News

Film at Lincoln Center announces Revivals for the 58th New York Film Festival (September 17 – October 11).

“We are thrilled with our selections for Revivals, a section reshaped for the 2020 edition of NYFF to showcase the relevance, the vitality, and the beauty of yesterday’s cinema,” said Florence Almozini, FLC Senior Programmer at Large. “The program covers the ’70s to the ’90s, from Europe to Asia to the U.S., and features seminal works by Wong Kar Wai, Joyce Chopra, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Marie-Claude Treilhou, William Klein, Jia Zhangke and more, in outstanding restorations. Together, these films reveal an enduring influence on our collective sense of cinema, culturally and politically, for filmmakers as well as audience members.”

The Revivals section connects cinema’s rich past to its dynamic present through an eclectic assortment of new restorations, titles selected by the festival’s filmmakers, rarities, and more. Highlights include a major rediscovery of Iranian cinema, Mohammad Reza Aslani’s The Chess Game of the Wind, and another NYFF58 appearance by Main Slate filmmaker Jia Zhangke, with his rarely screened Xiao Wu—both made possible by the dedicated work of The Film Foundation, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year; the sumptuous visual pleasures of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai and Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love, featuring two of Tony Leung’s most memorable roles; portraits of iconic American figures that resonate today in William Klein’s Muhammad Ali, the Greatest and Terence Dixon’s Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris, shot by Jack Hazan; Joyce Chopra’s 1986 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner, Smooth Talk, which boasts a breakout performance by a young Laura Dern; and Marie-Claude Treilhou’s Simone Barbes or Virtue, a stylish curio long overdue for reappraisal. Rounding out the program are Béla Tarr’s black-and-white noir, Damnation; Wojciech Has’s hallucinatory masterpiece, The Hourglass Sanatorium; and Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct, a celebration of the anarchy of youth selected by Opening Night director Steve McQueen as an influence on his Small Axe films.

Revivals will be presented in a combination of virtual and drive-in screenings; the full festival schedule will be announced in the coming weeks. Limited rentals of Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris and Zero for Conduct will be available free for NYFF audiences.

The Revivals section is programmed by Florence Almozini and Dan Sullivan with program advising by Gina Telaroli.

Since 1963, the New York Film Festival has been a centerpiece of New York’s arts scene: an annual bellwether of the state of cinema that has shaped film culture in the city and beyond. Festival organizers will keep this tradition alive while adapting as necessary to the current health crisis. The safety of audiences and staff is the first priority. The 58th edition of NYFF will focus on outdoor and virtual screenings, as directed by state and health officials. 

In May, organizers unveiled a reimagined festival structure under the leadership of new NYFF Director Eugene Hernandez and NYFF Director of Programming Dennis Lim. The festival’s offerings have been streamlined into five sections, including the previously announced Main Slate. Currents, Spotlight, and Talks will be announced in the coming weeks.

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center, the New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema. The festival continues a long-standing tradition of introducing audiences to bold and remarkable works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. Press and industry accreditation for the 58th New York Film Festival is now open through September 2. Tickets will go on sale to the general public on September 11, with early access opportunities for FLC members prior to this date. See details about ticket prices and passes here. Support of the New York Film Festival benefits Film at Lincoln Center in its nonprofit mission to support the art and craft of cinema.

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

The Chess Game of the Wind
Mohammad Reza Aslani, 1976, Iran, 93m
Farsi with English subtitles
An unheralded landmark of Iranian cinema, Mohammad Reza Aslani’s debut feature is set during the rule of the Qajar dynasty and chronicles the fallout when a noble family’s matriarch passes away, kindling tensions new and old among her heirs. Screened publicly just once and long thought lost after the 1979 Revolution, The Chess Game of the Wind evokes the work of Luchino Visconti in its sumptuous, refined, and poetic rendering of aristocratic decadence, the passage of time, the ties that bind, and the desires that set us against one another. Featuring a remarkable score by the trailblazing female film composer Sheyda Gharachedaghi and masterfully lensed by Houshang Baharlou with a candle-lit grandeur reminiscent of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, The Chess Game of the Wind ranks among the great recent (re)discoveries of world cinema. Restored by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Chess of the Wind. Courtesy of The Film Foundation.

Damnation
Béla Tarr, 1986, Hungary, 116m
Hungarian with English subtitles
A key turning point in Béla Tarr’s career, the first of the director’s six collaborations with novelist László Krasznahorkai signaled a visible shift away from the verité realism of his early features and toward the highly stylized, black-and-white otherworldliness that would become his signature. The story is a kind of desiccated film noir, focusing on the efforts of a dour loner, Karrer (Miklós Székely B.), to steal back his estranged lover—a lounge singer (Vali Kerekes) in a funereal bar named Titanik—from her debt-addled husband. Karrer lures the husband into a smuggling scheme that will force him to leave town, but these well-laid plans soon go awry, and the characters play out their doomed destiny through enveloping layers of rain, shadow, and despair. An Arbelos Films release. New 4K restoration by the Hungarian National Film Institute – Film Archive.

Flowers of Shanghai
Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1998, Taiwan, 113m
Cantonese & Shanghainese with English subtitles
An NYFF regular from relatively early in his career, Hou Hsiao-hsien made his seventh festival appearance with this ravishingly beautiful chamber drama that follows the intertwined fortunes and intrigues of four “flower girls” serving in the opulent brothels of fin-de-siècle 19th-century Shanghai. The great Tony Leung stars as the melancholy Master Wang, torn between his affections for the jealous, demanding Crimson (Michiko Hada) and the more eager-to-please Jasmin (Vicky Wei), and gradually realizing that he is looking for love in all the wrong places. Hou’s first film set outside his native Taiwan, Flowers of Shanghai is a transfixing masterwork and an achingly, intoxicatingly sensuous landmark of ’90s world cinema. A Janus Films release. Restored in 4K in 2019 from the 35mm original negative by Shochiku in collaboration with the Shanghai International Film Festival at the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory. With funding provided by Jaeger-LeCoultre.

Flowers of Shanghai. Courtesy of Janus Films.

The Hourglass Sanatorium
Wojciech Has, 1973, Poland, 124m
Polish with English subtitles
The collective trauma of the Holocaust looms over this adaptation of Jewish author Bruno Schulz’s visionary and poetic reflection on the nature of time and death, which won the Jury Award at Cannes. Józef (Jan Nowicki) finds himself aboard a train en route to visit his father in the hospital; he arrives to find the hospital in a state that’s a bit less than… orderly. From there, past and present, reality and fantasy, collapse into each other, unleashing a surreal phantasmagoria that is by turns psychedelic, paranoiac, elegiac, funny, and everywhere haunted by the specter of death: both Józef’s prophesied death and the death of a Europe that existed before the rise of Hitler, the horrors of the Holocaust, and the carnage of World War II. New 4K restoration from the original camera negative, produced by Fixafilm (Łukasz Cerenka, Andrzej Łucjanek), supervised by Łukasz Ceranka, and curated by Daniel Bird.

Hourglass Sanatorium. Courtesy of Fixafilm.

In the Mood for Love
Wong Kar Wai, 2000, Hong Kong, 98m
Cantonese and Shanghainese with English subtitles
Wong Kar Wai’s swoon-inducing instant classic made Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung the star-crossed dream team of the early 2000s art house. They play next-door neighbors who, upon discovering that their spouses are carrying on an affair, start a platonic romance of their own amid the alleyways and noodle shops of 1960s Hong Kong. The breathless, will-they-won’t-they tension is pushed to intoxicating heights by the luscious mise en scène: Christopher Doyle’s caressing cinematography; the sensuous use of slo-mo; the red- and green-saturated and patterned print-galore period art direction (that wallpaper!); and the haunting, endlessly repeating strains of Nat King Cole. “Quizás, quizás, quizás…” A Janus Films release. This 4K digital restoration was undertaken from the 35mm original camera negative by the Criterion Collection, in collaboration with Jet Tone Films, L’Immagine Ritrovata, One Cool, and Robert Mackenzie Sound. Supervised and approved by Wong Kar Wai.

Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris
Terence Dixon, 1971, UK/France, 27m
This rare film document of one of the towering figures of 20th-century American literature—photographed by Jack Hazan (Rude Boy, A Bigger Splash)—captures the iconic writer in several symbolic locations, including the Place de la Bastille. As Hazan recounts: “Things don’t go to plan for him and the film crew when a couple of young Black Vietnam draft dodgers impose themselves on the American. Baldwin wrestles with being a role model to the Black youths, denouncing Western colonialism and crimes against African Americans while at the same time demonstrating his mastery and understanding of the culture he supposedly despises.” Restored from a 2K scan of the 16mm original color negative A&B rolls and the 16mm optical negative. Scanning services by UPP, Prague. Picture and audio restoration, grading, and mastering by Mark Rance, Watchmaker Films, London. The film is presented in 1.37:1.

Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris. Courtesy of Buzzy Enterprises Ltd.

Muhammad Ali, the Greatest
William Klein, 1974, France, 123m
English and French with English subtitles
A masterful study of one of the greatest boxers of all time and a key cultural and political figure of his era, Klein’s portrait of Muhammad Ali ranks among the most enjoyable, provocative, and candid sports documentaries. Focusing on the lead-ups to and aftermaths of three of Ali’s defining bouts—the two fights with Sonny Liston in 1964 and ’65, and the “Rumble in the Jungle” with George Foreman in ’74—Klein vividly captures Ali in his element as well as the sociopolitical climate surrounding the champ. Featuring some of the most enthralling footage of Ali boasting ever committed to celluloid, Muhammad Ali, the Greatest is an astonishing work that renders its beyond-charismatic subject in all his prowess (verbal and physical), complexity, and majesty. Presented by Films Paris New York and ARTE. First digital 2K restoration from the original 16mm negative scanned in 4K  with the support of the CNC. Image works by ECLAIR Classics and sound by L.E.DIAPASON.

Simone Barbes or Virtue / Simone Barbès ou la vertu
Marie-Claude Treilhou, 1980, France, 77m
French with English subtitles
A criminally overlooked work from the post-post-New Wave era of French cinema, Marie-Claude Treilhou’s feature debut assumes the form of a triptych, following leather-clad porno theater usher Simone (Ingrid Bourgoin) as she banters with her coworker (Martine Simonet) while watching the eccentric strangers puttering in and out of the cinema’s lobby; then clocks out and heads off to meet her girlfriend, a waitress at a lesbian club; and later, has an encounter with a lonely man on the prowl (Cahiers du cinéma critic Michel Delahaye). But the minimalist plot of Simone Barbes almost seems besides the point: Treilhou’s film is saturated with style and atmosphere, the chargedness of each throwaway gesture, idle remark, or seemingly empty moment yielding a character study unlike any other. 4K scan and restoration by Cosmodigital for La Traverse with the support of the CNC.

Smooth Talk
Joyce Chopra, 1985, USA, 92m
In her first lead role, 18-year-old Laura Dern gave one of her most stirring, layered performances in an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s 1966 short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” She stars as Connie Wyatt, a teenager who spends her summer days moping around the house and exploring her sexuality in the Northern California suburbs. But the thrills and innocence of youth are forever shaded by the predatory behavior of an older man named Arnold Friend (Treat Williams) whom she encounters at a drive-in. Smooth Talk won the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize in 1986 and remains a carefully observed, shockingly powerful story of manipulation and deviance. A Janus Films release. New 4K restoration undertaken by the Criterion Collection.

Smooth Talk. Courtesy of Janus Films.

Xiao Wu
Jia Zhangke, 1997, China, 112m
Mandarin with English subtitles
Among the most essential filmmakers of the past several decades, Jia Zhangke launched his career with this, his 1997 debut (featured in New Directors/New Films in 1999) about a pickpocket struggling to keep up with the current of China’s transformation into an economic powerhouse. Abandoned by his friends and associates and stymied by the terrain shifting beneath him, the titular and somewhat nihilistic thief stumbles upon a chance at love—or at least a human connection—and finds himself confronted with the question: is this any way to live? Even in this early work, Jia’s unsurpassed attentiveness to the texture of quotidian life amid a society in flux is powerfully in evidence, presaging his current status as cinema’s great portraitist of the latter-day Chinese behemoth. Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in collaboration with Jia Zhangke and in association with MK2. Restoration funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Xiao Wu. Courtesy of The Film Foundation.

Steve McQueen Selects:
Zero for Conduct / Zéro de conduite
Jean Vigo, 1933, France, 49m
French with English subtitles
Among the greatest artworks about the anarchic energies of youth, Jean Vigo’s autobiographical mid-length film endures as a singular masterpiece whose influence and reputation have only grown in the decades since his untimely death at age 29 a year later after the film’s release. Set in an all-boys boarding school, the film follows the students as they set about turning the institution’s uptight rules on their head. A delirious and visually astonishing achievement and an acknowledged inspiration for Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Lindsay Anderson’s if… (among countless other films), Zero for Conduct is at once a sweet ode to childhood and a dreamlike exaltation of youthful chaos. Restored in 4K by Gaumont in association with The Film Foundation and La Cinémathèque française with the support of the Centre National de la Cinématographie. Restoration performed at L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna and Paris.

Watching movies with children is a clarifying experience. You can see and feel immediately what resonates and what doesn’t. You’re watching them watching the movie, and you’re seeing it afresh through their eyes. A couple of posts back I mentioned watching Hitchcock films with my sons. They loved the clarity and the emotional complexity, and, of course, the beauty and the showmanship. They’re both in their 20s now and Hitchcock has remained a constant. For my younger son, now 22, so has John Ford. Not all of Ford, but there are certain titles he’s gone back to time and time again. How Green Was My Valley is one of them. He saw it for the first time when he was a teenager, and I was moved to see how deeply it affected him. A couple of years later we were out in LA for the TCM Film Festival. How Green Was My Valley was playing at the El Capitan, and Maureen O’Hara was there for a conversation with Robert Osborne. We had recently seen the film again, but he was very eager to go. It was a great experience—to sit in the balcony of that beautiful old movie palace on Hollywood Boulevard, to see the audience greeting every utterance from O’Hara with laughter and applause, and most of all to watch the film again with my son.

I hear the word “community” used so often now—used and misused. How often does one read about an effort to “create” a community? How many forums for the sharing of poisonous grievances are euphemistically referred to as “online communities?” Ford was an enormously complex 20^th century American artist whose films embody and transmit many different and sometimes contradictory aspects of the culture, and I expect they will always be debated. But if there are two core elements of his artistry that make him an essential figure—for me, for my son, for filmmakers as various as Bergman and Godard, Welles and Kazan, Straub & Huillet and John Gianvito—they are his dynamism, a direct creative response to the cinema itself near its very beginning as an art form, and his aching desire and formidable ability to incarnate and dramatize both the power and the fragility of human fellowship, how it can endure and how it can fray and come undone with rancor, intolerance and the sadness of aging and loss. These elements are embodied in every single frame of How Green Was My Valley, painstakingly restored by the Academy and UCLA with the help of The Film Foundation.

- Kent Jones

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HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY (1941, d. John Ford)
Preserved and restored by the Academy Film Archive and UCLA Film & Television Archive with support from The Film Foundation. 

I met Agnès Varda in 1998. She was in New York for the Miramax re-release of Demy’s Young Girls of Rochefort, and I was invited to a breakfast by her publicist. I told her how much I loved her film about Demy, Jacquot de Nantes, and she scoffed—“Have you seen the new one, L’Univers de Jacques Demy?” Her son Mathieu sat silently by her side. “I’m having my son stay at the YMCA,” she told us. “It’s good for his character.”

We crossed paths quite often on the film festival trail, and she got in the habit of calling me whenever she was in New York. Agnès loved to stay on top of things—to be where everything was happening.

When I saw Faces Places, her 2017 collaboration with JR, I was stunned. She had chosen a younger collaborator whose temperament complimented and harmonized with her own, and it was as if she had been re-energized and re-oriented for a final artistic flowering. At the Q&A after the first screening at the New York Film Festival, the first question was about the encounter that never happens with her old friend Jean-Luc Godard near the end of the film. “Excuse me,” she said, “but this is how I know I’m in New York: the first question is about Godard.”

Agnès never had a fallow period as an artist—one might take issue with a title or two, but from La Pointe courte to Varda par Agnès her work is vitally alive. You can feel it so sharply in her editing, which is quite unlike anyone else’s. There is a breathlessness that runs throughout French art, an imperative to catch the lightning of existence in a bottle. It manifests in Agnès’s films in an extremely unusual way, as a reflection of something like satisfaction and confidence at meeting life head on, just as it is. I’m thinking of the moment when she stands before Cartier-Bresson’s touchingly modest gravesite and remarks to JR, “Actually, I’m looking forward to death.”

The last time I saw Agnès was in Marrakech in late 2018. Her daughter Rosalie had told me that her mother was ill, and I expected to find her infirmed, but it was quite the opposite. She conducted a master class with young Moroccan students, and if I hadn’t known she was dying I never would have guessed it.

The Film Foundation has worked with the Cineteca di Bologna and L’Immagine Ritrovata on the restorations of the four films that Agnès made in California. My favorite, Uncle Yanco, is a joyful hymn to color, light and fellow feeling. And it is completely and fundamentally a film that could have been made by only one human being on the planet.

I won’t pretend that I knew Agnès well, but I often think of my good fortune in knowing her even a little.

- Kent Jones

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UNCLE YANCO (1967, d. Agnès Varda)
Restored by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata in association with Ciné-Tamaris and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding provided by the Annenberg Foundation, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Film Foundation.

BLACK PANTHERS (1968, d. Agnès Varda)
Restored by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata in association with Ciné-Tamaris and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding provided by the Annenberg Foundation, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Film Foundation.

LIONS LOVE (1969, d. Agnès Varda)
Restored by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata in association with Ciné-Tamaris and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding provided by the Annenberg Foundation, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Film Foundation.

MUR MURS (MURAL, MURALS) (1981, d. Agnès Varda)
Restored by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata in association with Ciné-Tamaris and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding provided by the Annenberg Foundation, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Film Foundation.

Hailed by critics as one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, Kenji Mizoguchi started his career making silent films in the 1920s with remakes and adaptations of classic writers like Tolstoy and O’Neill. In the 1930’s he moved on to films that commented on the social upheavals that Japan was going through at the time. Transitioning from propaganda films in the war years of the 1940s like The 47 Ronin to period dramas focusing on women’s issues such as suffrage (Victory of the Women (1946) and My Love Has Been Burning (1949)), he was a feminist filmmaker ahead of his time. Through the years, Mizoguchi honed the poetic visual style that revealed his ‘tragic humanism,’ shown to best effect in his later period films, particularly in his masterwork Ugetsu Monogatari which was his 78^th film.

Most of Mizoguchi’s oeuvre, which totals 90 overall, were silent films that are lost. A particular favorite of director Martin Scorsese, Ugetsu was restored in digital 4K through his The Film Foundation and the Kadokawa Corporation at Cineric Laboratories in New York, with funding from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

At a 2016 presentation of the restored film by the HFPA in Bologna at Il Cinema Ritrovato, Scorsese sent a video message in which he said: “I first saw Ugetsu on TV in 1958 and I have been obsessed ever since by its beauty and poetry. It was very hard to find the various elements to restore and save this masterpiece and I have to thank our friends of the Hollywood Foreign Press for making it happen.”

The restoration process used the master positive and dupe negative which were determined to be the best elements available. The film was scanned at Cineric and picture restoration and grading were supervised by Scorsese and Masahiro Miyajima, who had worked with cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa for over 30 years. Audio mechanics performed the digital restoration of the soundtrack from the master positive. An internegative of the picture restoration and an optical soundtrack negative have been created for preservation, as well as 35mm film prints and DCPs for exhibition. The restoration was premiered at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival as part of Cannes Classics.

Ugetsu is based on two short stories, The House in the Thicket and The Lust of the White Serpent from Akirari Ueda’s 18^th century Tales of Moonlight and Rain. Interwoven is Guy de Maupassant’s story Décoré!.

Mizoguchi instructed his two screenwriters Matsutaro Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda thus: “The feeling of wartime must be apparent in the attitude of every character. The violence of war unleashed by those in power on a pretext of the national good must overwhelm the common people with suffering—moral and physical. Yet the commoners, even under these conditions, must continue to live and eat. This theme is what I especially want to emphasize here. How should I do it?”

In the civil war of 16^th century Japan, a potter and his brother leave their families behind in order to profit from wartime demand for the potter’s wares in a neighboring village. Genjuro, the potter, played by Masayuki Mori, is hungry for wealth; Tobei (Eitaro Ozawa) wants glory as a samurai. Genjuro is seduced by a beautiful ghost, Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyo), and Tobei endures much humiliation before he becomes a samurai by chance. Mizoguchi shows the suffering of the peasantry in wartime particularly through the plight of the wives as the men are blinded in the pursuit of their grandiose dreams.

The director has a signature “flowing scroll” of long, uninterrupted takes. He shoots mostly master shots, a majority with cranes. There are very few closeups. The title scenes are that of a medieval scroll reminiscent of a kimono. As his camera moves, he manages to straddle the real and the supernatural with ease, particularly in the famous lake scene where a mysterious man warns the protagonists of pirates before he dies. A keening soundtrack accompanies the mists and fog surrounding the boat on which the terrified peasants are huddled. Cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa worked with Mizoguchi six times, including his last film, Street of Shame (1956). He later remarked that Ugetsu was the only film for which his work was praised by the master.

Mizoguchi was a perfectionist, often doing hundreds of retakes before he was satisfied and constantly asking for rewrites in the middle of shooting. He was also uncompromising on historical detail like the costumes, props, and suits of armor for the soldiers.

Fans of Mizoguchi's later films were mostly in the West as local audiences in Japan at the time did not have much interest in his work. Jean-Luc Godard declared him “the greatest of Japanese filmmakers, or quite simply one of the greatest of filmmakers.” He won the Silver Lion for best director in 1953 at the Venice Film Festival for Ugetsu, in competition with William Wyler’s Roman Holiday. In Keiko McDonald’s book Mizoguchi, she writes that it was his first trip outside Japan and he spent most of his time in his hotel room praying to a scroll, worrying about how he could return to Japan if he did not win. The film was also Oscar-nominated for best costume design in 1956. It was included in Sight and Sound magazine’s once-a-decade poll as one of the greatest films ever made in 1962 and 1972, and has a 100% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Kenji Mizoguchi died of leukemia three years after the release of Ugetsu.