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The cinema is widely and commonly recognized as a popular art form, but its presence and the breadth of its history in different areas of the world varies wildly. The art form itself is often identified with this country, because ours has been the most spectacular, the most widely exported, and perhaps the most sheerly dynamic in relation to the development of the century: as André Bazin once observed, American society has told itself its own developing story and mythology through its cinema. But the cinemas of Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, China and Japan have been forceful presences in the history of the art form for just as long, and Indian cinema has been a powerhouse. In other parts of the world, production has been fitful, in Africa most of all. Africa is a big continent and there are obviously exceptions, including Egypt and, to a lesser extent, South Africa. But in general, getting a film made in Africa has long been, and continues to be, difficult. With the exception of the quickly and massively produced titles shot on home video equipment that started coming out of Nigeria in the late 80s, African cinema is basically one film at a time, each one financed and produced under unique circumstances. The preservation of African cinema has been especially problematic for just those reasons.

The African Film Heritage Project was launched in 2017, a closely coordinated effort between The Film Foundation, the Cineteca di Bologna—where the effort is spearheaded by the formidable Cecilia Cenciarelli—UNESCO (whose “General History of Africa” project is now in its 7^th decade and in preparation with its 9^th, 10^th and 11^th volumes) and FEPACI (Pan African Federation of Filmmakers), which launched a crucial survey of all African film archives. The aim of the AFHP is to locate the elements (mainly in European archives) and then restore and preserve African titles selected by a group of African filmmakers and scholars in coordination with FEPACI. Thus far, AFHP has restored Med Hondo’s Soleil O, which was completed not long before the filmmaker’s death; Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s Chronicle of the Years of Fire from Algeria, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1975; Timité Bassori’s 1969 film La Femme au couteau from the Ivory Coast; Jean-Pierre Dikongué Pipa’s Muna Moto from Cameroon; and Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Contras’ City from Senegal. Pre-dating the formation of AFHP, the World Cinema Project arm of The Film Foundation restored Trances and Alyam Alyam by Ahmed Al-Maanouni from Morocco (I focused on Trances a ways back here); Mambéty’s Touki Bouki and Ousmane Sembene’s Borom Sarret and Black Girl, three foundational films from Senegal; and Shadi Abdel-Salam’s Al Momia also known as The Night of Counting the Years, and The Eloquent Peasant, from Egypt. The scope of all these linked initiatives and the dedication behind them is deeply moving, a titanic collective effort to reclaim history on multiple fronts. The majority of these films are revelatory on many levels—for westerners with limited exposure or even knowledge of the fact of Africa’s multiple cinemas, and for African audiences and film students as well. For Aboubakar Sanogo, FEPACI’s North American secretary, this is a crucial element. “The young African filmmakers are at a really important crossroad,” he told Mark Cosgrove. “There has never been more of a passion for making films than now in terms of sheer numbers…What they don’t have access to is the history.” The ultimate goal is that “no African filmmaker can take a camera without seeing a Med Hondo or Sembène or Cissé.” It’s a noble goal for Africa and its cinemas, and a real example to millions living on wealthier continents throughout the world who harbor the sadly mistaken belief that history can be either ignored or discarded or re-molded like a lump of clay. Which always ends in humiliation, disgrace, or tragedy.

- Kent Jones

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SOLEIL O (1970, d. Med Hondo)
Restored by Cineteca di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in collaboration with Med Hondo. Restoration funded by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation and The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project.

This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema.

CHRONICLE OF THE YEARS OF FIRE (1975, d. Mohammed Lakhdar–Hamina)
Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Image Retrouvée and L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratories. Restoration funded by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema.

LA FEMME AU COUTEAU (1969, d. Timité Bassori)
Restored by Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project. Restoration funded by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema.

MUNA MOTO (1975, d. Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa)
Restored by Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema.

CONTRAS’ CITY (1968, d. Djibril Diop Mambéty)
Restored in 2020 by Cineteca di Bologna/L'Immagine Ritrovata and The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project in association with The Criterion Collection. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema.

TRANCES (1981, d. Ahmed Al-Maanouni) 
Restored in 2007 by Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, Ahmed El-Maanouni, and Izza Genini. Restoration funded by Armani, Cartier, Qatar Airways and Qatar Museum Authority.

ALYAM ALYAM (1978, d. Ahmed Al-Maanouni)
Restored by Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with Ahmed El-Maanouni.  Restoration funded by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project.

TOUKI BOUKI (1973, d. Djibril Diop Mambéty)
Restored in 2008 by Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and the family of Djibril Diop Mambéty. Restoration funded by Armani, Cartier, Qatar Airways and Qatar Museum Authority.

BOROM SARRET (1963, d. Ousmane Sembène)
Restored in 2013 by Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory and Laboratoires Éclair, in association with The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, and the Sembène Estate.  Restoration funded by Doha Film Institute.

BLACK GIRL (1966, d. Ousmane Sembène)
Restored by Cineteca di Bologna/ L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with the Sembène Estate, Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, INA, Eclair laboratories and the Centre National de Cinématographie. Restoration funded by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project.

AL MOMIA (1969, d. Shadi Abdel-Salam)
Restored in 2009 by Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, and the Egyptian Film Center. Restoration funded by Armani, Cartier, Qatar Airways, Qatar Museum Authority and the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. 

THE ELOQUENT PEASANT (1969, d. Shadi Abdel-Salam)
Restored in 2010 by Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, and the Egyptian Film Center. Restoration funded by Armani, Cartier, Qatar Airways and Qatar Museum Authority.

Moroccan director Ahmed El Maanouni’s film “Transes” (Al Hal, 1981), which recounts the stage performances of Moroccan mythic musician group Nass El Ghiwane, is among the new releases to be available soon on “The Criterion Collection” platform, an American home video distribution company which focuses on licensing “important classic and contemporary films.”

“The groundbreaking Moroccan band Nass El Ghiwane is the dynamic subject of this captivating, one-of-a-kind documentary by Ahmed El Maanouni, who filmed the four musicians during a series of electrifying live performances in Tunisia, Morocco, and France; on the streets of Casablanca; and in intimate conversations,” the Criterion Collection said in a statement.

“Storytellers through song and traditional instruments, and with connections to political theater, the band became a local phenomenon and an international sensation, thanks to its rebellious lyrics and sublime, fully acoustic sound, which draws on Berber rhythms, Malhun sung poetry, and Gnawa dances. Both a concert movie and a free-form audiovisual experiment, bolstered by images of the band’s rapt audience, Trances is pure cinematic poetry,” it added.

The 88-minute film was restored in 2007 by the Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, Ahmed El-Maanouni, and Izza Genini.

The Criterion Collection is dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in DVD and Blu-ray editions of the highest technical quality, with supplemental features that enhance the appreciation of the art of film.

Film noir has been so thoroughly fussed over and theorized and fetishized and trumpeted since it was first classified and named back in the 70s that it has now become a brand name. It’s interesting to give the films a fresh look and consider their most outlandish aspects—labyrinthine narratives, wildly eccentric and impulsive characters popping up around every corner, unreliable narrators, resurrections from the dead and soul-searing betrayals. The mixture of resignation, confusion, wild romantic longing, punishing cruelty and sheer craziness really does stop you in your tracks. The titles made in the years just after the war are the most moving, and they now seem directly tied to films about returning WWII vets like The Best Years of Our Lives, Till the End of Time and From This Day Forward—the same bottled-up emotions expressed by different means.

Amnesia, recurring dreams and drug-induced delirium are the narrative convolutions that create fractured landscapes of the mind, often enhanced by filmmakers and actors who were electrified by the challenge. And the challenge is even greater when the source material is from Cornell Woolrich. Woolrich, who also wrote under the pen name William Irish, was prolific. He was also variable. To take one example, his 1940 novel The Bride Wore Black ends with a truly inane “plot twist,” thrown out by François Truffaut in his 1968 adaptation. But he was also inventive, and his novels and short stories were the basis of some of the greatest films of the 40s and 50s, including The Leopard Man, Phantom Lady, Rear Window and The Chase, Arthur Ripley’s 1946 adaptation of The Black Path of Fear. For years, The Chase was only available in some of the worst and most dispiriting transfers I’ve ever seen, and I was thrilled when Bertrand Tavernier told me he’d heard the negative existed in a European archive and overjoyed when the film was actually restored by UCLA with funding from The Film Foundation and the Franco-American Cultural Fund. I wouldn’t dream of giving away too much of the plot. Suffice to say that the film begins with a troubled, penniless vet (Robert Cummings) on the streets of Miami who picks up a wallet on the street and returns it to its rightful owner, a gangster (Steve Cochran) who lives with his beautiful kept wife (Michèle Morgan) in a gaudy mansion filled with “classical” statues, and who decides to give the vet a job as his chauffeur—over the objections of his unimpressed henchman (Peter Lorre)—and test him out with a ride in his specially designed limo in which he can gun the speed from the back. Ripley (who started as a gagman for Mack Sennett, and whose independently made Voice in the Wind was also restored by UCLA with the help of TFF), along with DP Franz Planer, Art Director Robert Usher, writer Philip Yordan and producer Seymour Nebenzal, created an exquisite nightmare that becomes more baroque and uncanny as it unfolds—small wonder that The Chase is a favorite of Guy Maddin. And at the heart of the film is the deep yearning of Cummings’ Scottie to be whole and at peace with himself.

- Kent Jones

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THE CHASE (1946, d. Arthur Ripley)
Restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, with funding provided by The Film Foundation and the Franco-American Cultural Fund, a unique partnership between the Directors Guild of America (DGA); the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA); the Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique (SACEM); and the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW).

VOICE IN THE WIND (1944, d. Arthur Ripley)
Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive and The Film Foundation, in collaboration with Cohen Film Collection. Restoration funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

When navy combat photographer Morris Engel decided to make Little Fugitive in 1953, there was no such thing as an independent film made outside the studio system. “My wife grew up in Hollywood and worked as a messenger at MGM, so she knew all about how films were made,” Engel explained at a screening of his movie at Brooklyn College. “When I told her that I was going to make a film, she told me that it couldn't be done. We started work on the film and our film editor quit, so I asked Ruth if she would edit our dailies. She resisted, but pretty soon she fell in love with the material and edited it for us and did a fantastic job. Because she had worked in Hollywood, where her mother was a silent-screen star, she knew all about continuity and film editing, which was lucky for us because we didn't have a clue!”

Engel, his wife Ruth Orkin, and Ray Ashley who wrote the screenplay are the credited directors of the film which is shot in black and white with a simple story that focuses more on character than plot. However, what’s groundbreaking about their effort is that they pioneered independent film in the US and are credited with influencing the French nouvelle vague cinema. “Our New Wave would never have come into being if it hadn't been for the young American Morris Engel, who showed us the way to independent production with his fine movie Little Fugitive,” said François Truffaut in an interview in the New Yorker. Indeed, the influence is clear in Truffaut’s directorial debut The 400 Blows, as it is in John Cassavetes’ first film Shadows. Both films were released in 1959 and borrowed heavily from Engel’s style of handheld camerawork shot on the fly, with realistic settings, natural dialogue and non-actors.

In the movie, seven-year-old Joey (Richie Andrusco) runs away from his home in Brooklyn after his big brother Lennie (Richard Brewster), tricks him into believing that he has killed him while playing with a gun. Their widowed mother is away from home, and the terrified Joey grabs the $6 she left for groceries and gets himself on the subway to Coney Island. There, like a typical child, he forgets his worries and runs around the boardwalk, riding the steeplechase carousel and reaching for the brass ring, eating hotdogs and watermelon, trying his luck at the arcade games and batting cage. The pony rides are a powerful attraction at the point when he realizes he’s run out of money, whereupon he hits on an ingenious solution to get more. The little star does all these things in an utterly unselfconscious and charming way, and the viewer is treated to a slice of history in the depiction of 1950s-era Coney Island, a more innocent time when children were in no danger when they were alone. Viewers will see the Tornado, Parachute Jump, Gyro Globe and Wax Museum, as well as the still-existing Wonder Wheel.

Engel devised a 35mm camera that was strapped on his body so he could follow the child around in an unobtrusive way, capturing the real rhythms of his Brooklyn neighborhood and residents, as well as the Coney Island summer crowds, all unwitting extras. There was a script, but the Coney Island scenes, which are fully two-thirds of the film, had to allow for spontaneous action by the child as he sees the world through his eyes, beautifully filmed by Engel. Indeed, the cinematography is absolutely remarkable as Engel captures light and shadows under the boardwalk, the vistas of the beach during the day and night and even in the rain, with closeups of Joey, sometimes despondent, sometimes joyful. The film is delightful and it has everything to do with the little boy and Engel’s camera.

The camera was a precursor to the Steadicam which had not yet been invented. Stanley Kubrick was so taken by it, he rented it from Engel for his next film. Also, in the Engel archives is a letter from Jean-Luc Goddard to him which says in part: “Unfortunately, I have been kept busy by the editing of my last movie; and I won’t be able to come to New York to discuss with you for the camera before two or three months. So I am sending to you Raoul Coutard, my operator, who will, if you agree, just have a look at your camera from his technical point of you. After that, I shall keep in touch with you to come to an agreement together about that camera.”

Sound couldn’t be recorded live with this way of filming, so the entire film was dubbed in post-production, including dialogue and ambient sounds. Therefore, Engel kept the dialogue to an absolute minimum; the boys’ dialogue in post ends up sounding a bit stagey. The very effective soundtrack is mainly a solo harmonica played by Eddy Manson, a harmonica virtuoso who composed for and played on various television shows. The movie was shot for $30,000 and eventually grossed $162,373 worldwide in theatrical exhibition.

After good reviews, Little Fugitive was screened at the 1953 Venice Film Festival where it was nominated for the Golden Lion and won the Silver Lion. It was then nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story in 1954. The National Board of Review included it in its list of top ten films of 1953.

In 1997, it was inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress and the National Film Preservation Board for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Engel and Orkin continued their photography careers till their deaths. They made two more indie movies together – Lovers and Lollipops in 1956 and Weddings and Babies in 1958.

At a film screening when the movie was revived in 2013, Andrusco said he was discovered by Engel in Coney Island where he was riding the carousel with his brother. In the audio commentary on the DVD version, Engel talks about working with the children, the filming of the gun scene, the real-life drowning scene on the beach which was cut out of the television version, and the fact that Ohio censored the film for the line, “You’re lying on my pants,” which is said by Lennie after he comes back from a swim to see his pants hidden under the beach towel of a couple.

The film was restored and mastered in HD from a 35mm print preserved by the Museum of Modern Art with support from The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, The Film Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation.