Film series at MoMA fosters new appreciation for old favorites

CORRECTION APPENDED:

Amidst the seemingly endless season of major film festivals, it’s easy to get caught up in the search for the “next big thing.” But at the Museum of Modern Art’s “To Save and Project” series, cinema’s forgotten masterpieces—and the recent preservation projects that have brought them to life—take center stage.

Running through Nov. 14, and featuring over 35 films from 13 countries, the festival brings to light an unusual selection of influential and under-seen movies—all for free, of course, with a CUID.

Rescued from the threat of decay and disappearance by studios and nonprofit groups like Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, these movies find a home on MoMA’s screens, ensuring their place within cinema’s historical narrative. What immediately stands out, though, is the simple, visual side effect of this ambition: After exhaustive color and sound correction, the films really look incredible. Bringing movies that seldom see the light of day, let alone the light of the projector, to a venue like this offers the chance to see a rarely shown work in an even rarer form: as a vibrant, magnified spectacle onscreen.

At the same time, though, this process of restoration—of manipulating, often digitally, the films’ image and sound—can begin to look more like revision than repair. Is it still possible to view preservation as a process of “excavating” films lost to history when preservationists bring their own kind of authorship to a work? To School of the Arts film professor James Schamus, reinterpretation represents an unavoidable but ultimately constructive element of restoration.

“Every preservation project is an act of imagination and interpretation—but a necessary one,” he explained. For films meant to be exhibited through now obsolete technology, restoration work calls for careful and creative decisions to imagine how a film might have been seen in its original, untouched state. Schamus continued, "Every aspect of preservation requires tact and conjecture, a feel for how to adapt to contemporary modes of reception and consumption.”

Maybe, then, the festival’s selections can be seen and admired as efforts to meticulously and imaginatively recreate, rather than just restore, a moment in cinema. Rather than merely shedding light on lesser-known relics of film history, the festival helps reveal preservation as a delicate and necessary art in its own right.

This year’s highlights include a pair of long buried Andy Warhol films, an influential post-war British noir called “They Made Me a Fugitive,” and “Point of Order!,” a collage of news broadcasts documenting the infamous Army-McCarthy hearings. Off-screen, too, the festival offers even more insight into the restorations: Sofia Coppola and Tamara Jenkins will present Barbara Loden’s seminal indie, Wanda, while Director Volker Schlöndorff will introduce a new cut of The Tin Drum—his brutal film on the rise of Nazism in Danzig.

Luchino Visconti’s literary epic “The Leopard,” which opened the festival last weekend, makes a particularly great case for the power and value of preservation. The film, which traces the changing role of a Sicilian prince through the Italian Risorgimento, recreates the opulent period on a massive scale and in vivid detail. Bringing out the overwhelming scope of the movie’s striking “Technirama” format, the restoration breathes new life into a film built around the dominance of color and composition.

With films like “The Leopard,” the festival not only offers students the chance to see a number of great and unusual movies onscreen, but also works to characterize film preservation itself. With “To Save and Project,” MoMA illuminates a complex, imaginative process whose powerful contributions to film are often hidden from view.

CORRECTION: The final version of the print article incorrectly included a sentence of the author's writing ("For films meant to ...") as part of a quote attributed to Schamus. The article now reflects the correct quote. Spectator regrets the error.