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Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project Returns with Fourth Criterion Box Set
Brian Tallerico
Usually, this feature would offer mini-reviews of the six films in the latest “World Cinema Project,” an essential release from the Criterion Collection. However, life got hectic enough (including three Covid diagnoses in my house) that I haven’t been able to sample the set like I wanted to but didn’t want to let its release go by. Therefore, consider this post more informative than critical, a detailed look at what’s in the latest box set instead of an opinion of their quality.
I have a feeling that quality isn’t really a concern here, but mostly wanted to make sure people knew that there’s a fourth box set from Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, a group that restores and preserves films that could have otherwise been lost to history. In this case, they have highlighted films from multiple eras (as old as 1939 and as new as 1976) and countries, including Cameroon, Argentina, Iran, and Angola. Criterion has been accused of being too Euro-centric in the past, and these “World Cinema Project” sets go a long way to correcting that impression. Each film has been delicately remastered, and the entire box set is accompanied by a fantastic booklet of essays about the six works assembled. Below, you will find descriptions of all six films, courtesy of Criterion, along with a list of the special features. Buy it here. You won’t regret it. (Also don’t miss Godfrey Cheshire’s four-star review of one of the titles, “Chess of the Wind,” linked here.)
“Sambizanga” (1972)
A bombshell by the first woman to direct a film in Africa, Sarah Maldoror's chronicle of the awakening of Angola's independence movement is a stirring hymn to those who risk everything in the fight for freedom. Based on a true story, "Sambizanga" follows a young woman (Elisa Andrade) as she makes her way from the outskirts of Luanda toward the city's center looking for her husband (Domingos Oliveira) after his arrest by the Portuguese authorities—an incident that ultimately helps to ignite an uprising. Scored by the language of revolution and the spiritual songs of the colonized Angolan people, and featuring a cast of nonprofessional actors—many of whom were themselves involved in anticolonial resistance—this landmark work of political cinema honors the essential roles of women, as well as the hardships they endure, in the global struggle for liberation.
“Prisioneros de la Tierra” (1939)
The most acclaimed film by one of classic Argentine cinema's foremost directors, Mario Soffici's gut-punching work of social realism, shot on location in the dense, sweltering jungle of the Misiones region, simmers with rage against the oppression of workers. A group of desperate men are conscripted into indentured labor on a treacherous, disease-ridden yerba maté plantation under the control of the brutal foreman Köhner (Francisco Petrone)—a situation that boils over in an explosive act of rebellion led by the defiant Podeley (Ángel Magaña), and made all the more tense by the fact that Köhner and Podeley love the same woman: Andrea (Elisa Galvé), the sweet-spirited daughter of the camp's doctor. The expressionistic, shadow-sculpted cinematography of Pablo Tabernero evokes the feverish dread of a place where suffocating heat, economic exploitation, and unremitting cruelty lead inexorably to madness and violence.
“Chess of the Wind” (1976)
Lost for decades after screening at the 1976 Tehran International Film Festival, this rediscovered jewel of Iranian cinema reemerges to take its place as one of the most singular and astonishing works of the country's prerevolutionary New Wave. A hypnotically stylized murder mystery awash in shivery period atmosphere, Chess of the Wind unfolds inside an ornate, candlelit mansion where a web of greed, violence, and betrayal ensnares the potential heirs to a family fortune as they vie for control of their recently deceased matriarch's estate. Melding the influences of European modernism, gothic horror, and classical Persian art, director Mohammad Reza Aslani crafts an exquisitely restrained mood piece that erupts into a subversive final act in which class conventions, gender roles, and even time itself are upended with shocking ferocity.
“Muna Moto” (1975)
Director Dikongué-Pipa forged a new African cinematic language with "Muna Moto," a delicate love story with profound emotional resonance. In a close-knit village in Cameroon, the rigid customs governing courtship and marriage mean that a deeply in love betrothed couple (David Endéné and Arlette Din Belle) can be torn apart by the lack of a dowry and by another man's claiming of the young woman as his own wife—a rupture that sets the stage for a clash between a patriarchal society and a modern generation's determination to chart its own course. Luminous black-and-white cinematography and stylistic flourishes yield images of haunting power in this potent depiction, told via flashback, of the challenges of postcolonialism and the devastating consequences of a community's refusal to deviate from tradition.
“Two Girls on the Street” (1939)
The maverick Hollywood stylist André de Toth sharpened his craft in his native Hungary, where he directed five films, including this chic, dynamically paced melodrama studded with deco decor and jazzy musical interludes. Mária Tasnádi Fekete and Bella Bordy sparkle as upwardly mobile working women—one a musician in an all-girl band, the other a bricklayer—who join forces as they both try to make it in Budapest, supporting each other through changing economic fortunes, the advances of lecherous men, and the highs and heartbreaks of love. Kinetic camera work, brisk editing, and avant-garde imagery abound in "Two Girls on the Street," an often strikingly modern ode to the power of working-class female solidarity.
“Kalpana” (1948)
A riot of ecstatic imagery, performance, and set design, the only film by the visionary dancer and choreographer Uday Shankar is a revolutionary celebration of Indian dance in its myriad varieties and a utopian vision of cultural renewal. Unfolding as an epic film within a film, "Kalpana" tells the story of an ambitious dancer (Shankar) determined to open a cultural center devoted to breathing new life into India's traditional artistic forms; meanwhile, the obvious adoration between him and his lead dancer (Shankar's wife and collaborator, Amala Uday Shankar) arouses the jealousy of his enterprising companion (Lakshmi Kanta). Swirling surrealist dance spectacles—featuring dance masters and young performers, many of whom would become stars in their own right—are interwoven with anticolonial, anticapitalist commentary for a radical, proto-Bollywood milestone that is one of the most influential works in Indian cinema.
New introductions to the films by World Cinema Project founder Martin Scorsese
New and archival interviews featuring Indian film historian Suresh Chabria and filmmaker Kumar Shahani (on "Kalpana"); Argentine film historians Paula Félix-Didier and Andrés Levinson (on "Prisioneros de la tierra"); "Two Girls on the Street" director André de Toth; and "Sambizanga" director Sarah Maldoror and Annouchka de Andrade, Maldoror’s daughter
New program by filmmaker Mohamed Challouf featuring interviews with "Muna moto" director Dikongué-Pipa and African film historian Férid Boughedir
"The Majnoun and the Wind" (2022), a documentary by Gita Aslani Shahrestani, daughter of "Chess of the Wind" director Mohammad Reza Aslani, featuring Aslani, members of the film’s cast and crew, and others
PLUS: A foreword and essays on the films by critics and scholars Yasmina Price, Matthew Karush, Ehsan Khoshbakht, Aboubakar Sanogo, Chris Fujiwara, and Shai Heredia
'World Cinema Project Vol. 4’ Review: Films Outside Our Frame
David Mermelstein
This boxed set of Blu-rays and DVDS, curated by Martin Scorsese and distributed by the Criterion Collection, contains six recently restored foreign-language films, forgotten or unknown beyond their native countries.
At a time when world news seems especially grim and the divisions between people appear to outnumber their similarities, it’s a gift to savor the latest installment on disc from the World Cinema Project, a venture established in 2007. Curated by Martin Scorsese and distributed by the Criterion Collection, these boxes—the new one is volume four—house six films on nine discs, with each movie included on both Blu-ray and standard-definition DVD to maximize options for viewers.
All the films (none in English) are recently restored to best possible effect, generally in 2K or 4K, with the present set yielding particularly impressive results. The funding for such costly, time-consuming work comes primarily from Mr. Scorsese’s own Film Foundation, though several other cinema-loving charities also make generous contributions. These efforts either return lost treasures to public consciousness or reveal works hitherto unknown beyond the borders of their native lands—some from as long ago as the 1930s, others made as recently as the last decade of the 20th century.
Scene from ‘Prisioneros de la Tierra’ (1939) PHOTO: CRITERION COLLECTION
“Prisioneros de la Tierra” (1939), the earliest picture in this set, is directed by the Italian-born Mario Soffici, its script adapted from short stories by the ill-fated Horacio Quiroga, born and bred in Uruguay. But the film is thoroughly Argentine, a classic Latin melodrama in which the villain, Köhner (Francisco Petrone), meets a cruel but fitting end, even as the central lovers, Chinita (Elisa Galvé) and Podeley (Ángel Magaña, sort of an Argentine Pedro Armendáriz), confront undeservedly tragic fates. What makes the film special, besides the caliber of its principal players and its exotic jungle setting (shot on location rather than in a studio), is Soffici’s keen eye for cinematic detail, from the Beethoven records Köhner plays to soothe his savage breast to the often intoxicated ministrations of Chinita’s dolorous doctor father.
Scene from ‘Two Girls on the Street’ (1939) PHOTO: CRITERION COLLECTION
Released just a few months later, the Hungarian “Two Girls on the Street” (1939) lays several claims to interest—not least its director, whom fans of old Hollywood know as André de Toth (“House of Wax,” “Pitfall”). Here, before his trans-Atlantic transformation, he is Tóth Endre, already a gifted stylist with a penchant for daring overhead shots. Yet this film’s strong proto-feminist stance, in which two young women seek new, urban lives in Budapest while regularly battling loutish men, proves its biggest draw. Well, that and its documentary depiction of the sparkling Hungarian capital before wartime devastation. Only the abrupt “happy” ending disappoints.
A scene from ‘Muna Moto’ (1975) PHOTO: CRITERION COLLECTION
Two African films—“Sambizanga” (1972), from Angola, and “Muna Moto” (1975), from Cameroon—provide fresh views of that continent’s cinematic accomplishments. The former, the only picture in this box directed by a woman, Sarah Maldoror, offers a harrowing tale in Portuguese and two Bantu languages of a man torn from his village by colonial forces during the unrest that later leads to his nation’s independence. The movie’s divided focus concentrates not just on the sufferings of the imprisoned man, but even more so on those of his valiant wife. The latter, written and directed by Dikongué-Pipa, bends narrative perspective in novel ways to craft a bitter monochromatic fantasia, in French, in which a young man is cheated of true love not just by his selfish, greedy uncle, but also by the tribal society in which he lives.
Ironically, the movie that bridges the greatest distance is this set’s most recent: Mohammad Reza Aslani’s “Chess of the Wind” (1976), from Iran. That’s partly because the picture seems to take place a very long time ago (specifics are left vague), but even more so because the world represented in Mr. Aslani’s film was essentially erased in 1979 by his country’s Islamic revolution.
Happenstance alone saved this movie from oblivion, and how lucky we are for it—a moody tale of ugly family and class dynamics, reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe, complete with an utterly unexpected, numbing final shot.
Scene from ‘Chess of the Wind’ (1976) PHOTO: CRITERION COLLECTION
The longest film in the box, at just over 2 1/2 hours, is also arguably the most important. “Kalpana” (1948), the Hindi word for imagination. Written, produced and directed by the celebrated Indian dancer Uday Shankar (elder brother of the renowned sitarist and composer Ravi Shankar), it documents his life’s work—and, loosely, his life story—in a spectacle of melodrama, fantasy, social realism, romance and politics. And, yes, he is also its star. Yet so accomplished is the effort—with tableaux inspired by Sergei Eisenstein and Fritz Lang—that it’s hard to believe this was Shankar’s first movie. It was also, sadly for us, his last.
Short, lively introductions to each film by Mr. Scorsese enhance this set, as do varied supplements that should not be overlooked. The real treasures, of course, are the films themselves—guaranteed to enrich any cineaste’s perspective. Currently the World Cinema Project has preserved 50 films, of which 32 are now available on Criterion discs—most, but not all, in these sets. And Mr. Scorsese and his collaborators are forging ahead, rescuing other important but neglected pictures, so this list will grow. We can only hope Criterion will continue to take it from there.
Mr. Mermelstein writes for the Journal on film and classical music.
60th New York Film Festival Revivals Announced
Film at Lincoln Center announces Revivals for the 60th New York Film Festival (September 30–October 16, 2022). The Revivals section showcases important works from renowned filmmakers that have been digitally remastered, restored, and preserved with the assistance of generous partners.
Festival Passes are now on sale. NYFF60 single tickets will go on sale to the General Public on September 19, with pre-sale access for FLC Members and Pass holders prior to this date.
“The Revivals section continues to look beyond acknowledged and revered classics, and to challenge the conventions of the canon,” said Florence Almozini, Senior Director of Programming at Film at Lincoln Center. “This year’s lineup proves once again that even relatively recent decades are full of potential cinematic discoveries, by showcasing significant works from artists of diverse backgrounds and origins in striking new restorations.”
The Revivals section connects cinema’s historical significance and present-day cultural influence through a selection of world premieres of restorations, rarities, and more. Highlights from this year’s slate include
No Fear No Die, Claire Denis’s rarely screened second feature, a forceful examination of the lives of immigrants in France and the psychic toll of the violence imposed by colonizers upon the colonized; and Canyon Passage, the first of Jacques Tourneur’s remarkable Westerns and a film that Martin Scorsese called “one of the most mysterious and exquisite examples of the Western genre ever made,” with Scorsese and Steven Spielberg consulting on this restoration.
Additional highlights include four newly restored short and medium-length films by the pioneering queer Black experimental filmmaker Edward Owens: Autre Fois J’ai Aimé Une Femme, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, Remembrance: A Portrait Study, and Tomorrow’s Promise; Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso, a landmark in American independent cinema and an enduringly rich work of DIY filmmaking that remains a resonant and visionary examination of violence (and its reverberations), friendship, and gender; a long overdue restoration of Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, five decades after its scandalous premiere at Cannes, which uses an obsessive, talkative ménage à trois as the jumping-off point for an intense exploration of sexual politics; and Pedro Costa’s first feature, O Sangue, a beguiling fairytale about the trials undergone by two brothers in the wake of their father’s violent death that Costa has noted as “the beginning of [his] love—maybe love is the wrong word—for domestic cinema. A kind of cinema that shows how people live.” Balufu Bakupu-Kanyinda’s Le Damier, a meticulously composed work of political cinema that takes aim at the absurdity of authoritarianism, will screen with Radu Jude’s previously announced short film The Potemkinists (a Currents selection), which revisits the history of the battleship Potemkin through a comic dialogue between a sculptor and a representative from Romania’s Ministry of Culture.
The Revivals section is programmed by Florence Almozini and Dan Sullivan with program advising by Gina Telaroli.
Presented by Film at Lincoln Center, the New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema and takes place September 30–October 16, 2022. An annual bellwether of the state of cinema that has shaped film culture since 1963, the festival continues an enduring tradition of introducing audiences to bold and remarkable works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent.
As part of its 60th anniversary celebration, the New York Film Festival will offer festival screenings in all five boroughs of New York City in partnership with Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Staten Island), BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) (Brooklyn), the Bronx Museum of the Arts (Bronx), Maysles Documentary Center (Harlem), and the Museum of the Moving Image (Queens). Each venue will present a selection of films throughout the festival; a complete list of films and showtimes will be announced later this month. NYFF60 tickets, including those for partner venue screenings, will go on sale to the General Public on September 19 at noon.
FLC invites audiences to celebrate this milestone anniversary by reflecting on their NYFF experiences with our NYFF Memories survey and by taking part in our Letterboxd Watch Challenge.
Please note: Masks are required for all staff, audiences, and filmmakers at all times in public spaces at FLC indoor spaces. Proof of full vaccination is not required for NYFF60 audiences at FLC indoor spaces, but full vaccination is strongly recommended. Visit filmlinc.org/safety for more information. For health and safety protocols at partner venues, please visit their official websites.
Festival Passes are on sale now in limited quantities. NYFF60 single tickets, including those for partner venue screenings, will go on sale to the General Public on Monday, September 19 at noon ET, with pre-sale access for FLC Members and Pass holders prior to this date. Support of NYFF benefits Film at Lincoln Center in its nonprofit mission to promote the art and craft of cinema. NYFF60 press and industry accreditation is now open and the application deadline is August 31. NYFF60 volunteer call is now open.
FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS
Beirut the Encounter
Borhane Alaouié, 1981, Lebanon, 97m
Arabic with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Set in 1977 during the Lebanese Civil War, Borhane Alaouié’s melancholic, meditative docu-fiction study of longing and life amid conflict begins as the lines of communication between East and West Beirut have been reestablished and two former university friends, a Christian woman (Nadine Acoury) and a Shiite man (Haithem el Amine), reconnect. They make a pact to record their thoughts and feelings to share with each other before the woman departs the next day for the United States, and we follow the two through the everyday system of checkpoints, traffic jams, and moments of tension that define their experience of Beirut. An entrancingly personal and atmospheric film poem about human connection in troubled times, Beirut the Encounter is a too-little-seen masterwork of Lebanese cinema. Beirut the Encounter was restored in 2018 from the original negative by the Royal Film Archive of Belgium – CINEMATEK. The 35mm negative was scanned and digitally restored in 2K. The magnetic soundtrack was also digitized by the Royal Film Archive of Belgium – CINEMATEK.
Black God, White Devil
Glauber Rocha, 1964, Brazil, 120m
Portuguese with English subtitles
A landmark work of militant cinema and a key film of the Cinema Novo movement, the then-25-year-old Glauber Rocha’s second feature begins in the 1940s as a ranch laborer named Manoel (Geraldo Del Ray) finds himself in conflict with his boss, who is trying to stiff him on payment; Manoel kills the boss and heads out on the lam with his wife (Yoná Magalhães). The two become self-styled outlaws and, later, join up with self-appointed saint Antonio das Mortes (Mauricío de Valle), who preaches a gospel of meeting the violence of the world with still more violence. A film at once alluringly mystical and radically political, Black God, White Devil interweaves documentary elements and iconoclastic formal experimentation to yield one of world cinema’s all-time great shots across the bow. New 4K restoration from Metropoles Productions, based on original 35mm materials preserved by the Cinemateca Brasileira. Restoration by CineColor Digital and JLS Studios.
Canyon Passage
Jacques Tourneur, 1946, U.S., 92m
Ablaze in breathtaking Technicolor, the first of Jacques Tourneur’s remarkable Westerns is a complex, morally ambiguous portrait of an Oregon mining community where the friendship between an enterprising merchant (Dana Andrews) and an avaricious gambler (Brian Donlevy) is tested by romantic rivalry, gold, and greed. An unusually rich, philosophical frontier tale, Canyon Passage conjures a dreamily idyllic vision of the Old West punctuated by sudden, shocking bursts of violence—Tourneurian flashes of a world ruled by chaos and chance. The result is what Martin Scorsese has called “one of the most mysterious and exquisite examples of the Western genre ever made.” Restored by Universal Pictures in collaboration with The Film Foundation. Special thanks to Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg for their consultation on this restoration.
A Confucian Confusion
Edward Yang, 1994, Taiwan, 125m
Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles
Edward Yang’s panoramic satire is set in the material world of 1990s Taipei, the skyline choked by smog and lit up by the neon signs of globally branded corporations. With his rapier wit, Yang observes the self-absorption of a gaggle of 20-something urbanites, including “culture company” impresario Molly (Ni Shujun), her wealthy fiancé (who fears Molly may be cheating on him), her talk-show-host sister, and the sister’s estranged husband, a novelist whose latest book imagines a reincarnated Confucius returning—with considerable horror—to a modern society ostensibly built upon his teachings. Though it signaled a shift in tone from his earlier, more dramatic films, the ambitious and incisive A Confucian Confusion finds Yang once again searching for the soul of a country he no longer quite recognizes. New digital restoration by The Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute through a grant from Edward Yang’s widow Kaili Peng.
Le Damier
Balufu Bakupu-Kanyinda, 1996, Democratic Republic of Congo, 40m
French with English subtitles
Set in a fictitious African country, Balufu Bakupu-Kanyinda’s medium-length comedy recounts the tale of the country’s president—the founder and “first citizen” of his nation—settling in for an all-night game of checkers with a man who purports to be the grand champion. However, the game soon devolves into a satirical and incisive parable about the brutal confrontation between dictatorship and its political opponents. A meticulously composed work of political cinema, Le Damier takes aim at the absurdity of authoritarianism and doesn’t miss. Restored in 2K in 2021 by NYU Tisch, in association with Villa Albertine – French Embassy in the United States and the Cinémathèque Afrique of the Institut français.
Screening with:
The Potemkinists / Potemkiniștii*
Radu Jude, 2022, Romania, 18m
Romanian and Russian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Radu Jude revisits the history of the battleship Potemkin—the source story for Sergei Eisenstein’s classic 1925 work of Soviet montage—as a comic dialogue between a sculptor and a representative from Romania’s Ministry of Culture about cinema, monument-making, and art’s conflicted role in the continual revisionism of history.
*The Potemkinists is a Currents selection. For more information about the Currents lineup, visit here.
The Day of Despair
Manoel de Oliveira, 1992, Portugal/France, 76m
Portuguese with English subtitles
One of Portugal’s greatest filmmakers portrays one of its greatest writers in this biographical gem, the culmination of the trilogy that Manoel de Oliveira began with Doomed Love (1978) and Francisca (1991). As with Francisca, The Day of Despair finds Oliveira depicting the life of the 19th-century writer Camilo Castelo Branco, here played by Mario Barroso. Drawing from Branco’s correspondence with the writer Ana Plácido, this film follows Branco’s final days, with the great, scandalous author tormented by his own internal tensions as his health takes a dive and the possibility of continuing to write grows ever more remote. Oliveira’s execution of this portrait of an anguished master of letters—marked by gorgeous, enveloping, painterly images—yields an essential tribute. This copy is the result of the 4K digitisation of the original 35mm camera negative and the final sound mix, on magnetic tape, both elements conserved by the Cinemateca Portuguesa. Color grading and digital restoration of the image were made by Cineric Portugal in 2022 using a distribution print as reference.
Drylongso
Cauleen Smith, 1998, U.S., 86m
World Premiere
Cauleen Smith’s 1998 feature debut, a landmark in American independent cinema, follows Pica (Toby Smith), a woman in a photography class in Oakland, as she begins photographing the young black men of her neighborhood, having witnessed so many of them fall victim to senseless murder and fearing the possibility of their becoming extinct altogether. This project serves as a point of departure for Smith to explore Pica’s relationship with her family, as well as her relationship with a friend (April Barnett) who becomes the victim of an enigmatic and elusive serial killer lurking in the background. An enduringly rich work of DIY filmmaking, Drylongso remains a resonant and visionary examination of violence (and its reverberations), friendship, and gender. A Janus Films release. 4K restoration undertaken by The Criterion Collection, Janus Films and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Supervised by Director Cauleen Smith. The NYFF60 Revivals presentation of Drylongso is sponsored by Turner Classic Movies.
Eight Deadly Shots
Mikko Niskanen, 1972, Finland, 316m
Finnish with English subtitles
Inspired by the events surrounding a 1969 mass shooting in Pihtipudas, Finland, Mikko Niskanen’s riveting four-part mini-series chronicles the plight of a farmer, Pasi (played by Niskanen himself), whose economic hardships lead him to take up moonshining with a friend, effectively causing him to lapse back into despondent alcoholism. As Pasi sinks deeper into poverty and deeper into the bottle, we witness the routines, rituals, and quotidian dramas of his life, captured with a transfixing attentiveness to the passage of time. Hailed as the crowning achievement of Finnish filmmaking by no less an authority than Aki Kaurismaki, this naturalist epic is a triumph of psychological cinema, and a powerfully relevant exploration of economic injustice. A Janus Films release. Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, Yleisradio Oy, Fiction Finland ry, and Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Additional support provided by the Ministry of Culture and Education in Finland, Tiina and Antti Herlin Foundation, and the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation.
The Long Farewell
Kira Muratova, 1971, USSR, 97m
Russian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Completed in 1971 but not released until perestroika in 1987, Kira Muratova’s fourth feature is a majestic psychodrama centering on the relationship between a mother and a son and rendered with a borderline avant-garde sense of aesthetic freedom and formal experimentation. Divorced Evgenia (Zinaida Sharko) has devoted her life to raising her son, Sasha (Oleg Vladimirsky), but their bond is tested when he becomes a teenager and visits his father in far-off Novosibirsk, planting seeds for the young man’s desire to move out from beneath his overbearing mother’s thumb. Muratova transfigures the resulting blow-ups and reconciliations as a kinetic and atmospheric symphony suffused with resentment and love, sensitivity and obliviousness, freedom and duty. A Janus Films release. Restored in 4K by STUDIOCANAL in collaboration with The Criterion Collection at L’Immagine Ritrovata/Éclair Classics.
The Mother and the Whore
Jean Eustache, 1973, France, 210m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere
At long last presented in a striking new restoration worthy of the film’s reputation, 50 years after its scandalous premiere at Cannes, Jean Eustache’s hard-to-see masterpiece uses an obsessive, talkative ménage à trois—Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bernadette Lafont, and Françoise Lebrun—as the jumping-off point for an intense exploration of sexual politics among liberated yet alienated moderns. The Mother and the Whore abounds with references and allusions to 15 years of New Wave images and language while also documenting the mix of strategies and fictions that lovers and other strangers use to make contact and to armor themselves. Léaud, Lafont, and Lebrun, the basis of the film, portray its unforgettable characters with an absolute intensity and a mesmerizing, endlessly rich sense of humanity. A Janus Films release. The Mother and the Whore has been restored and remastered in 4K in 2022 by Les Films du Losange with the support of CNC and the participation of La Cinémathèque suisse and of Chanel. Image restoration by L’Immagine Ritrovata/Éclair Classics, supervised by Jacques Besse and Boris Eustache. Sound restoration by Léon Rousseau-L.E. Diapason.
No Fear No Die
Claire Denis, 1990, France, 90m
French with English subtitles
World Premiere
Claire Denis’s rarely screened second feature is a radically physical cinematic journey into the shadowy (under)world of illegal cockfighting. Isaach De Bankole and Alex Descas star as Dah and Jocelyn, two immigrants (from Benin and French Antilles, respectively) living on the outskirts of Paris who earn money from cockfights. The escalating violence of the bouts—at the encouragement of the white owner of the restaurant (Jean-Claude Brialy) in whose basement the fights are held—takes its toll on the pair, and Jocelyn dreams of a life outside the brutal environment of feathered pugilism. Drawing inspiration from the writings of Frantz Fanon, the ruggedly unsentimental and psychologically evocative No Fear No Die is a forceful examination of the lives of immigrants in France and of the psychic toll of the violence imposed by colonizers upon the colonized. A Film Desk Release. Restored in 4K by Pathé in 2022 with the help of the French National Center of Film and Motions Pictures (CNC) at Hiventy Laboratory. Special thanks to Claire Denis, Agnès Godard, and Pascal Marti for their collaboration.
O Sangue
Pedro Costa, 1989, Portugal, 95m
Portuguese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Admirers of Pedro Costa’s more recent work are often thrown for a thrilling loop by the glossy, liquid textures and lush atmospherics of the director’s first feature, a beguiling fairytale about the trials undergone by two brothers in the wake of their father’s violent death. Costa, who was barely 30 when O Sangue premiered, had spent the seven years leading up to its production immersing himself in the films of Fritz Lang, Kenji Mizoguchi, Robert Bresson, Jacques Tourneur, and Nicholas Ray. But the film, which begins with a slap to the face, is never less than a bracingly original stream of images and impressions: a nocturnal journey through a brittle forest; a burst of fireworks seen from the balcony of a ghostly hotel; a glittering fairground dream scored to a rhapsodic pop song. “O Sangue,” Costa said in a 2006 interview, “was also the beginning of my love—maybe love is the wrong word—for domestic cinema. A kind of cinema that shows how people live.” This DCP results from a digitization of the original 35mm camera negative and from original 35mm monaural magnetic and optical sound elements preserved at Cinemateca Portuguesa, Museu do Cinema / ANIM. Negative 4K scan on wet gate Oxberry-Cineric scanner and audio recording supervised by Franco Bosco at ANIM. Digital grading and image restoration supervised by Carlos Almeida at IrmaLucia Efeitos Especiais, Lisbon. Colorist: Gonçalo Ferreira. Image Restoration: André Constantino, Ana Cunha. Uncompressed monaural soundtrack supervised by Hugo Leitão at Estúdio Espreita o Som, Lisbon. Image and sound restorations approved by the director, October 2021–February 2022. Special thanks to José Manuel Costa, Rui Machado – Cinemateca Portuguesa, Museu do Cinema / ANIM and Clarão Companhia Prod.
Four Films by Edward Owens
Autre Fois J’ai Aimé Une Femme, 1966, U.S., 16mm, 24m
Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, 1967, U.S., 16mm, 6m
Tomorrow’s Promise, 1967, U.S., 16mm, 45m
Remembrance: A Portrait Study, 1968–70, U.S., 16mm, 6m
This program collects four newly restored short and medium-length films by the pioneering queer Black experimental filmmaker Edward Owens. A student of Gregory Markopoulos, Owens combined the strikingly staged, dramatically lit compositions of Markopoulos’s work with image-layering and superimpositions of pop cultural iconography to arrive at a singularly entrancing evocation of people and places. Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts pursues a dialectic of visual spaces and of stillness and motion. Autre Fois J’ai Aimé Une Femme conjures illicit desire on the surface of the skin, in the sound of a ferocious row, in magazine clippings, and in classical paintings. Tomorrow’s Promise focuses on the body by way of starkly lit portraits to meditate upon the tension between presence and absence, before shifting to zero in on the figure of a pensive bride. And Remembrance: A Portrait Study is an ode to Owens’s mother and her friends, adorned with the sounds of Marilyn Monroe singing “Running Wild” and Dusty Springfield’s “All Cried Out.” Restored by Chicago Film Society, The New American Cinema Group, Inc./The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and the John M. Flaxman Library at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant Program and the Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.
The Passion of Remembrance
Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien, 1986, UK, 82m
A landmark work in British avant-garde film and video, the Sankofa collective’s greatly influential first film, The Passion of Remembrance, ambitiously explores themes of racism, homophobia, sexism, and generational tensions as embodied in the reality known by a Black British family over the years. Interweaving two narrative threads—one in which a man and a woman discourse on their own experiences living in the UK, another in which events from three decades in the lives of the Baptiste family are staged—Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien tease the accumulated fragments into a spellbinding, heterogeneous mosaic that powerfully evokes the multiplicity of Black experience and identity and critiques the British state’s treatment of its marginalized residents. This 4K remaster by the BFI National Archive, undertaken in collaboration with the directors and cinematographer Nina Kellgren, is based on the original 16mm negative and magnetic soundtrack final mix. It screens in a simultaneous transatlantic premiere with the BFI London Film Festival.
Festival Passes are now on sale. NYFF60 single tickets will go on sale to the General Public on September 19, with pre-sale access for FLC Members and Pass holders prior to this date.
Members of the press and industry are invited to apply for accreditation. Press and industry screenings will begin Monday, September 26. The deadline to apply for press and industry accreditation is Wednesday, August 31 at 5pm ET.
IFH 602: Can Martin Scorsese Save Cinema? With Margaret Bodde
Margaret Bodde is the executive director of The Film Foundation, the non-profit organization created by Martin Scorsese in 1990 dedicated to the preservation and protection of motion pictures. Working in partnership with the archives and studios, TFF has preserved and restored over 925 films, including 49 restorations from 28 countries as part of the World Cinema Project.
TFF educates young people about the visual language of film through its cinema literacy program, The Story of Movies. In addition, Bodde is the award-winning producer of several of Scorsese’s documentaries.
The Film Foundation, the non-profit organization created by Martin Scorsese to preserve cinema, invites you to come together for a series of beautifully restored films in the Restoration Screening Room, our new virtual theater, available through any web browser.
Presentations will take place within a 24-hour window on the second Monday of each month, along with Special Features about the films and their restoration process. Monthly programming will encompass a broad array of restorations, including classic and independent films, documentaries, and silent films from around the world.
The next free screening is August 8th. They will be playing an amazing Film Noir double feature. Arthur Ripley’s 1946 classic The Chase and Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 masterpiece Detour.
Margaret is also a producer, known for Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019), The 50 Year Argument (2014), Public Speaking (2010), George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011), No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005), and the PBS 7-part series The Blues (2003).
