News

Film at Lincoln Center announces the Revivals selections for the 64th New York Film Festival. The NYFF Revivals section celebrates films that have been restored, preserved, or digitally remastered, bringing both landmarks of cinema history and overlooked discoveries to new audiences and this year includes 12 features and two programs of rare shorts. Showcasing classics, rarities, and rediscovered gems, the section highlights films whose artistic innovation, cultural significance, and enduring influence remain as compelling today as when they were first made. Presented by Film at Lincoln Center in partnership with Rolex, NYFF64 takes place September 25 through October 12 at Lincoln Center and in venues across the city.

Highlights in this year’s Revivals section include two films from the U.K. whose original visions were long obscured by studio intervention: The Devils, Ken Russell’s controversial and brilliant 1971 work of religious blasphemy, newly restored and featuring originally censored material; and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1950 Technicolor work of pastoral beauty, Gone to Earth, which had been drastically re-edited by producer David O. Selznick, and has now been restored in a version overseen by Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker. Gone to Earth is one of four restoration world premieres, along with Allen Fong’s Just Like Weather, Barbara Hammer’s Nitrate Kisses, and Fred Camper’s Suicide Note.

Also of note are three exciting rediscoveries from the 1980s: Report to Mother, the final feature by legendary Malayalam filmmaker John Abraham, one of the essential works of South Indian cinema; In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, Pradip Krishen’s sharp, little-seen 1989 coming-of-age story about a Delhi architecture student, which was written by a young Arundhati Roy; and Hong Kong filmmaker Allen Fong’s Just Like Weather, which mixes documentary and fiction in its tale of a couple immigrating to the U.S. and discovering the disillusionment of reality. 

Three of this year’s Revivals selections are essential, rarely screened works of the 1960s, when international narrative cinema was at its boldest and most experimental, including Paula Delsol’s underseen 1964 character study The Drift, a rare feminist film of the French New Wave; Ukrainian filmmaker Yuri Ilyenko’s 1965 feature A Well for the Thirsty, a work of poetic interiority suppressed by Soviet authorities; and Alexander Kluge’s 1966 New German Cinema trailblazer Yesterday Girl, about a woman’s daily life in East Germany—all restored from the original 35mm camera negatives.

Revivals also presents two works from cornerstone artists of American experimental filmmaking: Barbara Hammer’s 1992 queer opus Nitrate Kisses, which juxtaposes imagery past and present to create a tapestry of lesbian experience; and Fred Camper’s rarely seen late 1970s New York diary Suicide Note, previously announced in—and also screening as part of—NYFF64’s Currents section.

This year’s selection also features a near-complete retrospective of the visionary works of the Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian, screening in two programs. Beloved by filmmakers, critics, and scholars, but very rarely screened in the U.S., Pelechian’s films combine archival and original footage, mixing documentary essay and the poetic avant-garde, and boast a highly unique montage style. Now 88, Pelechian oversaw the supervision of these films, which span more than three decades. The director was honored as a special guest at Cannes Classics.

The Revivals section is programmed by Florence Almozini, Dennis Lim, Dan Sullivan, and Gina Telaroli.

NYFF64 Revivals is supported by Anne-Victorie Auriault.

NYFF64 is generously supported by Festival Co-Chairs Susannah Gray and John Lyons, Susan and John Hess, Almudena and Pablo Legorreta, and Nanna and Dan Stern; Vice-Chairs Jack Heller, Tara Kelleher and Roy Zuckerberg, and Ronnie Planalp; and Supporters Great Hill, Kathy and Kris Heinzelman, Hillary Koota Krevlin and Glenn Krevlin, Marcia DB Levy and William G. Levy, Ari Rifkin, and Mary Solomon / GS Gives.

Secure your tickets with Passes, limited quantities on sale now. NYFF64 single tickets will go on sale to the general public on Tuesday, September 15 at noon ET, with pre-sale access for FLC Members and Pass holders prior to this date. Become an FLC Member by August 28 to secure NYFF64 pre-sale access and discounted tickets year-round.

Explore the NYFF64 lineup. The Talks section and more will be announced soon—sign up for NYFF updates for the latest news.

64th New York Film Festival Revivals

The Devils (Ken Russell)

The Drift (Paula Delsol)

Gone to Earth (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)

Goodbye South, Goodbye (Hou Hsiao-hsien)

In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (Pradip Krishen)

L’innocente (Luchino Visconti)

Just Like Weather (Allen Fong)

Nitrate Kisses (Barbara Hammer)

Report to Mother (John Abraham)

Suicide Note (Fred Camper)

A Well for the Thirsty (Yuri Ilyenko)

Yesterday Girl (Alexander Kluge)

Pelechian Project Program 1 (Artavazd Pelechian)

Mountain Patrol
Land of the People
We
The Seasons

Pelechian Project Program 2 (Artavazd Pelechian)

The Beginning
|Our Century
The End
Life 

64th New York Film Festival Revivals Films and Descriptions

The Devils
Ken Russell, 1971, U.K., 35mm, 114m
North American Premiere of Newly Restored 35mm Print

The Devils. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Ken Russell’s controversial adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun is at long last available in its full, provocative splendor. This new restoration thrillingly incorporates material that was originally censored—footage that Russell deemed some of the best and most political work of his career. A young Derek Jarman designed the sets that house this story of a vengeful nun (Vanessa Redgrave) who accuses a priest (Oliver Reed) of collaborating with the devil, resulting in the apparent possession of an entire convent. A fearless account of state and church corruption, The Devils mixes graphic sexual imagery with religious iconography in an unforgettable spectacle that could only issue from the mind of Ken Russell. Following its NYFF64 premiere, The Devils will open on 35mm for a one-week engagement beginning October 16 at Film at Lincoln Center. A Warner Bros. Clockwork release.

New 4K restoration from the original camera negative of Ken Russell’s definitive vision of The Devils, using his privately constructed 2004 edit. Audio remastered from original English Composite 35mm Mag Film transferred at 96kHz, plus other original elements as needed. Picture and sound restoration performed by Warner Bros. Post Production Creative Services, Water Tower Color, and Warner Bros. Sound.

The Drift / La dérive
Paula Delsol, 1964, France, 83m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere of New 4K Restoration

The Drift. Courtesy of Janus Films.

An underseen and criminally overlooked film of the Nouvelle Vague, Paula Delfsol’s sensual, meandering work of modernistic character study follows Jacquie (Jacqueline Vandal), a young woman who leaves her family to hit the road with her guitarist lover, only for him to abandon her. As she proceeds to encounter a succession of men, Delsol uses Jacquie’s experiences to reflect on the state of women’s liberation in 1960s France. In her sole feature film, Delsol filled nearly every role behind the camera, and though it fell into obscurity for decades following its Cannes premiere, the film today appears to us as a bold and innovative feminist contribution to the notorious boys’ club that was the Nouvelle Vague. A Janus Films release.

Restored in 4K in 2026 by La Cinémathèque française in collaboration with the CNC, and with the support of the Neuflize OBC Foundation. Restored at the TransPerfect Media laboratory from the 35mm image and sound negatives.

Gone to Earth
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1950, U.K., 111m
World Premiere of New 4K Restoration

Gone to Earth. Courtesy of The Walt Disney Company.

For many years, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s evocative ode to Shropshire fell victim to the meddling hands of producer David O. Selznick, who drastically re-edited the film, releasing it as The Wild Heart in 1952. Selznick made his changes directly onto the negative, making it exceedingly difficult to reconstruct Powell and Pressburger’s original version. Overseen by Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker, and making use of positive materials held at the British Film Institute, as well as the film’s tattered negative, this restoration miraculously brings Powell and Pressburger’s Technicolor version of Mary Webb’s novel back to life. Jennifer Jones stars as the free-spirited, nature-loving Hazel Woodus, a woman who refuses to bow down to her father (Esmond Knight), the spiritual clergyman (Cyril Cusack) to whom she is betrothed, or the reckless squire (David Farrar) who desires her. Jones gives a career-best performance in The Archers’ glorious tribute to the otherworldly landscapes where Powell’s father grew up. A Walt Disney Company release.

Restored in 2026 by Walt Disney Studios, in association with The Film Foundation, with the participation of the British Film Institute, The George Eastman Museum, The Museum of Modern Art. Image Restoration: Cineric, Inc. Audio Restoration: Audio Mechanics. Supervised by Thelma Schoonmaker, with special thanks to Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.

The NYFF64 screening of Gone to Earth is presented in partnership with Rolex.

Goodbye South, Goodbye / 南國再見,南國
Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1996, Taiwan, 120m
Taiwanese Hokkien and Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles
North American Premiere of New 4K Restoration

Goodbye South, Goodbye. Courtesy of Janus Films.

Arriving midway through Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 1990s run of unassailable masterpieces, Goodbye South, Goodbye is one of his great contemporary films, and a definitive generational portrait, following the schemes and plots of a group of small-time gangsters in the age of get-rich-quick late-capitalism. As Gao (Jack Kao) aims to establish a gambling ring in Pingxi with a friend and accomplice, Gao’s girlfriend quickly grows wary of the new faces that enter his life as a result. A typically mesmerizing study of the effects of modernization on the lives of everyday Taiwanese, cycling between movement and stasis, Goodbye South, Goodbye remains one of Hou’s most sociologically insightful works, and it features several of his most bravura long takes in a career replete with them. A Janus Films release.

4K scanned from the 35mm original camera negative preserved at the National Film Archive of Japan, followed by picture restoration and color grading. Sound digitized from the optical magnetic sound track (cinetape) and audio-restored/remastered.

In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones
Pradip Krishen, 1989, India, 112m
North American Premiere of New 4K Restoration

In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones

Based on a screenplay by a then-28-year-old Arundhati Roy, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones at first appears to be a modest and playful depiction of student life in the 1970s. But Roy’s story of Annie (Arjun Raina), a New Delhi architecture student caught in a vicious cycle of failing and repeating his studies, gradually reveals itself as a sharp and poignant portrayal of youth, deftly poised between hope and cynicism. (Roy herself quietly steals the show in her onscreen turn as Radha, Annie’s friend and an independent young woman proud of her nonconformist ways.) Directed by Roy’s husband Pradip Krishen and based on her own university experiences, the English-language film was originally made for television and circulated exclusively on VHS for many years. This new restoration, which made use of the 16mm camera negative, as well as a 35mm print, finally brings this deeply pleasurable film to the big screen where it belongs. A Several Futures release.

Restored in 4K by Film Heritage Foundation at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with the director Pradip Krishen. Funding provided by Film Heritage Foundation. Restored using the best surviving elements: 16mm original camera negative and sound negative preserved at the NFDC-National Film Archive of India and 35mm release print preserved at Film Heritage Foundation.

L’innocente / The Innocent
Luchino Visconti, 1976, Italy/France, 129m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere of New 4K Restoration

L’innocente. Courtesy of Film Movement.

In his final film, Luchino Visconti offers one of his most cutting variations on his lifelong theme: the moral decay of the soul-sick aristocracy. Based on a novel by the proto-fascist sensualist Gabriele d’Annunzio, this poison-pill melodrama concerns a callously self-absorbed nobleman (Giancarlo Giannini) whose liberal views on marriage extend only as far as his own extramarital affairs. When his tormented wife (Laura Antonelli) pursues a dalliance with a writer, the full monstrosity of his chauvinism is unleashed. Working with a late-career rigor, Visconti returns one last time to the luxuriant, red-velvet world of the 19th century, stripping away operatic excess in favor of a supremely controlled emotional intensity. A Film Movement release.

New digital transfer created in 4K resolution on an Arriscan film scanner from the original camera negative by Cinelab Service in Italy. All video and audio restoration done at Heavenly Movie Corporation by Sebastian Alvarez del Castillo.

Just Like Weather / 美國心
Allen Fong, 1986, Hong Kong, 95m
Cantonese and English with English subtitles
World Premiere of New 4K Restoration

Just Like Weather. Courtesy of Film Movement.

Allen Fong’s fascinating, ahead-of-its-time third feature follows a couple from Hong Kong as they navigate domestic trials and tribulations, both real and staged, before eventually heading to the United States in search of a potential better future amid the social and political malaise of their generation. They soon discover, like many immigrants before and since, that the U.S. isn’t quite the promised land of abundant opportunity. Fong’s use of non-actors and documentary techniques in a fictional context—or perhaps fictional techniques in a documentary context?—at times recalls the work of Abbas Kiarostami, imbuing quotidian concerns with a powerful metaphysical and political resonance. The result is a signature work of the Hong Kong New Wave, and one of the great films about married life. 

Restored in 4K by M+, Hong Kong in 2026. The restoration was made using the original 16mm picture negative, the 35mm reversal intermediate, and the 35mm optical sound negative preserved at the Hong Kong Film Archive, Leisure and Cultural Services Department. The restoration was undertaken at L’Immagine Ritrovata. Special thanks to George Chang. Just Like Weather is one of the films under “M+ Restored,” an initiative supported by CHANEL.

Nitrate Kisses
Barbara Hammer, 1992, U.S., 67m
World Premiere of New 4K Restoration

Nitrate Kisses. Courtesy of The Estate of Barbara Hammer.

Barbara Hammer’s pioneering first feature weaves together a liberating portrait of queer sexuality through a dizzying mix of archival and original footage: interviews, sexual imagery, and excerpts of documentary and narrative films from the 1930s, including the first gay film from the U.S., James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber’s Lot in Sodom (1933). Hammer’s editing juxtapoises contrasting images and sounds and brings past and present into an intimate and unexpected dialogue. With sections that explore, among other matters, the sexuality of American author Willa Cather and the status of lesbians in the Third Reich, Hammer’s film boldly pulls back the curtain on the queer experience. A Strand Releasing release.

Restored by BB Optics (Mackenzie Lukenbill, Restoration Technician). Supported by Frameline and The Estate of Barbara Hammer. Restoration overseen by Brydie O’Connor.

Report to Mother / Amma Ariyan
John Abraham, 1986, India, 115m
Malayalam with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere of New 4K Restoration

Report to Mother. Courtesy of the Film Heritage Foundation.

The final feature by legendary Malayalam filmmaker John Abraham, Report to Mother is an astonishing work of political commitment and aesthetic experimentation. The first production of the Odessa Collective, which raised funds by screening films and performing in villages with the aim of creating a true “people’s cinema,” the film follows Purushan (Joy Mathew), who discovers a dead body while en route to Delhi and sets out to inform the mother of the deceased of his apparent fate, while gathering an eclectic group of companions along the way. Indelibly capturing the political tumult of 1970s Kerala in stark black and white, Report to Mother has endured as one of South Indian cinema’s most essential works. 

Restored by Film Heritage Foundation at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory and Digital Film Restore Pvt. Ltd. in association with Odessa Collective with special thanks to cinematographer Venu ISC and editor Bina Paul. Funding provided by Film Heritage Foundation. Restored in 4K from one of the only two surviving prints: the first-generation 35mm release print preserved at the NFDC-National Film Archive of India.

Suicide Note
Fred Camper, 1976–1984, U.S., 16mm, 110m
Silent with no subtitles
World Premiere of New Restoration

Suicide Note. Photos by Fred Camper. Courtesy of Chicago Film Society.

Shot largely in New York in the late 1970s, and seldom screened publicly, this rare film from critic and artist Fred Camper is a fragmentary, diaristic work, capturing a cluttered and melancholic world on Super 8 reversal film. Haunted by its title, the film is at once intimate and opaque, rhapsodic and withdrawn, as its tremulous images attempt to reckon with the fleeting beauty of crowds, shop windows, domestic interiors, art exhibitions, and a panoptic view of New York City taken from the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Each screening of the film, which unfolds across 10 sections, is different from the last: the reels that make up its eighth section are determined by way of a chance operation performed before each projection. Previously known as SN, the film has now been given its full title (conceived after Camper’s stepfather took his own life and left no note), to coincide with this essential new restoration. 

Suicide Note has been restored by Chicago Film Society with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation and Big Creek Cooperative. Picture Restoration: BB Optics; 4K Scan and Laboratory Services: Colorlab. 

A Well for the Thirsty / Криниця для спраглих
Yuri Ilyenko, 1965/1987, Ukraine/USSR, 71m
Ukrainian with English subtitles
North American Premiere of New 4K Restoration

A Well for the Thirsty

Completed in 1965 but suppressed by Soviet authorities until its eventual release amid the onset of perestroika in 1987, Yuri Ilyenko’s debut feature is a cryptic, visionary work that helped establish the Ukrainian poetic cinema movement (alongside Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, on which Ilyenko served as cinematographer). Almost entirely dialogue-free, A Well for the Thirsty paints the interiority of Levko (Dmytro Miliutenko), an old peasant who lives on the perimeter of a desert; his family members are all dead or otherwise gone, and as he makes preparations for his own inevitable death, he is beset by memories and apparitions from throughout his life. With its radical sound design and striking symbolist imagery, A Well for the Thirsty is a singular achievement that announced Ilyenko as a worthy heir of Alexander Dovzhenko. 

Restored from the 35mm original camera negative, held at Oleksandr Dovzhenko Centre, Kyiv. Scanned by Lukasz Ceranka (Fixafilm) and Oleksandr Bertman (Oleksandr Dovzhenko Centre), restored with funding by Fixafilm and the Polish Film Institute, graded with reference to an archival print loaned by the Dovzhenko Centre. Copyright holder: Dovzhenko Film Studio. Special thanks to Olena Honcharuk, Daniel Bird, Pylyp Illienko, Andriy Donchyk, CEO of Dovzhenko Film Studio.

Yesterday Girl / Abschied von gestern
Alexander Kluge, 1966, West Germany, 88m
German with English subtitles
North American Premiere of New 4K Restoration

Yesterday Girl

One of the foundational films of the New German Cinema, the debut feature by the polymath artist and writer Alexander Kluge (who died in March 2026 at the age of 94) remains a radical and generative work that reimagines the formal conventions of narrative cinema in pursuit of a new kind of film, one that would better reflect the political realities of life in Germany 20 years after the fall of the Third Reich. Nominally, the plot concerns Anita G. (Alexandra Kluge, the director’s sister), a young East German woman acclimating to her new life on the other side of the wall. But Kluge adorns her meandering odyssey with a wealth of intertitles, references, citations, and documentary footage, yielding an allusive and polyvocal work about which one can say, simply, that there was a German cinema before Yesterday Girl and a German cinema after it. 

Restoration undertaken by Kairos-Film and Reitz-Medien under the supervision of Alexander Kluge. 4K scanning from the original 35mm negative performed at ARRI Film & TV München.

Pelechian Project

The Seasons

Long a figure of cultish devotion but still too little known in the U.S., the Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian once said, while speaking to Jean-Luc Godard, that “film relies on three factors: space, time, and real movement.” Combining archival and original footage, and blurring the categories of documentary essay and the poetic avant-garde, Pelechian’s visionary works revolve around a grand recurring theme of humankind’s tumultuous relationship to the natural world. A spiritual and theoretical descendant of great Soviet filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, Pelechian evolved their pioneering editing techniques into a method he termed “distance montage,” which, instead of forging linear associations, sought to create “a magnetic field around the film.” The films in these two programs—restored under the supervision of Pelechian, now 88—span more than three decades and constitute a near-complete survey of his extraordinary body of work.

Restoration of Artavazd Pelechian’s films launched by Coproduction Office in partnership with Cineteca di Bologna under the director’s supervision. Best available elements selected by the director and scanned in 4K at the Public Television Company of Armenia. Restoration and color grading carried out by L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory. In association with Cinema Foundation of Armenia, Public Television Company of Armenia, VGIK. Additional support by ZDF/ARTE, ArMa Media Production LLC, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

Pelechian Project Program 1
Artavazd Pelechian, 1964–1975, USSR/Armenia, 79m

We

Mountain Patrol / Լեռնային պարեկներ
1964, 10m
North American Premiere of New 4K Restoration

Made at the legendary Russian film school VGIK while Pelechian was a student, this early short film shows the daily labor of men tasked with clearing the way for train passage through the Armenian mountains.

Land of the People / Մարդկանց երկիրը
1966, 11m
U.S. Premiere of New 4K Restoration

A striking portrait of labor and human thought, bookended by a roving visual meditation on Rodin’s “The Thinker.” 

We / Մենք
1969, 27m
U.S. Premiere of New 4K Restoration

The question of Armenian identity and the very fate of the Armenian people seem to be at stake in this kinetic, formally convulsive work. 

The Seasons / Տարվա եղանակները
1975, 31m
U.S. Premiere of New 4K Restoration

In what is often considered Pelechian’s magnum opus, the ancient antagonism of nature and humanity plays out in a depiction of a remote farming community, energetically scored with Armenian folk music and Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.

Pelechian Project Program 2
Artavazd Pelechian, 1967–1993, USSR/Armenia, 77m

The Beginning

The Beginning
1967, 9m
U.S. Premiere of New 4K Restoration

The October Revolution of 1917 comes to life through Pelechian’s unique stuttering montage in this analytical, staccato counterpoint to Eisenstein’s October.

Our Century
1982, 52m
North American Premiere of New 4K Restoration

A jarring, provocative work alternating between images of a rocket launch and scenes of failed experiments in aviation, Our Century is, in Pelechian’s words, “a film about us, about me, about what I’m striving for, what we’re all striving for, every person, humanity. And this desire to ascend, to transcend, is literally embodied in the cosmonauts.”

The End
1992, 9m
U.S. Premiere of New 4K Restoration

A staggering meditation on landscapes and travel, The End captures a train ride from Moscow to Yerevan, rendered by Pelechian as a kind of hymn outside of time, conjured through the mystery of the human face, the rumbling of mechanized transport, and the revelatory play of light. Note: The End will also screen in Currents Program 2: The Visible Invisible. 

Life
1993, 7m
North American Premiere of New 4K Restoration
A rare color film for Pelechian, in which a woman’s face movingly fills the frame as she gives birth.

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A new restoration undertaken by the Academy Film Archive and Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation will screen this weekend at the 12th annual Cinema Revival Film Festival.

This weekend the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio is holding its 12th annual Cinema Revival Film Festival devoted to celebrating the art and practice of film restoration and preservation. As always, the lineup is stacked with recent restorations of classics from around the globe, from New Hollywood favorites like Bob Rafelson‘s “Five Easy Pieces” and Steven Spielberg‘s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to Erich von Stroheim’s long lost silent treasure “Queen Kelly” and Leobardo López Arretche’s landmark 1968 documentary “El Grito.” There’s also a program devoted to animation treasures, a rare 3D screening of the Jerry Lewis comedy “Money From Home,” and a presentation of “Ghost in the Shell” director Mamoru Oshii’s live-action debut “The Red Spectacles.”

One of the best films screening at this year’s festival is also one that was seriously underrated and misunderstood by both the critics and the public when it first appeared in 1957. “Saint Joan” was producer-director Otto Preminger‘s adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s 1923 play about the life of Joan of Arc, a play the extremely well-read Preminger considered to be “the greatest masterpiece ever written for the theater.” To adapt the play, Preminger hired the great screenwriter and novelist Graham Greene, who Preminger felt would add meaning and emotional investment to the project given his Catholicism.

“Saint Joan” had long been an object of fascination and desire for Preminger, who was in a position to acquire it after finding success as an independent filmmaker with movies like “The Moon is Blue” and “The Man With the Golden Arm” in the years following his era at Fox as a sturdy contract director. A study in opposing values that pits Joan’s unwavering faith against men in power who range from the sympathetic to the willfully ignorant, “Saint Joan” was both a departure for Preminger in its abstraction (he was already moving toward the kind of realist-based location shooting that would characterize his best films like “Anatomy of a Murder” and “Advise and Consent”) and perfectly in his wheelhouse as an exploration of moral gray areas.

To find his leading lady, Preminger embarked on a nationwide search and personally auditioned thousands of would-be Joans before landing on Jean Seberg, an 18-year old from Iowa whose acting experience was limited to high school plays. Casting the unknown Seberg, who would become exalted by cinephiles for her role in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” (as well as her performance in Preminger’s next film, “Bonjour Tristesse”), had several benefits for Preminger.

The first was a bonanza of free publicity, as the American press ate up Seberg’s Cinderella story and covered it relentlessly in the months leading up to the film’s release. The second benefit was an aesthetic one: casting a young and inexperienced American opposite mostly established British thespians (Preminger produced the film in England under the Eady plan, which provided government subsidies for films using British artists) added to Joan’s sense of isolation, oppression, and exclusion.

That alienation was increased by Preminger’s treatment of Seberg on set, which was, by all first-hand accounts, extremely harsh. Costars like Richard Widmark, who gives one of the weirdest but most interesting performances of his career as The Dauphin, were deeply troubled by Preminger’s constant verbal abuse of Seberg; then there was an accident on set (which seems to have horrified even the tyrannical Preminger) that led to Seberg getting badly burned during the climax where she is burned at the stake.

Seberg suffered through it all only to be excoriated by the press, along with Preminger, when “Saint Joan” was released. As is so often the case, there was a backlash against all the pre-release hype; the free publicity generated by Preminger’s talent search had turned rancid by the time the film finally arrived. The reviews were cruel, and extremely unfair given that Seberg’s performance is not only not the disaster the critics claimed it to be, it’s one that often rises to the level of greatness in Seberg’s ability to convey Joan’s blinding, relentless sense of commitment to her cause — and her genuine shock and horror when she learns it is not enough to spare her.

The deep sadness of Seberg’s performance, which probably feels more resonant now knowing how tragically her life ended, is unblinkingly captured by Preminger’s objective camera and cutting, which rarely editorialize. Preminger was the least manipulative of all classical Hollywood directors (one reason why he probably thrived as an independent once he broke free of the more rigid visual language directors needed to practice while under contract to the studios), a filmmaker who avoided close-ups and who kept dramatic emphasis to a minimum in his editing.

The technique was inextricably bound to his worldview as a prober and philosopher uncommitted to absolute truth or inflexible morality; in Preminger’s world, there are always myriad perspectives that, if not equally valid, are equally considered. Thus even Joan of Arc doesn’t get the heroic treatment she would if “Saint Joan” had been directed by someone like Cecil B. DeMille, or even John Ford or Michael Curtiz. Preminger’s restraint has made the film age well, but in its time it probably kept audiences from recognizing the power of Seberg’s work and the audacity of Preminger’s experimental storytelling.

 

 

The restoration of “Saint Joan” that will be screening at Cinema Revival this Sunday has been making the rounds of festivals and museums since making its world premiere at the Academy Museum a little over a year ago, and it’s a revelation for those of us who fell in love with the film via the murky home video copies that have been circulating since the early 1990s. Even Cassie Blake, the film preservationist at the Academy Film Archive who oversaw the restoration, was surprised by the film’s elegance and beauty.

“The cinematography and production design are stunning and lush in a way I had not realized until working on the restoration, despite having seen the film before,” Blake told IndieWire. “Much of the discussion surrounding the film focuses on its performances, but it’s worth paying attention to the aesthetic details as well.” Perhaps the most valuable effect of the restoration is to see how Preminger’s aesthetic concerns intersect with Seberg’s performance for maximum impact; his framing of her most exhausted, pleading moments makes “Saint Joan” as much a documentary of its lead actor’s exasperation as a biography of Joan of Arc, and the details in her expressions and gestures are more deeply, vividly felt in the 4K restoration.

Blake attributes the exquisite quality of the restoration to the superior source elements she had to work with, as the Academy possesses the original negative and optical soundtrack for “Saint Joan” as part of the Preminger Collection that Otto Preminger’s daughter Victoria donated to the archive in 2006. “Both were in beautiful condition for their age, free of any major deterioration or missing footage,” Blake said. “A restoration is often only as good as its source element, and the negative of ‘Saint Joan’ was up for the task.”

For the Academy’s restoration, the original 35mm picture negative was scanned at 4k and digitally restored in a 4k workflow. “A new 35mm track positive was produced from the 35mm optical track negative in order to provide optimal sound quality,” Blake said. “Once created, the new track positive was subsequently captured and restored. Once the digital restoration was complete, we recorded a 35mm filmout and new track negative. An answer print and release prints were created photochemically, rounding out the restoration process.”

The new print and DCP of “Saint Joan” take their place in the Academy’s archive alongside many other important Preminger prints donated by Victoria, who was a strong advocate for the restoration of “Saint Joan” before she passed away in 2024. Blake notes that the Academy also holds a rare 35mm print of the film’s trailer, in which Preminger appears and announces the selection of Seberg in the title role. “Watching the director announce his quest to find his next star cements the idea that Seberg was truly plucked from obscurity to carry this film,” Blake said. “As someone who deeply appreciates Seberg’s subsequent work in ‘Breathless’ and ‘Bonjour Tristesse,’ it’s fascinating to watch these significant facets of her trajectory.”

“Saint Joan” will screen at the Wexner Center’s Cinema Revival Film Festival on Sunday, March 1. It was restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

The directors paid tribute to George Stevens' 1965 biblical epic before the Academy Museum's premiere of a new restoration overseen by Amazon MGM Studios and Scorsese's Film Foundation.

On Saturday, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles presented the world premiere of a new 4K restoration of George Stevens‘ “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965), one of the most ambitious and experimental of all Hollywood epics. Director Martin Scorsese, whose Film Foundation was instrumental in restoring the film (and whose “The Last Temptation of Christ” is the only biblical epic that rivals “The Greatest Story” in its audacity and complexity), provided a video introduction in which he celebrated Stevens’ masterpiece as the summation of his work.

“ The film was shot in Ultra Panavision 70 with lenses that yielded an aspect ratio of 2.76 to 1, and it was breathtaking,” Scorsese said. “But it wasn’t just the size of the image, it was the imprint of the man behind the camera who knew how to fill that frame, how to compose it. And composer seems like the right word to describe George Stevens and the extraordinary level of artistry he reached at that point in his life and career.”

Scorsese explained that when Stevens came back from World War II, his work took on a new sense of purpose and urgency in powerful works like “A Place in the Sun,” “Shane,” “Giant,” and “The Diary of Anne Frank.” “He began to pay very close attention to evil, to the greed and the hatred and the raw murderous violence that can overtake us all if we don’t all pay attention,” Scorsese said. “Those pictures are grand cinematic canvases, but they’re also urgent warnings to take care of our goodness and our love.”

Although Stevens was not a particularly religious man, he saw in Jesus Christ a way to explore those themes on their grandest scale. “‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ is the summation,” Scorsese said. “It’s the final movement of Stevens’ multi-picture symphony. Stevens chose to enact the story on a scale of mythic grandeur and timeless immensity. This picture was years in the making at a cast of thousands.” It also felt of a piece with Stevens’ Westerns thanks to the unusual choices the director made when it came to locations.

“It was set against the backdrop of the American West in locations that we normally associate with Westerns,” Scorsese said. “Death Valley, Moab, Utah, Pyramid Lake in Nevada. It’s an extraordinary idea and it was really controversial because most biblical epics up to that time been shot somewhere near the Middle East or in the Middle East.” Scorsese noted that the film was part of a trend that included Nicolas Ray’s “King of Kings” and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” that brought a new immediacy to the story of Jesus Christ. “They turned away from the conventions of the period.”

Scorsese added that the production encountered “one calamity after another” and ultimately didn’t fully realize Stevens’ vision. “ Nevertheless, Stevens put everything he had into the telling of the story of Jesus and you could feel it from the first frame to the last,” Scorsese said. “He wanted to embody the tragedy and the redemption of humanity on every level. In a way, his ambitions were so grand that it wasn’t possible to realize them fully, but the sheer intensity and artistry of the picture is moving all on its own. There’s nothing else quite like it.”

Stevens’ son, filmmaker George Stevens Jr., worked on the restoration with Amazon MGM Studios and the Film Foundation and appeared in person at the Academy Museum to introduce Guillermo del Toro, a lifelong Stevens enthusiast and Film Foundation board member who was present to deliver a 20-minute lecture on “The Greatest Story Ever Told” before the film. As a Catholic raised in Mexico, del Toro estimated that he had seen “The Greatest Story” over 20 times — and he sat with the audience in the Academy Museum to watch it again in its exquisite new restoration.

Del Toro provided rich historical context for the film, describing Stevens’ path through several epochs of filmmaking. “He lived through every era of cinema,” del Toro said before exploring Stevens’ innovations during the silent period, his wartime documentary work, his seminal post-war American epics, and the influence he had on the New Hollywood. This last topic was where del Toro’s lecture was most revelatory, as he explained why the perception of Stevens as a staid classical filmmaker is dead wrong, and that in fact Stevens was a modernist who influenced one of the most groundbreaking films of the 1960s, “Bonnie and Clyde.”

“I want to make the case today that this man influenced the New American Cinema,” del Toro said. “He influenced Martin Ritt, Warren Beatty, Terrence Malick and many more.” Del Toro gave the example of Warren Beatty studying the sound mix of “Shane” and applying its principles to the climactic shoot-out in “Bonnie and Clyde.” “Beatty was the first man that noticed ‘Shane’ was a modern film by a modern master. Stevens insisted that the percussion, the brutality of a gunshot overpowers with its violence, and Beatty understands that this is a bold decision, a bold technique.”

In discussing “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” del Toro insightfully drew parallels between Stevens’ age and our own, both in terms of world politics and upheaval in the film industry. “ His canvas became Ultra Panavision 70, with a spherical system that gave him extra space,” del Toro said. “When he shot this movie, there was a battle between TV and cinema — we’re there again — and the battle was how to get people into theaters. One of the things was spectacle. The larger formats were getting people into theaters, but very few directors really knew how to use it and how to use it expressively.”

Del Toro added that Stevens used the vast potential of the Ultra Panavision 70 frame as a tool to examine his themes with sweep and intensity. “You can find out more about an artist by their art than by sharing space and time with them,” del Toro said when explaining that “The Greatest Story Ever Told” expressed Stevens’ profoundly humanistic point of view. “This is a time and a generation that didn’t signal virtue, they practiced it. They didn’t tell you who they were, they demonstrated who they were.”

 

“The Greatest Story Ever Told” represented a demonstration of all that Stevens had learned and felt about good and evil since liberating Dachau concentration camp during his time in the service, an experience that informed the film he made right before “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” “The Diary of Anne Frank.” “One of the questions he was trying to grapple with was that no one group crucified Jesus,” del Toro said. “We all crucified Jesus. Stevens said there was no them, it was us.”

Yet for del Toro, what stands out about “The Greatest Story Ever Told” and the rest of Stevens’ body of work is its hopefulness and faith. “He realized that art and narrative have such a high calling to tell us what we are and who we are, and that compassion and decency are our superpowers,” del Toro said. “Don’t let them lie to you that hatred is our superpower. It diminishes us, and Stevens understood this.”

Stevens only made one film after “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” the Warren Beatty vehicle “The Only Game in Town,” which got made due to Beatty’s reverence for the master director. “What would George Stevens have done after this film if given another chance at the canvas he was grappling with?” del Toro asked before closing his lecture with the memory of watching “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” “If you grow up Mexican, every Easter you saw this movie. It’s Saturday, but let’s have Easter together.”

“The Greatest Story Ever Told” premiered at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, where Guillermo del Toro presented this year’s “George Stevens Lecture on Directing”— the museum’s ongoing lecture series about the art of filmmaking. For information on future museum events, visit their website.

Criterion offers another slew of neglected classics their much-deserved moment in the sun.

The Criterion Collection’s latest bundle of films restored by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project is bookended by two of the largest spectacles in the series to date: Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s Palme d’or-winning Chronicle of the Years of Fire, which reorients the visual language of a David Lean epic around the perspective of a colonized people, and Ardak Amirkulov’s The Fall of Otrar, which was made off and on for a period of years during the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Beginning in the lead-up to the Second World War and carrying through to the period of the postwar Algerian independence movement and eventual war, Chronicle of the Years of Fire centers its vast canvas on Ahmed (Yorgo Voyagis), who uproots his family from a drought-ravaged village to Algiers, where he becomes radicalized by the exploitation he suffers at the hands of French colonists. Lakhdar-Hamina arranges gorgeous but bleak vistas of arid landscapes before slowly shifting into staged recreations of guerilla warfare or French reprisals that focus less on the action itself than the aftermath of bodies littering streets. Galvanizing in its depiction of tribal conflict giving way to solidarity against a common enemy, the 1975 film nonetheless never loses sight of the immense cost of gaining one’s freedom.

The Fall of Otrar details the story of one of Genghis Khan’s most brutal conquests: the eradication of the Khwarazmian Empire after its shah recklessly executed the Mongol’s envoys. Co-written by maverick Russian filmmaker Aleksei German and his wife and frequent collaborator, Svetlana Karmalita, Amirkulov’s 1991 film shares many of that director’s stylistic and thematic preoccupations, as evidenced by the swooning, dreamy long takes and garishly sensual evocation of the filth and fury of pre-modern life.

For all the immensity of its production design and its impressively mounted battle scenes, the film often conveys an intense claustrophobia befitting the siege campaign that brought the walled city of Otrar to its knees. It’s also one of the greatest movies ever made about irreconcilable culture clash, of what happens when two civilizations have such radically different values that neither can comprehend the other and sees annihilation as the only logical response.

Sandwiched between these colossal works are two comparatively shorter features: Idrissa Ouédraogo’s 1987 debut, Yam Daabo, and G. Aravindan’s Kummatty, from 1979. Yam Daabo’s title translates to “The Choice,” a brutal and multivalent irony considering the hardships on display, which range from economic desperation to the false promise of urban prosperity for rural transplants to the violently possessive tug of war by two suitors for the same woman.

Ouédraogo is anti-lyrical in his approach, presenting this harsh land in stark cuts and minimally moving shots and filling the soundtrack with the sounds of hoes tilling rocky soil and the occasional snap of gunfire. And yet, the film also takes care to point out the grace that people extend to each other even at the height of conflict. A handshake between fathers dissipates the tensions raised by their competing teenage sons, and elsewhere, a show of humanity from a seemingly lost soul toward an old friend inspires the latter to return to a home he abandoned.

The fabulistic Kummatty follows a Pied Piper-esque magician (Ambalappuzha Ravunni) who charms local children into obedience and devotion. Against expansive landscape shots of the mountainous, tropical southern Indian state of Kerala, Aravindan’s film gradually induces a sense of the uncanny using in-camera techniques. Opening the aperture a few extra stops in daytime scenes, Aravindan and cinematographer Shaji N. Karun overexpose the images to make the sky appear almost blindingly bright and hyperreal. And when the sorcerer starts weaving his magic, quick edits are used to convey the effect of his transfiguring spellcraft. Sidestepping any simple moral for the sake of a more ambiguous, folkloric tale of a radical journey back to where one started, the film is as beguiling and relaxing as it is unnerving.

Despite their lack of relation to one another, the films in Criterion’s box set share certain thematic and stylistic parallels. All four boast stellar vistas, while the magic-realist tone of Kummatty makes for easy programming alongside the almost alien atmosphere of The Fall of Otrar. The more intimate drama of perseverance and struggle seen in Yam Daabo mirrors much of the same motivating hardship besetting the central family of Chronicle of the Years of Fire before that film expands into something much larger.

Image/Sound

All four films receive transfers from new 4K restorations (overseen by the World Cinema Project in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna), and given the sorry state of preservation that some of these movies were in previously, the results are astounding. The streaks of verdant color in Kummatty and Yam Daabo pop against the swaths of brown and yellow soil and sand. Both the sepia-tinted monochrome and full-color scenes of The Fall of Otrar look crisp with stable contrast and clarity well into the background of deep-focus compositions. Chronicle of the Years of Fire looks best of all, with the image depth so clear that you can make out the sand cakes into the lines of faces and the stained browns and yellows on well-worn desert clothing.

The soundtracks are of more variable quality, all seemingly endemic to the conditions in which they were recorded. (A tinniness can be heard in The Fall of Otrar when characters’ voices echo in cavernous rooms.) Still, there are no discernible issues with the discs’ reproduction of these tracks, and in all cases dialogue, music, and sound effects are well balanced.

Extras

Each of the films comes with an introduction from Martin Scorsese, who recounts his memories of seeing them for the first time and of the World Cinema Project’s often fraught efforts to restore them. A documentary about the making of The Fall of Otrar amid the collapse of the Soviet Union features interviews with director Ardak Amirkulov, actor Tungyshbai Dzhamankulov, production designer Umirzak Shmano, and film journalist Gulnara Abikeyeva, while the other films are supplemented with interviews with film scholars (and, in the case of Kummatty, its filmmaker’s son, Ramu Aravindan). These interviews all provide helpful social context for the times and places in which the movies were made, as well as deeper dives into the oeuvres of their respective filmmakers. An accompanying booklet contains essays on the films by critics and historians Joseph Fahim, Chrystel Oloukoï, Ratik Asokan, and Kent Jones.

Overall

The Criterion Collection offers four neglected classics their much-deserved moment in the sun with the latest iteration of its World Cinema Project series.

Cast: Yorgo Voyagis, Larbi Zekkal, Cheikh Nourredine, Hassan El-Hassani, Leila Shenna, Aoua Guiraud, Moussa Bologo, Ousmane Sawadogo, Fatimata Ouédraogo, Assita Ouédraogo, Ambalappuzha Ramunni, Ashok Unnikrishnan, Sivasankaran, Kothara Gopalkrishnan, Vilasini, Dokhdurbek Kydyraliyev, Tungyshbai Dzhamankulov, Bolot Beyshenaliyev, Abdurashid Makhsudov  Director: Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, Idrissa Ouédraogo,G. Aravindan, Ardak Amirkulov  Screenwriter: Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, Tewfik Fares, Rachid Boudjedra, Idrissa Ouédraogo,G. Aravindan, Kavalam Narayana Panicker, Ardak Amirkulov, Aleksei German, Svetlana Karmalita, Ardak Amirkulov  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 502 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1975 - 1991  Release Date: January 20, 2026  Buy: Video