orientalism—Flash exudes a modern sensibility, from Buster Crabbe’s quotable quips to the rip-roaring pace of its 20-minute narrative chunks” (UCLA).

35mm restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, with funding provided by the Packard Humanities Institute.

Presented with a ten-minute intermission following episode seven.

7:30 pm - Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman:

Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman. 1974. USA. Directed by Judy Collins, Jill Godmilow. With Antonia Brico, Judy Collins. 4K digital restoration by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. North American premiere. 58 min.

The Only Girl in the Orchestra. 2023. USA. Directed by Molly O’Brien. With Orin O’Brien. 34 min.

With special guest appearances by the singer-songwriter Judy Collins and documentarian Molly O’Brien, the closing night of To Save and Project is dedicated to two women who broke barriers at the New York Philharmonic: the conductor Antonia Brico and the double bassist Orin O’Brien. Jill Godmilow and Judy Collins’s Oscar-nominated Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman (1974) is a documentary about Brico, Collins’s mentor, who in 1938 became the first woman to conduct the New York Philharmonic. O’Brien’s The Only Girl in the Orchestra (2023) is a newly made portrait of the filmmaker’s aunt Orin O’Brien, who in 1966 became the first female musician in the history of the New York Philharmonic when Leonard Bernstein hired her as a double bassist.

Date:

January 11, 2024 - February 3, 2024

Location:

Museum of Modern Art

11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019.

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