News

56th NYFF Retrospective & Revivals Sections Include Films from Fassbinder, Oshima, Mambéty & More

Leonard Pearce

8/21/2018 12:00:00 AM

Following their impressively varied Main Slate section and Projections lineup, the full slate for Retrospective and Revivals at the 56th New York Film Festival have been announced. After last year’s Robert Mitchum retrospective, this year’s edition is split into three parts, paying tributing to the late Dan Talbot and Pierre Rissient, as well as spotlighting a trio of documentaries that delve into cinema history.

“For Pierre and Dan, two genuine heroes, everything to do with cinema was urgent. This year’s retrospective section pays tribute to both men, who passed away within six months of each other,” NYFF Director and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones said.

Talbot, founder of New Yorker Films and longtime director of Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, will be honored with personal favorites from Bernardo Bertolucci, Straub-Huillet, Nagisa Oshima, Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and more. Meanwhile, producer, publicist, distributor, curator, and cinema polymath Pierre Rissient’s section will feature works from Clint Eastwood, Joseph Losey, King Hu, Raoul Walsh, Fritz Lang, and more.

Amongst the Revivals sections, a number of major new restorations will be presented, including Edgar G. Ulmer’s noir classic Detour, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s neocolonialist satire Hyenas, Alexei Guerman’s Khrustalyov, My Car!, Delmer Daves’ The Red House, and more.

Check out the lineup of both sections exclusively below.

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

REVIVALS
Detour
Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, USA, 1945, 68m
Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 classic, made at the Poverty Row production company PRC somewhere between 14 and 18 shooting days for $100,000, has come to be regarded, justifiably, as the essence of film noir. Ulmer and his team turned the very cheapness of the enterprise into an aesthetic asset and created a film experience that reeks of sweat, rust, and mildew. For years, Detour was only available in dupey, substandard prints, which seemed appropriate. In the ’90s, a photochemical restoration improved matters, but the quality was far from optimal. Now we have a restoration of a different order, made from vastly superior elements. “To be able to see so much detail in the frame, in the settings and in the faces of the actors,” says Martin Scorsese, “is truly startling, and it makes for a far richer and deeper experience.”

Restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation, in collaboration with the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Cinémathèque Française, with funding from the George Lucas Family Foundation.

Enamorada
Dir. Emilo Fernández, Mexico, 1946, 99m
This wildly passionate and visually beautiful love story from director Emilio Fernandéz and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, a follow-up to their wildly successful Maria Candelaria, remains one of the most popular Mexican films ever made. As Farran Smith Nehme has written, it was “one of the biggest hits of Fernández’s career and a high-water mark for nearly everyone involved.” The romance between between a revolutionary General (Pedro Armendariz) and the daughter of a nobleman (Maria Félix) set during the Mexican revolution (in which Fernandéz himself fought) was inspired by The Taming of the Shrew and, for the finale, by the end of Sternberg’s Morocco.

Restoration led by UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project in collaboration with Fundacion Televisa AC and the UNAM Filmoteca, funded by Material World Charitable Foundation.

Hyenas / Ramatou
Dir. Djibril Diop Mambéty, Senegal/Switzerland/France, 1992, 110m
“When a story ends—or ‘falls into the ocean,’ as we say—it creates dreams,” said the great Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty in an interview after the completion of his second film, Hyenas, a wildly freeform adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit. A wealthy woman (Ami Diakhate) returns to her—and Mambéty’s—home village, and offers the inhabitants a vast sum in exchange for the murder of the local man who seduced and abandoned her when she was young. “I do not refuse the word didactic,” said Mambéty of his very special body of work, and of the particular plight of African cinema. “My task was to identify the enemy of humankind: money, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. I think my target is clear.” A Thelma Film AG release.

Restored over the course of 2017 by Eclair Digital in Vanves, France. Restoration was taken on by Thelma Film AG (Switzerland).

I Am Cuba
Dir. Mikhail Kalatozov, Cuba/USSR, 1964, 108m
Mikhail Kalatozov’s wildly mobile, hallucinatory film was initially rejected by both Cuban and Soviet officials for excessive naiveté and an insufficiently revolutionary spirit, and went largely disregarded and almost unknown for nearly 30 years. That all changed in the early nineties—a remarkable era in film culture, chock full of rediscoveries—when G. Cabrera Infante programmed it at the Telluride Film Festival, and Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola co-presented a Milestone Films release. I Am Cuba is a one-of-a-kind film experience, a visually mind-bending bolt from the historical blue.

Milestone Film & Video’s 4K restoration from the original Gosfilmofond 35mm interpositive and mag tracks was done at Metropolis Post with Jason Crump (colorist) and Ian Bostick (restoration artist). 4K scan by Colorlab, Rockville, MD.

Khrustalyov, My Car! / Khrustalyov, mashinu! 
Dir. Alexei Guerman, USSR/France, 1998, 150m
The time is 1953, the place is Moscow; the Jewish purges are still on, and Stalin is on his deathbed. When General Yuri Glinsky, a military surgeon, tries to escape, he is abducted, taken to the lowest rungs of hell, and deposited at the heart of the enigma. Alexei Guerman’s deeply personal penultimate film is a work of solid and constant disorientation, masterfully orchestrated. Enigmatic phrases, sounds, gestures, and micro-events pass before our eyes and ears before we or the alternately jumpy and exhausted characters can make sense of them. Guerman’s lustrous black and white images and meticulously constructed soundscape are permeated with the feel of life in a totalitarian society, where something monumental is underway but no one knows precisely what or when or how it will break.

The original 35mm fine grain positive was scanned in 2K resolution on an Arriscan at Eclair, Paris. The film was graded and restored at Dragon DI, Wales. Restoration supervised by James White, Arrow Films; restoration produced by Daniel Bird.

Neapolitan Carousel
Dir. Ettore Giannini, Italy, 1954, 129m
One of the first color films made in Italy, Ettore Giannini’s 1954 film version of his stage musical begins in the present day, with sheet music hanging on a barrel organ blown through the streets of Naples: every individual song tells a story of the history of the city, from the Moorish invasion in the 14th century through the arrival of the Americans at the end of WWII. Giannini assembled an amazing roster of talent for his film, including one-time Ballets Russes principal dancer and Powell-Pressburger mainstay Léonide Massine (who also choreographed), the great comic actor Paolo Stoppa, and a young Sophia Loren.

Restored by the Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory and The Film Foundation with funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

None Shall Escape
Dir. André de Toth, USA, 1944, 85m
The Hungarian emigré André de Toth directed this unflinching look at the rise of Nazism right before the end of the war, the first Hollywood film to address Nazi genocide. Written by Lester Cole, soon to become a member of the Hollywood Ten, None Shall Escape is structured as a series of flashbacks that dramatize the testimony of witnesses in a near-future postwar tribunal. Alexander Knox is the German everyman, a WWI vet who slowly, gradually accepts National Socialism and becomes a mass murderer. With Marsha Hunt—her career and Knox’s would both be affected by the Red Scare. A Sony Pictures Repertory release.

4K digital restoration from original nitrate negative and original nitrate track negative.

The Red House
Dir. Delmer Daves, USA, 1947, 100m
This moody, visually potent film, directed by Delmer Daves and independently produced by star Edward G. Robinson with Sol Lesser, is something of an anomaly in late ’40s moviemaking, a piece of contemporary gothic Americana. Robinson plays Pete, a farmer who shares his home with his sister (Judith Anderson) and his adopted niece Meg (Allene Roberts). Meg becomes increasingly attached to a sweet local boy (Lon McAllister), and together they venture into the woods in search of a red house that Pete has forbidden them to enter. The emotional heart of The Red House can be found in the extraordinary close-ups of Roberts and McAllister, shot by the great DP (and frequent John Ford collaborator) Bert Glennon.

Restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.

Spring Night, Summer Night
Dir. J.L. Anderson, USA, 1967, 82m
J.L. Anderson’s haunted Appalachian romance occupies a proud place alongside such similarly hand-crafted, off-the-grid American independent films as Carnival of Souls, The Exiles, Night of the Living Dead, and Wanda. Made in coal-mining country in northeastern Ohio with local amateur actors, the film is carefully observed (Anderson and his producer Franklin Miller spent two years scouting locations becoming familiar with the place and the people) and beautifully and lovingly realized. Spring Night, Summer Night has had an extremely checkered history, including a release in a version crudely recut for the exploitation market with the title Miss Jessica Is Pregnant. It was invited to the 1968 New York Film Festival, only to be unceremoniously bumped to make way for John Cassavetes’s Faces. Fifty years later, we’re re-extending the invitation and promising that it’s solid.

A Restoration and Reconstruction Project of Cinema Preservation Alliance by Peter Conheim and Ross Lipman. Produced by Nicolas Winding Refn.

Tunes of Glory
Dir. Ronald Neame, UK, 1960, 106m
Ronald Neame’s adaptation of James Kennaway’s novel is a spare, dramatically potent war of nerves, about the power struggle between a tough lower-middle-class Scottish Major due to be replaced as Battalion commander of a Highland regiment and an aristocratic Colonel traumatized by captivity during the war. At its center are two breathtaking performances: John Mills as the Colonel and Alec Guinness, in a genuine tour de force, as the Major (apparently, after they had read the script, each actor had originally wanted to play the other’s role). With Dennis Price, Kay Walsh, Susannah York, and Gordon Jackson.

Restored by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation in collaboration with Janus Films and The Museum of Modern Art. Restoration funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.

The War at Home
Dir. Glenn Silber and Barry Alexander Brown, USA, 1979, 100m
This meticulously constructed 1979 film recounts the development of the movement against the American war in Vietnam on the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin, from 1963 to 1970. Using carefully assembled archival and news footage and thoughtful interviews with many of the participants, it culminates in the 1967 Dow Chemical sit-in and the bombing of the Army Math Research Center three years later. One of the great works of American documentary moviemaking, The War at Home has also become a time capsule of the moment of its own making, a welcome emanation from the era of analog editing, and a reminder of how much power people have when they take to the streets in protest. A Catalyst Media Productions release.

New 4K restoration by IndieCollect.

 

RETROSPECTIVE

Tribute to Dan Talbot

Before the Revolution
Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy, 1964, 105m
Dan Talbot began as an exhibitor, and he started his distribution company, New Yorker Films, for the best possible reason: he saw a film that he loved and he wanted to share it with as many people as possible. The film was Bernardo Bertolucci’s masterful second feature, a deeply personal portrait of a generation gripped by political uncertainty. Set in the director’s hometown of Parma, it follows the travails of a young student struggling to reconcile his militant views with his bourgeois lifestyle (and his fiancée), who drifts into a passionate affair with his radical aunt. One of the key films of the ’60s, Before the Revolution set many aspiring filmmakers on their own autobiographical courses. 35mm print from Istituto Luce Cinecittà.

Straub-Huillet Program:
Machorka-Muff
Dir. Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet; West Germany; 1963; 18m
The Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp
Dir. Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet; West Germany; 1968; 23m
Not Reconciled
Dir. Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet; West Germany; 1965; 55m
In 1966, Dan and Toby Talbot went to a party thrown by Bertolucci and his friend and co-writer Gianni Amico in Rome. Suddenly, the bell rang. “Shh-sh,” said Bertolucci. “Get rid of the pot! Put the drinks away. The Straubs are here!” That someone would pick up any single film directed by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet is utterly unthinkable in the context of the present moment, but for decades New Yorker Films handled all of them. These three films, often shown together, are among their very best: an idiosyncratic adaptation of Heinrich Böll’s short story “Bonn Diary,” about a former Nazi colonel cynically reflecting on the sheer stupidity of the bourgeoisie; a three-part short comprised of a nocturnal tour of Munich, a high-speed stage production of Bruckner’s Sickness of Youth, and the marriage of James and Lilith, who guns down her pimp (played by Rainer Werner Fassbinder); and their stunning, thrillingly compressed adaptation of Böll’s novel Billiards at Half-Past. A Grasshopper Film release.

The Ceremony
Dir. Nagisa Oshima, Japan, 1971, 123m
New Yorker developed a close relationship with the filmmaker once known as “the Japanese Godard,” Nagisa Oshima, and they programmed a groundbreaking retrospective of his early films during their brief tenure at the Metro on 100th Street. This disarmingly atmospheric portrait of a family’s collective psychopathology recounts the saga of the Sakurada clan, whose decline plays out over the course of 25 years and multiple funerals and weddings. Operating at the height of his iconoclastic powers, Oshima renders the family’s unraveling with an arresting sense of foreboding and an air of gothic fatalism, enriched by Tôru Takemitsu’s quintessentially modernist score.

Every Man for Himself / Sauve qui peut (la vie)
Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France/Austria/West Germany/Switzerland, 1980, 87m
“Dan jumped straight to the point,” wrote Toby in her book The New Yorker Theater and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies. “‘I love your work and would like to distribute anything you make.’” Over the years, New Yorker handled many of Godard’s films, including his return to 35mm character-based storytelling after a decade of experimentation in video. What Godard called his “second first film” is a moving portrait of restless, intertwining lives, and the myriad forms of self-debasement and survival in a capitalist state, with Jacques Dutronc (as “Paul Godard”), Nathalie Baye, Isabelle Huppert, and, in an unforgettable anti-cameo, the voice of Marguerite Duras. An NYFF18 selection.

The American Friend
Dir. Wim Wenders, West Germany/France, 1977, 125m
Dan Talbot and New Yorker Films put the New German Cinema of the 1970s on the map in this country, and one of their key titles was Wim Wenders’s spellbinding adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game (and a little bit of Ripley Underground). Dennis Hopper is the sociopathic charmer Tom Ripley, transformed by Wenders into an urban cowboy peddler of forged paintings who ensnares Bruno Ganz’s gravely ill Swiss-born art framer into a plot to assassinate a Mafioso. Shot in multiple New York and European locations in low-lit, cool blue and gold tones by the great Robby Müller, this brooding, dreamlike thriller conjures a world ruled by chaos and indiscriminate American dominance. It also features a stunning array of performances and guest appearances by filmmakers, including Nick Ray, Gérard Blain, Sam Fuller, Jean Eustache, Daniel Schmid, and Peter Lilienthal. An NYFF15 selection.

The Marriage of Maria Braun
Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1979, 120m
“I bought 11 Fassbinders in one shot, like rugs,” Dan told Anthony Kaufman in a 2009 interview. As was the case with every New Yorker acquisition, the motive was not financial. So one can imagine the surprise at their offices when this 1979 film about a poor German soldier’s wife (Hanna Schygulla) who uses her wiles and savvy to rise as a businesswoman and take part in the “wirtschaftwunder” or postwar economic miracle, became an arthouse hit—per François Truffaut, this was the movie that broke Fassbinder “out of the ivory tower of the cinephiles” and earned him the acclaim he had always sought. The Marriage of Maria Braun was also the Closing Night selection of the 17th New York Film Festival.

My Dinner with André
Dir. Louis Malle, USA, 1981, 110m
When Dan read Wallace Shawn and André Gregory’s script for My Dinner with André, he was so excited that he helped Louis Malle procure production funding from Gaumont. The film, an encounter between the two writers playing themselves discussing mortality, money, despair, and love over a meal at an upper west side restaurant (according to Gregory, Malle’s one direction was “Talk faster”), becoming a sensation at the art house, playing to packed houses for a solid year, and a favorite on the brand-new home video circuit. My Dinner with André is entertaining, confessional, funny, moving, and suffused with melancholy and joy…like life.

 

Tribute to Pierre Rissient

Manila in the Claws of Light / Maynila: Sa mga kuko ng liwanag
Dir. Lino Brocka, Philippines, 1975, 124m
Pierre Rissient championed the work of countless filmmakers—as a programmer of the MacMahon Theatre in Paris, as a publicist in partnership with his lifelong friend Bertrand Tavernier, as a scout for Cannes, as a distributor and producer, and always as a lover of cinema with an avid desire to always learn and see more. As Todd McCarthy wrote, it was Pierre who “single-handedly brought the work of the late Filipino director Lino Brocka to the world’s attention.” This searing melodrama, with Bembel Roco and Hilda Koronel as doomed lovers, is one of Brocka’s greatest. “Lino knew all the arteries of this swarming city,” wrote Pierre, “and he penetrated them just as he penetrated the veins of the outcasts in his films. Sometimes a vein would crack open and bleed. And that blood oozed onto the screen.”

A Touch of Zen
Dir. King Hu, Hong Kong, 1971/1975, 200m
Pierre developed a special love for Asia and its many cinemas, and he was the one who properly introduced the great wuxia master King Hu to the west, bringing the uncut version of his masterpiece, A Touch of Zen, to the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. Supreme fantasist, Ming dynasty scholar, and incomparable artist, Hu elevated the martial-arts genre to unparalleled heights. Three years in the making and his greatest film, A Touch of Zen was released in truncated form in Hong Kong in 1971 and yanked from theaters after a week. Four years later, after Rissient saved the film from oblivion and it won a grand prize for technical achievement, the unthinkable occurred: King Hu received an apology from his studio heads.

Time Without Pity
Dir. Joseph Losey, UK, 1957, 85m
Pierre was close to many of the American writers and directors who had been through the blacklist, including Jules Dassin, Abraham Polonsky, John Berry, and Cy Endfield, and he was a great admirer of the films of Joseph Losey (his feelings about the man himself were another matter). Rissient was crucial in bringing attention to this consummately tense noir, one of Losey’s greatest films. The narrative, unfurling at a breakneck pace, chronicles the plight of a recovering alcoholic (Michael Redgrave) with a mere 24 hours to prove the innocence of his son, accused of murdering his girlfriend. The first film that Losey signed with his own name after his flight to Europe in the early ’50s, Time Without Pity established him as an essential auteur in the eyes of French cinephiles.

Play Misty for Me
Dir. Clint Eastwood, USA, 1971, 102m
When Clint Eastwood won his first Oscar, in 1992 for Unforgiven, he thanked “the French” for their support. But it was one French citizen in particular who was there from the start of his career as a filmmaker. Eastwood’s first film, about a casual romantic encounter between a Northern California DJ (played by the director) and a woman named Evelyn (Jessica Walter) that turns harrowingly obsessive, is an essential film from an essential moment in cinema known as Hollywood in the ’70s. While the film was well-received, it was Pierre who recognized that Play Misty for Me marked the debut of a truly distinctive talent. From there, a close and abiding friendship bloomed.

Mother India
Dir. Mehboob Khan, India, 1957, 172m
When we gave this film a run at the Walter Reade Theater in 2002, Pierre was only too happy to provide a simple but eloquent quote: “Air…space…light—that’s Mother India.” This seminal Bollywood film, a remake of Khan’s earlier Aurat (1940), is about the trials and tribulations of Radha (Nargis), a poor villager caught in the historic whirlwind of the struggles endured in her country after gaining its independence from Britain. Striving to raise her sons and make ends meet in the face of poverty and natural disasters alike, Radha endures through the strength of her convictions and her unflappable sense of morality. Mother India is a powerful experience, for both its place in film history and its incarnation of human resilience.

House by the River
Dir. Fritz Lang, USA, 1950, 89m
There were few filmmakers whose work Pierre revered more than Fritz Lang, whom he counted among his friends. When Lang came to the Cinémathèque Française for a retrospective of his work in the late 1950s, Pierre and Claude Chabrol asked him about this wild gothic period melodrama, made at Republic Pictures, starring Louis Hayward and Jane Wyatt, a print of which could not be found and which was still unseen in France. Lang, said Pierre, “could describe shot by shot the first ten, twelve minutes of the film. It was almost as if we were seeing the film.” Pierre not only found a way of seeing House by the River, he acquired the rights and distributed the film himself.

The Man I Love
Dir. Raoul Walsh, USA, 1947, 96m
Raoul Walsh was another honored figure in Pierre’s pantheon. On one occasion, when the subject of one of Walsh’s films came up, Pierre simply whistled in admiration. This 1947 film, somewhere between noir, musical, and melodrama, is one of Walsh’s least recognized and most moving, rich in the “daily human pathetique” that Manny Farber identified as the director’s richest vein. Ida Lupino is the Manhattan lounge singer who heads to Los Angeles to live with her family and start a new life. Bruce Bennett is the musician she falls for, and Robert Alda is the brash club owner who won’t take no for an answer. If one were pressed for a single word to describe this movie, it would be “soulful.”

 

Three Documentaries on Cinema
In this year’s retrospective section, we also include three special and very different documentaries about the movies: a lament for Viennese film critic and festival director Hans Hurch, a portrait of the great cinema pioneer Alice Guy-Blaché, and a tribute to Ingmar Bergman.

Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché
Dir. Pamela B. Green, USA, 2018, 103m
Alice Guy-Blaché was a true pioneer who got into the movie business at the very beginning—in 1894, at the age of 21. Two years later, she was made head of production at Gaumont and started directing films. She and her husband moved to the United States, and she founded her own company, Solax, in 1910—they started in Flushing and moved to a bigger facility in Fort Lee, New Jersey. But by 1919, Guy-Blaché’s career came to an abrupt end, and she and the 1000 films that bore her name were largely forgotten. Pamela B. Green’s energetic film is both a tribute and a detective story, tracing the circumstances by which this extraordinary artist faded from memory and the path toward her reclamation. Narration by Jodie Foster.

Preceded by:
Falling Leaves (1912)
One of Alice Guy-Blaché’s most beautiful films, this two-reeler concerns a girl who tries to keep her consumptive sister alive by magical means.

Music composed and performed by Makia Matsumura. A collaborative restoration for the Alice Guy-Blaché retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Mastered from a 2K scan of a surviving nitrate print received by the Library of Congress in 1983 from the Public Archives of Canada/Jerome House Collection. 2018 Digital restoration produced by Bret Wood for Kino Lorber, Inc.

Introduzione all’Oscuro
Dir. Gastón Solnicki, Argentina/Austria, 2018, 71m
North American Premiere
The new film from Gastón Solnicki (Kékszakállú, NYFF54) is a tribute to his great friend Hans Hurch, one-time film critic and assistant to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, and director of the Vienna International Film Festival from 1997 to his unexpected death from a heart attack last July at the age of 64. Solnicki pays tribute to Hurch by creating a cinematic form for his own mourning. He doesn’t simply visit his friend’s old haunts, he responds rhythmically, in images and sounds, to Hurch’s recorded voice delivering admonitions and gentle warnings during the editing of an earlier film. Introduzione all’Oscuro is truly a work of the cinema, and a moving communion with a friend whose presence is felt in the memory of the places, the people, the coffee, and the films he loved.

Searching for Ingmar Bergman
Dir. Margarethe von Trotta, Germany/France, 2018, 99m
U.S. Premiere
On the occasion of Ingmar Bergman’s centenary comes this lovely, personal film from one of his greatest admirers, Margarethe von Trotta. This is a tribute from an artist with a such a deep affinity for the subject that it opens to genuine and sometimes disquieting inquiry. In his writings and in his films, Bergman himself strove for an honest accounting and true self-revelation, but it is fascinating to hear and see the observations of loved ones and collaborators (often one and the same), particularly his son Daniel, whose relationship with his father was multi-layered. A rich and quietly absorbing portrait of an immense artist. An Oscilloscope Laboratories release.

Passes for the 56th NYFF, taking place from September 28-October 14 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, are now on sale. Single tickets go on sale on September 9.

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We have lost about 70 per cent of our films

Jaybrota Das

8/14/2018 12:00:00 AM

Award-winning Indian filmmaker, producer, film archivist and restorer Shivendra Singh Dungarpur will organise his next Film Preservation and Restoration Workshop India (FPRWI-2018) in Calcutta from November 15 to 22.

“The reason we are doing it in Calcutta this year is that while Bengal is the home of legendary filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak, Ajoy Kar, Tapan Sinha, Tarum Majumdar and so many more, sadly very little has been preserved of this great heritage. This is particularly ironic as Bengal is celebrating 100 years of Bengali cinema this year. We hope that the workshop will wake people up to the urgent need to save their films as our goal is to make a real difference,” said Dungarpur.

FPRWI-2018 is an intensive week-long workshop that covers both lectures and practical classes in the best practices of the preservation and restoration of both filmic and non-filmic material that is taught by a faculty of international experts from leading institutions around the world. The workshop usually has about 50 participants and about 25 international faculty and is certified by FIAF. Applications are open to India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, Thailand and Malaysia.

In the run-up to the workshop The Telegraph had a chat with Dungarpur, who had hosted distinguished filmmaker Christopher Nolan during his visit to India last year on a similar platform to preserve rare cinematic gems.

TT: How widely does such restoration workshops help? Does it only help the film fraternity and films in general or does it allow participation from film enthusiasts?

Dungarpur: When Film Heritage Foundation conducted our first film preservation and restoration workshop in Mumbai in 2015, people were not aware that films needed to be preserved. And we’re not talking just about the common man, but also the film industry. When we started the foundation in 2014, we realised that saving our film heritage had to be taken up on a war-footing. Not only had we lost about 70 per cent of our film heritage by the 1950s, we continue to lose films, even contemporary films, every day. We have seen a remarkable change in just a few years. The film industry has begun to comprehend the importance of preserving their films - both photochemical and digital ones. For instance, our foundation preserves the films of Amitabh Bachchan, Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Mani Ratnam, Farhan Akhtar, N.N. Sippy, Vishal Bhardwaj and many others and by this I mean storing their 35mm prints in temperature-controlled conditions and maintaining them. In just three years we have introduced 150 individuals to film preservation and restoration. We are building a movement to save our film heritage.

• How much change has you been able to bring in the mindset of producers who have not been able to maintain their assets?

• If we have not preserved our films, we will have nothing to restore. The loss of India’s film heritage has been colossal. Around 1,700 silent films were made in India of which the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) have only five to six complete films and 15 to 20 films in fragments. The film industry in Madras made 124 films and 38 documentaries in the silent era. Only one film survives, Marthanda Verma (1931). By 1950, India had lost 70 to 80 per cent of our films. And we don’t have to go so far back. Gulzar Saheb could not find the original negative of Maachis, a 1995 film. Mani Ratnam has lost many of his original negatives, which people do not realise, still need to be preserved even if you have a digital copy. The only world-class restoration of Indian films have been the restoration of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy that was done by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the Criterion Collection, Uday Shankar’s Kalpana and Ritwik Ghatak’s Titas by Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project.

• What are the procedures involved in restoring a film?

• The approach is the same as restoring a work of art or a manuscript. You don’t work on a photocopy, you restore the original. For instance in the case of the Apu Trilogy, the original negatives were burnt in a studio fire, and months were spent on the repair of these negatives before getting into the process of digital restoration. The task of restoration involves studying the film and its production history, understanding the filmmaker’s vision or his limitations, knowing the work of the cinematographer, the art director, the costume designer, etc.

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The Jolting “Moonrise,” a John Wayne Romance, and Other Diamonds From the Republic Pictures Vault

Farran Smith Nehme

8/7/2018 12:00:00 AM

Part two of the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective of this on-the-cheap studio unleashes a fresh arsenal of little-seen discoveries

When last we tuned in to Martin Scorsese and the Museum of Modern Art, back in February, they were presenting the first fifteen entries in “Republic Rediscovered,” a two-part series of thirty restored films out of the approximately one thousand made between 1935 and 1958 at Republic Pictures. Republic was the B-movie factory run throughout its brief, roller-coaster life by former tobacco executive Herbert J. Yates. It was a studio unlike any other, a place that could provide a home both to superstar John Wayne and never-quite-a-star Vera Hruba Ralston, Yates’s sparsely talented girlfriend (and, later, wife). It released acknowledged classics from John Ford and Frank Borzage alongside the best work of lesser lights like John H. Auer and R.G. Springsteen. From August 9–23, MoMA is screening the second batch of fifteen films, handpicked by Scorsese himself, and the result is another grab-bag of the fascinating, oddball, and occasionally downright brilliant output of Yates’s cut-price MGM manqué.

Two films feature John Wayne, one being the opening-night selection introduced by Scorsese, Wake of the Red Witch. Directed by Edward Ludwig (whose 1956 Flame of the Islands is also in the series), it was made during Wayne’s annus mirabilis of 1948, when the other three films with his name on the marquee were Fort Apache, Three Godfathers, and Red River. Like the Hawks film from that crop, Wake of the Red Witch, set in the South Seas in the 1860s, casts Wayne as a heavy, or so it appears it at first. He plays Captain Rall, a hard-drinking, foul-tempered, and violent commander who scuttles his own ship, seemingly so he can go back and steal the fortune in gold bullion it was carrying. It’s more complicated than that, of course — immensely so, as a flashback-tangled plot reveals it’s all part of Rall’s rivalry with Mayrant Sidneye (Luther Adler) for the love of Angelique (Gail Russell).

Wayne played a number of morally ambiguous characters throughout his career, but he didn’t get many movies that foreground a love story as much as this one. Rall’s passion for Angelique (and Wayne’s chemistry with Russell) drives what is a romantic tragedy as much as an adventure story. (“Underrated” is what Wayne biographer Scott Eyman calls Wake.) It had higher production values than the usual Republic adventure, and for Wayne, its emotional importance must have been significant. He named his production company, Batjac, after the trading company in the movie, and after he was diagnosed with and beat cancer the first time in 1964, he began to call the disease “the red witch.”

Much less lavish, but nearly as interesting, is Three Faces West, a Wayne starrer from 1940 that explicitly links the fate of European refugees from the Nazis (played by Sigrid Gurie and an accent-wielding Charles Coburn) and the residents of a Dust Bowl–ravaged farming town in North Dakota. The cinematographer was John Alton, hence some superbly lit dust storms, both day and night. The director was Bernard Vorhaus, who ran afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951 (fellow director Edward Dmytryk was one of the ones who fingered him) and spent the rest of his career in Europe, becoming an early mentor to David Lean. The screenwriter was Samuel Ornitz, an outspoken communist and one of the original Hollywood Ten. It’s startling, to say the least, to see John Wayne playing a farmer with such left-wing sympathies. His character fights local anti-immigrant sentiment to get the refugees settled and urges a type of collectivization to undo the damage to what he calls, in his inimitable drawl, “a little ol’ gal we been kickin’ in the teeth — Mother Nature.” Eventually he leads his neighbors west to farm land given to them via a government dam project.

Moonrise, the one incontestable masterpiece in the series, is set in a richly shadowed and spooky South of glittering swamps and abandoned houses, all of it created on Republic sets. Danny (Dane Clark), the doom-haunted son of a father hanged for murder, kills a rich bully (Lloyd Bridges) essentially in self-defense. But traumatized Danny, convinced no one will believe a murderer’s offspring, hides the body in the swamp and goes back to a waterside dance club to continue his courtship of the kind, ethereal Gilly (Gail Russell). Moonrise isn’t really film noir — it takes the humanist point of view that criminals are not born, they’re made, and can be unmade — but it boasts some of the most gorgeous noir cinematography of the era, via John L. Russell. And though Moonrise certainly isn’t a horror movie, it has several genuinely frightening moments, including a jolter of an opening. Directed by Frank Borzage in 1948, this film is a tribute to the way originality could flower at Republic.

Then there’s Fair Wind to Java (1953), described by at least one critic as “the ultimate B-picture” (and once you’ve seen it, that’s hard to dispute). Vera Hruba Ralston often cited Fair Wind as her favorite movie. The Czech former figure skater’s casting as a Balinese dancer named Kim Kim (“My father was white,” the character explains casually) is the strangest in the movie, which is saying something when you have Fred MacMurray as a hard-bitten sea captain named Boll; Virginia Brissac (the grandmother in Rebel Without a Cause) as Kim Kim’s Balinese mother; and English stage veteran Robert Douglas as Pulo Besar, the masked Australian-Dutch pirate. Yet Ralston gives this role all she’s got, whether she’s warning of the wrath of Vishnu or sneaking on deck for a breath of fresh air, with disastrous results. Scorsese has often spoken of his fondness for Fair Wind — and indeed, it is hugely enjoyable in its crazy way, graced by an eye-searing Trucolor palette, barreling plot developments, indifference to plausibility, and dialogue like “It’s a little island called Krakatoa. No one’s ever heard of it!” Republic poured a lot of money into the film (a rarity), and it shows, especially in the volcanic finale, an outstanding example of the era’s special effects.

Fred MacMurray co-stars in "Fair Wind to Java" with Vera Ralston, the wife of Republic Pictures chief Herbert J. Yates.PHOTOFEST

Ralston also appears to have a good time in Allan Dwan’s Surrender (1950), playing a foreign-born femme fatale who upends the friendship between a gambler (John Carroll) and a newspaper owner (William Ching) in the Old West. Dwan’s direction reaches its peak in a climactic chase scene across hills and canyons, shown almost entirely in long shot. A different kind of fatalism haunts the title character (Margaret Lockwood) in Laughing Anne (1953), a melodrama based on a Joseph Conrad play. Anne is a French sex worker, married to a lugubrious prizefighter whose amputated hands have been replaced by weights, but yearning for the love of simple sailor Wendell Corey. With every big scene played at a near-hysterical pitch, this was described by its own director, Herbert Wilcox, as a “very bad film,” but I liked a number of elements: the Technicolor; Lockwood’s interpretation of Anne as the ultimate co-dependent; the exotic-locales-on-the-cheap (it was also shot in the studio, of course); and the twist ending.

Hell’s Half Acre (1954) starts out as a fairly routine crime picture, then midway through plunges off a cliff of violence and cruelty; you will never look at the Maytag repairman the same way after seeing what this movie doles out to Jesse White’s character. Directed by Republic workhorse John H. Auer and shot on location (for once) in Honolulu, it has a large and mostly excellent cast, including Wendell Corey (as good as he ever got) as a racketeer trying to go straight; Evelyn Keyes as the wife he deserted years ago; the always wonderful Philip Ahn as a vicious gangster; Marie Windsor as another hard-bitten dame (the way she sucks down the last of her mai tai is a high point); and Keye Luke as the police chief. Though it has Nancy Gates playing an unconvincing Asian moll, the movie makes less use of stereotypes than many others of the era, and gives Luke’s chief the chance to sardonically tell a confused white witness, “What you’re trying to say is, to you, all Orientals look alike.”

The best family-oriented entry stars Steve Cochran, who was attempting to break free of his film-noir typecasting as an oily psycho ready to beat up the likes of Joan Crawford and Ginger Rogers. Come Next Spring (1956) was directed by R. G. Springsteen, who also made Hellfire, a B-Western that was my favorite discovery of the first Republic series. Ann Sheridan, in one of her last film roles, plays an Arkansas farm wife who’s been raising her kids alone after her alcoholic husband took a powder; Cochran, cast radically against type, plays that husband, home after nearly ten years, dried out and trying to stay that way so he can get to know his kids. Both give lovely performances; their first reunion, delivered with clean sincerity, is a marvel of things left unsaid. Filmed in Trucolor around Sacramento, the movie is sentimental in a way that shouldn’t be taken as a pejorative. It points to what might have been a fresh direction for both Sheridan and Cochran, but it was not to be. For Cochran, that was at least in part due to his own wild-man personality. “Steve was a bastard to work with,” recalled Cochran’s good friend and sometime producer Harrison Reader. “He drank too much, he womanized too much, and for a ten o’clock call, he got there at one. But I loved him dearly.”

Cochran would have been perfect for the villain in Make Haste to Live (1954) — a mobster just out of prison and seeking revenge against Chris (Dorothy McGuire), the wife who put him there. The mobster was played instead by Stephen McNally, and rather well, but the actor lacked Cochran’s sex appeal. As it stands, the film is a B-movie twist on Gaslight, a study in how ready people were (and are) to believe a certain type of personable he-man over a woman. Chris doesn’t lose her mind, but as in the Cukor movie, Make Haste to Live shreds your nerves as the mobster checkmates his wife’s every attempt to free herself. Helmed by William A. Seiter, a great comedy director and favorite of MoMA curator Dave Kehr, the movie uses its New Mexico location most effectively for a final showdown in an ancient burial site under excavation. Seiter’s grandson, filmmaker Ted Griffin, will introduce Make Haste to Liveand Seiter’s unusual underworld dramedy Champ for a Day (1953) on August 17, toward the end of the series. Or this year’s phase, anyway. As Paramount continues to restore the Republic library, which it owns, many of us are eager to see more from the adventurous studio’s unique group of filmmakers.

‘Martin Scorsese Presents Republic Rediscovered: New Restorations From Paramount Pictures, Part 2’
The Museum of Modern Art
August 9–23

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The African Film Heritage Project: Cinema’s Next Chapter

Oscar Harding

7/27/2018 12:00:00 AM

Cinema Escapist talks to some of the people behind the biggest milestone in African cinema this decade.

One of the joys of cinema is that it can connect people the world over. As Martin Scorsese of The Film Foundation and Ali Moussa Iye of UNESCO have discussed, the African Film Heritage Project unites organizations from across the world—in this case the African continent, Italy, France, and the USA—with a common goal of bringing international cinema to audiences previously unable to view an important part of their cultural history.

Each organization involved brings unique experiences and skills to a project that spans an entire continent and will take years to complete. It is a remarkable example of international cooperation between those who want to educate and celebrate Africa through its cinema.

For the last in our series of interviews with key figures of the African Film Heritage Project, I sat down with Margaret Bodde of The Film Foundation, Cecilia Cenciarelli of Cineteca di Bologna, and Aboubakar Sanogo of FEPACI to discuss in more detail the individual efforts of their respective organizations in this ambitious and much-needed project. 

Scorsese gave us an overview of the ethos behind AFHP, Iye explained the historical context of this important initiative. Now, we speak with those who travel the world and deal with the day-to-day aspects of achieving the AFHP’s grand vision.

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Aboubakar Sanogo. (Courtesy of Ottawa Life)

Aboubakar, what is your role within FEPACI? What exactly does being North American regional secretary entail?

Aboubakar Sanogo (AS): To defend and promote the interests of African filmmakers anywhere in the world. I personally represent this region because I live in North America—representing Mexico, Canada and the USA —and The Film Foundation also happens to be based here!

FEPACI develops initiatives towards the production, distribution, and preservation of African cinema. I have personally taken a lead role here, drafting the plan for an African Archival Project. We plan to bring together archivists from all 54 African countries and bring together our knowledge to answer anything we might not know [about the continent’s archival infrastructure and conditions of individual archives].

We hope the AFHP will help mobilize and raise awareness within Africa [for our other initiatives] of our past, which filmmakers have addressed. The timing is critical, as […] we hope to help Africans explore political and cultural [alternatives] during the advent of a better Africa (a recent example of this, which occurred after this interview was conducted, is the historic peace being brokered between Ethiopia and Eritrea, which would end Africa’s longest war).

Can you tell us how the African Film Heritage project started? Who was behind it and when did you come onboard?

AS: The advisory board [for the World Cinema Project (WCP)] included at least two African filmmakers, one of them I believe was Souleymane Cisse. That’s when the idea of also preserving African films was mentioned. So [the WCP] started restoring African films in an ad hoc manner. About three of four years ago, FEPACI got involved through my work of rediscovering African film pioneers that look me to Cineteca di Bologna, where Scorsese was also working on the idea of the AFHP. We had a conversation with Cecilia about this and as part of FEPACI, I suggested we do something more ambitious on a continental level.

We could then work towards restoring the patrimony of African films and [restart] that conversation of our relationship [towards] our own cinema. At the time, FEPACI was launching the African Archival Project, which is ambitious and not only about restoration but also the creation of infrastructure [for film preservation] on the continent, and preserving what was already there in Africa. When you travel this vast continent to see the organization of it all… it’s not very good! At the time, we were on the ground ourselves to stop the destruction of archives [and the elements contained within] through inclement weather, human negligence and political intervention… there are all kinds of difficulties facing African archives.

It was natural that we teamed up to see if we could cast new light on some of the major works of African filmmakers. This was a vehicle to raise awareness of cultural heritage on the continent and around the world […] and begin lobbying governments to do something about this.

Margaret Bodde. (Courtesy of Zimbio)

Margaret, could you tell us how you became involved in the African Film Heritage Project?

Margaret Bodde (MB): Marty (Martin Scorsese) created the Film Foundation in 1990 and I started working for him the following year, helping him with what he had envisioned for the foundation. [We were] trying to raise funds and awareness for film restoration projects, mainly in the beginning at the US archives like the Library of Congress, the UCLA film and television archive, MOMA and the George Eastman Museum. Then, over the years, as Marty has a global view, he began to look outside the US. We then started restoring films from Britain, India, Italy… before there was digital, we helped the Academy (of motion pictures arts and sciences) restore Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy.

Marty’s always been enriched by cinema from around the world—he really began to see the need, as we all do, to really help some of these regions with very little in the area of archival infrastructure […] there’s not really anywhere for people to go to preserve their film, there’s no cinematheques or archives in many of these countries, and they don’t have much support for their national film patrimony.

What Marty does through the WCP, and what Cecilia is really spearheading, is this two-pronged effort to both preserve and restore films, [so[ that their survival in ensured, but also to distribute them and make them available for audiences who, in many cases, will be discovering these films [for the first time].

Cecilia Cenciarelli. (Courtesy of Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano)

Cecilia, how did you and Cineteca di Bologna become involved with the project?

Cecilia Cenciarelli (CC): We started developing a relationship with the Film Foundation in the early 2000s and we started with mostly restoring Italian cinema […] I’ve been working at the Cineteca for 18 years and I naturally became involved with [the world cinema project] in 2007. The AFHP is just another extension of the world cinema project. The peculiarities we [dealt with when we] were discovering and restoring with the WCP led us to understand [that], clearly, there were going to be specific dangers and issues and challenges linked to the African continent and diaspora that needed special attention.

What are your personal relationships with African cinema before this project began to take shape? had of either you ever seen African film or been aware of the issues were facing it before you collaborated together?

MB: Cecilia has a much deeper understanding of African Cinema in general, but through the WCP we had already restored a few of the seminal African films—Ousmane Sembene’s films Black Girl and Borom Sarret, and North African films like Al Momia and Alyam, Alyam. There was this realization, through our experiences with those films, of the great need for preservation [through Africa].

CC: When I started at the Cineteca, [they] were hosting the first significant festival of films from the Mediterranean countries, so to speak. It was mostly North Africa where the most legendary filmmakers [of that region], mostly Egyptian but also Algerian, came from. Because of [what] the collections [had amassed] over the years, through chances and opportunities, we were always encouraged, as a film archive, to look at the richness of African cinema. We programmed it with FESPACO twice [and[ I’ve traveled to Africa, mostly North Africa, a bit…

The thing with African Cinema that is hard to narrow down, is that every single time you are exposed to a film, you realize how you’re just scratching the surface—there’s an understanding that we can access whatever we want through the internet, but [also] a misunderstanding we can [just automatically] reach out to every culture [and immediately develop a relationship with it], which is not true at all! I think it’s hard to claim to know a lot about African cinema [right now], which is just one of the reasons this project is so important.

Cineteca di Bologna, (Courtesy of Bologna da Vivere).

So the Film Foundation and Cinetca di Bologna have a long-standing relationship, but since the AFHP began what has it been like for you both, collaborating with UNESCO and FEPACI?

MB: FEPACI already had preservation initiatives [underway], as this is a core mission for them, and we basically came together with [common] purpose.

CC: Yeah, the AFHP came together at a very good time. It’s my understanding, discussing with Aboubakar and FEPACI, we were developing this project and starting a conversation right at the moment when FEPACI launched an archival survey as a priority, for the first time in its history. They wanted to really start looking into the state of the archives [that might hold African films] and what could be done to improve infrastructure, and finding out what were the holdings of these archives.

It was important to us to let the african filmmakers, scholars and historians guide us through the project. I don’t think a project like the AFHP could have been done without such prominent presence and initiative of an African organization.

MB: Once we get to the distribution of these films, through their ‘General History of Africa’ project, UNESCO already has their own support, infrastructure and relationships with all [the] key people in those regions. FEPACI and the Film Foundation are [leading] the actual preservation and restoration work with the [various] archives and the filmmakers, but UNESCO will be particularly helpful when we complete the restorations and seek to get them exhibited and distributed widely in Africa.

Le Vent des Aures, one of the films being restored by the AFHP. (Courtesy of Festival de Cannes)

What are these four organizations doing to ensure that, once the 50 african films have been located and restored, they will be seen by African audiences as the priority? This is a continent with less movie theatres and less reliable internet for streaming options than you may have in Asia or the Western world.

CC: This is a very crucial point for us, this is a priority – getting the films back to the African audiences – and we are aware of that. We are still in the first steps of the project, at the restoration level. […] You’re right, there are very few movie theatres, but there are traveling theaters. It’s the reality that exists and we really rely on our African partners to know the best ways to reach out to everything that exists. UNESCO has different programs in place and we’re going to be relying on their experience, as well as FEPACI.

Aboubakar, What do you feel are the primary problems that African Cinema currently faces? a lack of readily available education and resources for audiences and future filmmakers? or is the lazy preconceptions that global audiences have about africa, which possibly feeds into financial support of african films?

AS: Everything you’ve just mentioned, and many more! [laughs] Education helps! There are initiatives […] striving towards the professionalization of the African film sector, that train Africans across the world. We need Africans to go and be trained abroad, like I was.

Part of the problem, maybe the biggest problem, is funding. Those who made films in the 1970s and ’80s have stopped making films because they’re not able to find funding. People like Souleymane Cisse and Med Hondo, for Christ’s sake! Many filmmakers cannot get [the] resources they need because they’re too ambitious! They have to scale down those ambitions. Things are extremely difficult for the new generation, too, who have new ideas and want to revolutionize cinema.

Med Hondo’s Soleil O [1969]. (Courtesy of CNN)

Can you give us an idea of the scale of what the African Film Heritage Project is undertaking? Finding films from 54 different countries, which haven’t necessarily been protected and preserved…

MB: [For the Film Foundation,] Cecilia is really “Our Man in Havana”! (laughs)

CC: (laughs) that’s so kind! [We encounter] quite a specific issue when [we] go to the locations. This is why, in the mission statement published in the press release, the location of the elements is [mentioned] – it’s very complex when we [have, in the past,] restored films from countries like Armenia, Turkey, Sudan, or Brazil [as opposed to from countries like the US] – there’s always that element of not being absolutely sure of where you’re going to find the best negatives.

[With Africa] it’s a very different situation, which can be traced back to how [many of] these films were produced, with a lack of infrastructure, leading African filmmakers to Europe to develop their prints! These elements (original negatives) are never found in Africa, they’re always in European archives and laboratories. If it’s in a public archive, you have a better chance of locating it quicker, [but] archives like Cineteca di Bologna [don’t] often have enough funds to catalog everything we have. Often there are gray areas in the catalogs of every single archive. When it’s a private laboratory, things get even more complicated because they shut down, the collections pass into different hands, they’re auctioned sometimes, sold or acquired [by other people]. The information about a lot of these obscure films, that haven’t been enquired about for a long time, is a lot harder to find […] than one might expect.

The first thing we want to do—which is very ambitious‚—if we’re investigating a particular film by a particular filmmaker, [is] try and gather as much information as we can not only about the film, but also the other films by that filmmaker that might be in the same [archive or laboratory]. What we would like to have is a very open, shared database […]  These [films] are part of African culture and history, and they should be stored in Africa. But all this relevant information [about the filmmakers and the location of their films] is scattered all around the world [so it’s tricky trying to achieve this goal, but having a global database is going to help].

We’re doing this with [the] full respect that is due to the filmmakers. We don’t just locate and restore these films without informing the filmmakers and getting their authorization. This is something FEPACI is leading the way in, and can put us in contact with the filmmakers and introduce us. Some do not have access to the internet, so we have to go and explain exactly what we are going to do in a technical sense – there may be multiple cuts of one film, some of them censored, or re-dubbed, so we always try as much as possible to find out everything we can about a film, and who among those involved is still alive, who has the most expertise regarding each individual film, who has worked on this film the most before us… it’s important to bring all these people together [to make the best restoration possible that is true to the original vision of the films]. I could talk about just this part of process for hours! [laughs]

Morocco’s Trances [1982], a personal favorite of Scorsese’s. (Courtesy of Criterion)

Who exactly is deciding which films should be located and restored? Are there certain criteria for determining which films will be preserved? Why is one film more deserving than another in the eyes of your organizations?

MB: The list is being vetted and put together by FEPACI, a consortium of scholars and filmmakers and producers. They really are the best-equipped to assess the cultural, historic and artistic importance of these films. The goal is to be as Pan African as possible, to be drawing films from every region because most of the African cinema that the west is familiar with is usually north or western.

As they put this list [of fifty films] together, they want to be as representative of the continent’s fifty-four countries as possible. That’s a shifting process- we have a database, and currently have five or six films we’re actively pursuing right now. The list is continually being updated and vetted with information that FEPACI is coming across in discussions with people from different African countries.

AS: This is really being led by FEPACI. We have a committee of archivists and historians who have a profound knowledge of African Cinema. We are a Pan African federation, which of course means trying to involve all five regions of the continent, and of course the diaspora- the sixth region! So there is the geographic criteria to consider.

Then there is the historiographic criteria – we are interested in the hundred-year period of 1889 to 1989, from the very first Edison experiments onwards. We are looking at films made by Africans within this period. Most people know the post-independence era, and filmmakers like Sembene, but we are also interested in the colonial period. Africans were making films even during this time, from Tunisia and Morocco to Guinea and beyond.

Part of the project for us is to be able to have a comprehensive history of African cinema in the Braudelian sense. (Editor’s note: Fernand Braudel was a French historian who developed the idea of the longue durée, which looked at historical events and how long-standing institutions were far more responsible than immediate effects. For example, this theory attests that a conflict isn’t caused primarily by recent catalytic events, but by deep-seated attitudes. So approaching a history of African cinema would not just look at how it was shaped following independence, but how centuries of colonial oppression informed the motivations of African filmmakers and their ancestors)

These filmmaker’s works may be hidden away in archives, and many would not have heard of them, but they have played a major role in our history and in world cinema in general [and through the AFHP, we hope to correct that lack of awareness].

One of my trips to Cineteca di Bologna centred around a Tunisian filmmaker (Albert Samama Chikly) who was active from 1903! He captured World War One, earthquakes in Italy… he was an immense figure in early cinema but he is hardly mentioned. That is the kind of filmmaker we talk about, and hosted a small retrospective of his works, which was a revelation to film historians! This is just one example of Africa’s contributions to film history.

Ousmane Sembene’s Borom Sarret [1963], one of the earliest examples of post-independence African cinema. The AFHP aims to look well beyond this era of film. (Courtesy of Festival de Cannes)

CC: A question we get asked a lot is, “why fifty films?”. It could be five hundred, or five thousand! In no way will the fifty films summarize the richness of African film. It was a [starting point], and underlines the need for this kind of project—something mammoth and ambitious that will probably take a [long time] to accomplish. The list [of films] is being revised according to several strands—we’re trying to trace back to the pioneer [African] filmmakers, as well as the Masters and Genre films. We’re trying to find the right balance [of] good representation of all the voices of Africa. We always come across information we didn’t know when we started this—if we find out about a particular film that’s in danger because of weather conditions or preservation issues, we can take immediate action and restore them quickly, otherwise, we lose films. They joke in the film labs that they are very much like the ER!

MB: With the WCP titles and AFHP titles, most of these films were made independently. [There’s] not quite a clear-cut path to get access to the negatives. Cecilia and her team face a years-long process of researching where these elements are located, negotiating with those who have them to let us preserve and restore the films… it’s a time-consuming process. We look at the list of fifty films, but it’s not like we’re trying to scale Everest in one go—we’re taking it a little bit at a time, but when we know it’s going to take many years because we need to raise funds to do this properly, we feel [OK with that because] the project warrants such investment of time and resources to accomplish.

Aboubakar and Scorsese. (Courtesy of YouTube)

There hasn’t been any attempt of this kind, on this scale, before. Why do you think organizations haven’t stood up for African cinema in this way until now?

AS: There isn’t a model like [the one for the AFHP] anywhere on the planet! Martin has his team in New York, another in Los Angeles, another in Bologna, our team at FEPACI, and UNESCO, of course… all the main stakeholders brought together to create a structure for advocating for African cultural heritage.

Martin really is one of the blessings of cinema, a film historian himself, a cinephile and one of the most open-minded filmmakers I’ve ever met, taking influences regardless of where they come from. he has a desire for what is not firmly part of the Euro-American canon. I really admire him for this, and […] this makes him indispensable for us.

MB: It’s a little bit mad to think can do this! It’s very inspiring to work with Scorsese. One of the things I most admire about him is that the word “no” is not in his vocabulary! He the kind of person where if he feels something, he wills it to happen. This initiative, the WCP… they needed to be done, so he just did it! There’s no business plan with him- [he says] “figure out how to get it done, let’s get to work and everything else will follow!”. In the short span of ten years, thirty-two films have already been restored, preserved and distributed through the World Cinema Project. The Film Foundation has done this with over eight hundred films, helping others in many ways. He’s not just a brilliant filmmaker but a passionate advocate. With him, it all comes from the heart. He inspires our work, so we don’t want to go back to him and say “it can’t be done”.

CC: Lots of people ask whether Scorsese’s involvement is just being a name behind this, but I’ve been astonished to see how he could find the time and interest to be constantly involved with all of this work. It’s an incredible privilege to encounter such a spirit and such a vision.

Ivorian film La Femme au Couteau [1969], one of the films being restored by the AFHP. (Courtesy of Mubi)

This project is very much about the past, but regarding the future, do you believe there are any filmmakers we should be keeping an eye on within the continent? What is improving? What needs to be addressed within this new generation?

AS: It would be a mistake to consider this a project about the past. In fact, it’s about a future that is aware of its past. Part of the problem is there is still a kind of rupture [concerning] intergenerational transmission. For example, no film school worthy of its name in Europe or America would train filmmakers without bringing up Eisenstein or Griffith or Orson Welles or German expressionism…

That very fundamental education that every filmmaker should know!

AS: Right! The foundation from which new ideas can come. But today in Africa, it’s possible to go to a film school and not see [a film by] Sembene or Med Hondo!

It’s unbelievable!

AS: It is. This project is about allowing the new generation to re-appropriate that. Cinema belongs to all of us—regardless of where you come from, you can be touched by the films of others, but should be exposed to that which was created domestically. You should be able to have it as part of your vocabulary – we want to reinsert African films into the vocabulary of those African filmmakers, and filmmakers from around the world. It’s the heart of the AFHP.

Who are some figures within African Cinema you hope will become part of the popular conscience as the restoration rolls out? Who should audiences really know about?

AS: So many – [to name a few,] Sarah Maldoror, Ahmed Bouanani, Jean-Pierre Dikongué Pipa, John Akomfrah, Flora Gomes, Timite Bassori… Of course, we shouldn’t forget the women filmmakers! Safi Faye and many others! The pantheon is broad, but we have a narrow view right now, and need to expand it.

As someone who loves African Cinema, thank you all for your continued efforts. I speak for a lot of people when I say that we’re grateful that this project even exists.

MB: We’re glad you’re shining a light on it! The more we can get the word out, the more people will reach out and help us.

•   •   •

Aboubakar Sanogo is FEPACI’s North America Regional Secretary. You can find out more about FEPACI’s work here.

Magaret Bodde is executive director for The Film Foundation. You can find out more about their work here.

Cecilia Cenciarelli is Head of Research at Cineteca di Bologna. You can find out more about their work here. 

You can read the rest of the interviews from this series of interviews focused on the African Film Heritage Project, in which we spoke with Martin Scorsese and UNESCO’s Ali Moussa Iye.

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