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Sometimes, the act of preservation is the film.

W.C. Fields, a man of the 19^th century, started on the music hall circuit as “the Tramp Juggler,” remade himself as the “Eccentric Juggler,” and he gradually came to be known (or publicized) as the world’s greatest juggler. Before he turned 20, he was supporting his family with his increasingly elaborate act, and he toured the world. He began to incorporate little remarks and exclamations and asides into his routine. He moved onto vaudeville and then to Broadway, where he made the transition to comedy, and then the Ziegfeld Follies, where he became a full-blown sensation. He appeared in a few silent films but he became a film star with the coming of sound. Between 1930 and 1933, he made a series of two-reelers that were built around his persona and his almost supernatural comic timing, physical and verbal, and a merciless sense of humor that would enshrine him, along with The Marx Brothers and Humphrey Bogart, as a countercultural icon long after his death.

I’m not sure if The Fatal Glass of Beer, restored by UCLA with the help of The Film Foundation, is my favorite of the shorts, but it’s by far the most outlandish. It looks like it was shot in a matter of hours rather than days, on sets constructed by underpaid carpenters between lengthy visits to the bar. Visually, it makes an average Brady Bunch episode look like a Mizoguchi movie. But the ramshackle nature of the enterprise is part of the point and crucial to Fields’ act—everything, including the man himself, seems to be on the verge of falling apart and then falls back together again. The humor of this particular film is satirical in nature, and the targets are great white north rescue melodramas and the mid-19^th century theatrical sensation The Drunkard.

To people with no knowledge of these reference points and no sense of Fields’ popularity, The Fatal Glass of Beer might be as incomprehensible as Babylonian cuneiform. But I think that “accessibility,” especially when it’s “immediate,” is a severely overrated attribute of movies or literature. In the case of many of the films that I love, I was intrigued or sparked by something within them before I fully understood them. In the case of The Fatal Glass of Beer and the other Fields shorts, I would suggest watching them for the first time with a child by your side, if at all possible.

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Today, on a personal note, I want to remember someone who passed away this year, largely without notice. Robert Geisler, known to his friends and many acquaintances as Bobby, would have turned 69 yesterday. He and his old partner in life and business, John Roberdeau (who died in 2002), have three film credits to their names on IMDb, the last of which is The Thin Red Line. Bobby had many more projects that he tried mightily to get off the ground, for the stage and the screen, right up to the end. He was a dreamer, on an elaborate scale, and his dreams kept him alive. He was a true believer, and I never met anyone else quite like him. Yesterday, his mother Ann made a donation to The Film Foundation in his name. That would have made him smile.

- Kent Jones

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THE FATAL GLASS OF BEER (1933, d. Clyde Bruckman)
Preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by The Film Foundation. 

When I was young, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes was not universally considered to be a classic. For one thing, it wasn’t so easy to see. Plus, despite its enormous initial success in Great Britain, it had wound up in an odd category of films from the 40s and early 50s that were designed to bring high culture to the masses—Fantasia, Carnegie Hall, Invitation to the Dance, I’ve Always Loved You and the Archers’ later Tales of Hoffmann offer further examples. And, on the occasions that it did appear on television and in repertory theatres, the quality of the image was substandard. There were severe problems with the color registration, creating a disorienting halo effect around characters and objects. It’s the kind of thing we’ve all grown used to seeing in before-and-after restoration demonstrations included as supplements on Blu-Rays and DVDs. It was once commonplace.

I used to believe that a great film can shine through all intrusions, limitations and corrosions. But that was before digital restoration tools. To see films like Ugetsu, Pather Panchali, Giant and Detour brought back to life has been a startling experience—as Geoffrey O’Brien once said, you realize that you haven’t really seen these films before. And as Martin Scorsese has pointed out, the poor registration and the lack of definition we used to live with affected the performances—you often couldn’t see the eyes of the actors clearly—hence the emotional impact, hence the clarity of the narrative, hence the film.

I’ve admired The Red Shoes for a long time, but I have to admit that I have rarely been as stunned as I was when I sat down in the theatre in Cannes and saw the UCLA restoration, three years in the making. I immediately forgot that I’d ever seen it before—it was like watching a brand new film, and it made almost everything else around it seem paltry and small. I knew how much work and loving attention had gone into that restoration, made possible by The Film Foundation, the Louis B. Mayer Foundation and HFPA. Bob Gitt and his team at UCLA worked in association with the BFI, ITV and Janus, and Thelma Schoonmaker was closely involved at absolutely every stage.

The film throbs with emotion from the very first frames of the doormen waiting nervously before they open the doors to the waiting horde of students rushing up the stairs like a flash flood to get gallery seats for a ballet performance. The film is about art—making it, experiencing it, living for it and dying for it. Actually, the word “about” is wrong, because it implies a theoretical distance that has no part in The Red Shoes. The passion of art is felt from behind and before the camera, it’s felt in the artistry of every craftsman and every actor, and it’s felt in every cut and every choice made by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. And that passion is also felt in the restoration, which is the greatest I’ve ever seen.

- Kent Jones

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THE RED SHOES (1948, dirs. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)
Restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive in association with the BFI, The Film Foundation, ITV Global Entertainment Ltd., and Janus Films. Restoration funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, The Film Foundation, and the Louis B. Mayer Foundation.

THE TALES OF HOFFMANN (1951, dirs. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)
Restored by The Film Foundation, in association with the BFI and STUDIOCANAL. Restoration funding provided by The Franco-American Cultural Fund, a unique partnership between the Directors Guild of America (DGA); the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA); the Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique (SACEM); and the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW), The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the Louis B. Mayer Foundation and The Film Foundation.

UGETSU (1953, d. Kenji Mizoguchi)
Restored by The Film Foundation and KADOKAWA Corporation at Cineric Laboratories in New York. Special thanks to Masahiro Miyajima and Martin Scorsese for their consultation on this restoration. Restoration funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in association with The Film Foundation and KADOKAWA Corporation.

PATHER PANCHALI (1955, d. Satyajit Ray)
Restored by the Satyajit Ray Preservation Project through a collaboration of the Academy Film Archive, the Merchant-Ivory Foundation and the Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. 

DETOUR (1945, d. Edgar G. Ulmer)
​​​​​​Restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation in collaboration with Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Cinémathèque Française. Restoration funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. 

Here’s a collection of top movies to stream this week.

“I Am Greta”

Hulu

When Greta Thunberg began protesting outside Swedish Parliament two years ago, it only took days for director Nathan Grossman to start trailing her in her mission to prod government leaders on the climate crisis. “I Am Greta,” which premieres Friday on Hulu, documents the enormous movement fueled by Thunberg’s one-person school strike, and a few very surreal years for the Swedish teenager. Along the way, she meets world leaders, speaks at the United Nations and reckons with her newfound notoriety.

“Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds”

Apple TV+

Is there a more simply compelling equation for a documentary than Werner Herzog + meteorites? In “Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds,” Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer ponder the mythic, spiritual gravitational pull of meteors and comets on humanity — and on Herzog, himself. Having already surveyed volcanoes with his co-director in “Into the Inferno,” Herzog here turns his gaze to the cosmos to rhapsodize on the hunks of rocks hurtling through space. On Apple TV+ Friday.

Criterion Channel’s Film Foundation series

Criterion Channel

Three decades ago, Martin Scorsese founded the Film Foundation. Since then, it has been a critical bulwark of film preservation, saving an enormous number of movies from deterioration and illuminating the brilliance of countless others. Over 30 years, the nonprofit organization has aided in some 850 restorations. To celebrate the Film Foundation, the Criterion Channel on Sunday will begin a 30-film series, set to expand over the next year, featuring some of the titles given new life by Scorsese’s creation. Among them: “The Red Shoes,” “It Happened One Night,” “Ugetsu,” “Once Upon a Time in the West” and “Primary.”

When director Elia Kazan made America America in 1963, his most celebrated work was behind him. He never regained the audiences of his heyday in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and his last few movies had all lost money. Therefore, he had to struggle to find the financing for America America, his most personal film which was based on the story of his Uncle Joe Kazantzoglou who escaped Turkish oppressors in Anatolia and struck out for America in 1896.

In order to achieve the documentary realism of the film, Kazan found locations in Greece and Istanbul, shot the film in black and white, brought only a few of the supporting cast from the US, and used mostly local talent, including the lead actor Stathis Giallelis. Shooting had already begun in Greece when his producer Ray Stark pulled out, and Kazan had to wait till Warner Bros. stepped in with the money.

Adrian Danks writing in “Senses of Cinema” in the March 2012 issue talks of how the hostility of Turkish authorities caused Kazan to move production to Greece, whereupon customs officials seized the cans of film already shot. “Owing to a prescient switch of labels between exposed and unexposed product, the valuable cargo survived.”

The screenplay, written by Kazan, was based on Kazan’s own novel of the same name that started out as a short story. The film starts with an unprecedented beginning where the director introduces himself and the story via voiceover against the image of a cloud-covered mountain: “My name is Elia Kazan. I am a Greek by blood, a Turk by birth, and an American because my uncle made a journey.”

Set in 1896, a rebellious young Greek man Stavros (the Joe character played by Giallelis) witnesses the massacre of his Armenian neighbors at the hands of the Turks in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey). (Kazan was foreshadowing the Armenian Genocide to come in 1915.) Knowing that they would be coming for the Greeks next, Stavros’ father (Harry Davis) gives his son all the family’s jewelry, carpets and money and sends him to Constantinople to his uncle to invest it all in the uncle’s carpet business. The idea is to eventually reunite the whole family in the metropolis. But Stavros’ eyes are on a bigger prize – he wants to go to America. Constantinople is only the first step.

But he arrives at his uncle’s shop with nothing. He has been cheated by a fellow traveler (a very fine Lou Antonio) on the road who takes advantage of his naiveté to slowly separate him from all his belongings and even his donkey. The furious uncle (Salem Ludwig, Kazan’s colleague from The Actor’s Studio) plans to salvage the situation by marrying Stavros off to a rich merchant’s daughter Thomna (Linda Marsh). Stavros will have none of it, preferring to labor as a ‘hamal,’ one of the dockworkers doing back-breaking work, saving his meager wages for a $110 ticket of third-class passage to America, till a prostitute steals his savings and he is beaten up by her pimp’s thugs. He is forced to return to his uncle, defeated.

In the last act, the marriage between Stavros and Thomna is arranged, but Stavros is still determined to deceive everyone and board a ship to America as soon as he can get the money. It’s only when he first speaks alone with his fiancée in a touching scene that he comes to the conclusion that he cannot betray her and calls off the wedding. A casual lover makes it possible for him to finally board the SS Kaiser Wilhelm for America, but it’s only in the sacrifice of a friend that he makes it to Ellis Island. (The Ellis Island scene was actually filmed in the hall there; it had closed in 1954.)

After the last scene, the film returns to the cloudy mountain and Kazan resumes his voiceover to tell the audience that Stavros (meaning Uncle Joe) did bring the family over to America (including the child Elia) in time. And he then recites the credits of his whole cast and crew.

Kazan’s purpose was to show that Stavros’ journey through all the pain and humiliation was reflective of what a typical immigrant suffered to get to the promised land of America. The film’s cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, a frequent collaborator of Kazan’s, was instrumental in achieving the documentary feel of the film, something not seen in Hollywood films of the time. The juxtapositions of close and long shots such as the cramped interiors of the rude houses in Anatolia against the stark beauty of the land, or the busy landscape of the docks and bazaars contrasting with the carpet merchant’s rich and cluttered rooms are things of beauty, frequently captured with handheld cameras. The editing is a combination of traditional cutting and dramatic jump-cuts marking the passage of time via editor DeDe Allen. If the lead character’s acting abilities fall a bit short, the supporting cast more than carries him, though some of the American accents are a bit jarring. One wonders why Kazan didn’t shoot the dialogue in the vernacular and add subtitles, but that is quibbling. And technologically, the film is a marvel, epic in scope, ambitious in scale and aesthetically groundbreaking.

Kazan won Best Director at the Golden Globes in 1964. Stathis Giallelis won the now-defunct New Star of the Year; he was also nominated for Best Actor. The film was nominated for the also defunct Best Film Promoting International Understanding. The art direction by Gene Callahan won the film its only Oscar. It was nominated for Best Picture, Screenplay and Director.

Martin Scorsese is one filmmaker upon whom the film had a profound influence, enough for him to mention it in his documentary “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies.” But in general, critics were not kind and audiences stayed away.

In a long profile on Kazan in the November 9, 1947 issue of the New York Times, staff writer Murray Schumach ended the article this way: “He dreams of making epic films that will portray America and its people; movies that will be shot, not in studios, but in fields, mines, factories. “I want to make folk movies, not folksy movies,” says Kazan. “Odets discovered the Bronx, but no one has discovered America.” Kazan hopes to become the nation’s cinematic Columbus.”

America America was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2001 as “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” and was recommended for restoration.

It was preserved by Warner Bros. in association with UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preservation funding was provided by Warner Bros., the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and The Film Foundation. Warner Bros. used their fine-grain master positive at YCM Laboratories in Burbank to restore it. Supervised by Haskell Wexler, the film’s director of photography, and Ned Price of Warner Bros., new elements created include a duplicate picture negative, a re-recorded track negative from the original mag track, a check print and a release print from the duplicate picture and track negatives.