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Criterion’s fourth box set of Martin Scorsese‘s World Cinema Project is part of the ongoing initiative of The Film Foundation to finance and coordinate restorations of important films from countries with little or no self-funded resources. Packaged as a DVD/Blu-ray combo, the box set contains six features and a booklet. Although these films come from different countries, decades, and languages, they reveal similarities in social conscience and film experiment.

Four of the six features in this box sex present explicit critiques of their government’s policies and forces of oppression, which is probably a great way to become obscure and overlooked. The other two, Chess of the Wind and Two Girls on the Street, are also at least highly critical of social conventions, male supremacy, and industrialization. These films might hail from different countries, but they were all made on the same troubled planet.

Prisonieros de la Tierra (1939) Director: Mario Soffici

The opening credits in Prisonieros de la Tierra declare that all is peaceful and harmonious today in the northern Argentine region where the story takes place, but that the events date from an earlier pioneer era of blood and alcohol. Then the first scene announces its date as 1915, which isn’t that long ago for a film of 1939. Here the filmmakers try to pacify cultural critics (or so we guess) by implying that we can speak of such exploitations and depravities because they belong to a distant past before today’s enlightened era. This is a common strategy when films point out unpleasant legacies that might upset those who benefited from them.

Prisonieros de la Tierra‘s quickly introduces its characters, most of whom are referred to as “Mensú” and who sometimes speak Guarani, indicating indigenous status. Spanish Wikipedia informs us that Mensú is a Guarani word derived from the Spanish word for “monthly” and refers to workers recruited to work on yerba mate plantations. As Sofici’s film depicts, the workers were often recruited forcibly and kept in permanent debt to “the company store”, frequently while dying of malaria and other diseases. Their conditions were akin to slavery and worse than sharecropping since they had no share in the crop.

Several Latin American writers called attention to this exploitation. Among these was Horacio Quiroga, whose stories inspired Soffici’s Prisonieros de la Tierra (or Prisoners of the Land or Prisoners of the Earth) a couple of years after Quiroga’s death in 1937. One of the screenwriters is Dario Quiroga, the author’s son. His co-writer is poet and playwright Ulyses Petit de Murat, who here launches his career as Argentina’s most prolific screenwriter.

Melodramas about serious issues commonly dramatize them through emblematic characters in confused romantic relationships, so Prisonieros de la Tierra presents its hero, Esteban Podeley (Ángel Magaña), as an enlightened peón who reads books about his exploitation. Such education is disapproved as dangerous by foreign gringo boss Köhner (Francisco Petrone), who has an unscrupulous job whipping all those workers into line for the plantation. Among the film’s strong points is that Köhner remains an understandable human while being the villain.

The third point in their triangle is the lovely Andrea (Elisa Galvé). She’s the daughter of the self-hating doctor (Raúl De Lange), who has passed from youthful idealism to alcoholic nihilism. She considers herself spiritually with the workers because her mother was half-native. She commits herself to the love of Podeley while the lonely Köhner fumes with jealousy and hates his life.

In this way, personal issues lead to political rebellion in a climax – an angry call to revolution mixed with star-crossed tragedy. The most striking scene is possibly inspired by Eliza’s whipping of Simon Legree in the ubiquitous stage productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. However, this scene goes beyond our initial animal pleasure at the payback. More than one scene and character in Prisonieros de la Tierra harness Christlike imagery. Also notable is the symbolism of falling trees in the Amazon jungle.

One amazing moment of blurred, drunken subjectivity involves hallucination and horror that reminds us of Quiroga’s reputed affinity with Edgar Allan Poe. These tales are adapted from Quiroga’s story collection called Stories of Love, Madness, and Death (Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte, 1917). That tells you plenty.

Prisonieros de la Tierra is probably the first Argentine film to address such a subject. During the ’50s,  the industry made at least two melodramas about the Mensú based on literary sources written years after Quiroga died. Hugo del Carril’s Las Aguas Bajan Turbias (1952) is based on Afredo Varela’s Dark River (El río oscuro, 1943). Armando Bó’s El trueno entre las hojas (1958) is based on the same-titled 1953 book by Augusto Roa Bastos. There’s a trilogy waiting to be gathered.

As a child, Soffici emigrated from Italy to Argentina and eventually became a fixture in the national cinema, directing more than 40 films from the ’30s to the ’60s. In his Dictionary of Film Makers (1972, University of California Press), the French historian Georges Sadoul pronounces Soffici the best Argentinian filmmaker of the 1935-45 period for “portraying Argentinian realities with an authenticity and a particular social sense unusual in his country.”

In Prisonieros de la Tierra, we see that authenticity in the frequent use of outdoor locations and in the excellent high-contrast black and white photography of Pablo Tabernero, which goes in a heartbeat from documentary-like to grim to lyrical. This may have been the first film shot in the Amazonian region where the story takes place, very remote from Buenos Aires. The actor who originated the project died of appendicitis there, far from medical attention, and had to be replaced.

The restoration shows why Jorge Luis Borges hailed the film as a landmark and why it was popular with audiences and critics. In a bonus discussion about the film’s history, we learn that only one wretched and battered 16mm print of Prisonieros de la Tierra existed in its own country. The restorers were able to locate 35mm prints in Paris and Prague.

 

Sambizanga (1972) Director: Sarah Maldoror

Sambizanga, named for a community outside Angola’s capital of Luanda, bears a few similarities to Prisioneros de la Tierra. While both have documentary elements, Sambizanga goes farther in that direction and feels especially indebted to Neorealism. Both films are about colonization and resistance, showing characters who speak the dominant European language and their language.

In Sambizanga, the setting is the Portuguese colony of Angola in Africa, and the events take place in early 1961, just before the long war that was still going on during filming. The film had to be shot next door in the Congo with Angolan non-professionals involved in the revolutionary movement.

Sambizanga‘s adapts a novella by a Portuguese anti-colonial author, José Luandino Vieira, called A vida verdadeira de Domingos Xavier (The Real Life of Domingos Xavier). That title implies that Xavier dominates the narrative, but the strategy of filmmaker Sarah Maldoror is to emphasize everyone around Xavier (Domingos de Oliveira), especially the struggles of his wife Maria (Elisa Andrade).

Sambizanga opens with the type of everyday documentation that will fill the narrative. Xavier is working at his construction job. After a curious encounter with his white boss, who asks him to stop by that evening, Xavier tells a colleague in confidence that this man is a friend. As we will put together later, the boss is distributing revolutionary leaflets. Xavier is arrested and taken to prison in Luanda for his part in those leaflets, and he refuses to name his associates.

From the beginning, whole communities of Africans observe his fate, passing information by word of mouth and offering consolation to Maria, who makes long journeys with her baby trying to see Xavier. Occasionally we see him in prison, but the doings of Maria and others dominate Sambizanga in accordance with Maldoror’s belief that revolution cannot happen without women and children and communal cooperation is at least as vital as individual actions. This makes the film a collection of often lyrical, almost digressive scenes that linger on intense close-ups or wide shots of the community and landscapes.

At one point, a revolutionary leader is educating men in a sewing factory. He declares with a classic Marxist bluntness that “There are no white people, there are no mulattoes, there are no black people. There are only the rich and the poor, and the rich are enemies of the poor.” Sambizanga promotes the activities of the Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), whose first president was Maldoror’s husband Mário de Andrade. He co-wrote the film with French poet Maurice Pons.

Maldoror was the daughter of a Frenchwoman and a father from Guadeloupe, and she dedicated her life to pan-African topics. She adopted her surname from the unconventional anti-hero of Comte de Lautréamont’s novel The Songs of Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror, 1869), so beloved by the Surrealists. Sambizanga was her only completed feature, though she’d made a short based on a similar story by Luandino Vieira. It would have been nice to see that short here.

Maldoror spent the rest of her career making many documentaries for French television. She died in 2020. A bonus segment interviews her and her daughter Annouchka de Andrade. They explain that some “miserabilist” critics found fault with Sambizanga for its physically beautiful characters and rich color photography. Maldoror rejected the idea that poor people aren’t entitled to beauty.

 

Muna Moto (1975) Director: Dikongué-Pipa

Shot in Cameroon in black and white, Muna Moto (or A Child of Another) is perhaps the most avant-garde film in this set. As befits films with a complex structure, the story is very simple. As in Prisioneros de la Tierra, the hero’s marriage ambitions are thwarted by a personal triangle and social conditions, and once again, a falling tree becomes a metaphor.

Ngando (David Endene) and Ndome (Arlette Din Bell) wish to marry but first come many hoops. Ngando must pay an exorbitant bride price he can’t afford. His family is dominated by his uncle Mbongo (Abia Moukoko), who, upon the death of Ngando’s father, has inherited and married Ngando’s mother, just like Hamlet’s Claudius, and also her daughters.

This familial polygamy is sanctified by tradition, and the boorish uncle blames his wives for the fact that he has no children. The obvious conclusion, which nobody spells out, is that Mbongo is the sterile one. He thinks he can solve his problem by marrying Ndome.

Muna Moto‘s story will interrogate this tradition harshly by personalizing it through the tyrannical Mbongo, who can be seen as symbolizing all oppressive patriarchal traditions and the general powers that be. A few passages link Ngando’s problems to the economic policies of the newly independent post-colonial government, though Dikongué-Pipa was obliged to tread lightly on political criticism.

Muna Moto‘s basic story is presented in fragments of memory after Ngando has created a stir at a family celebration. Scenes will float around this confrontation. There are moments of fantasy, such as when the uncle imagines Ndome’s future pregnancy and even a theatrical dream sequence in which Ngando hears his father. Dikongué-Pipa uses editing and sound mixing imaginatively to string ideas together and explain events. The ending uses a beautiful melancholy song by Georges Anderson.

In a bonus interview, Dikongué-Pipa declares that his spiritual mentors are Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, and the Italian Neorealists.

 

Chess of the Wind (Shatranj-e Baad, 1976) Director: Mohammad Reza Aslani

As in Muna Moto, a hated patriarchal tyrant dominates the proceedings, at least for Chess of the Wind’s first half. Haji Amou (Mohamad Ali Keshavarz) throws his weight around the fancy Iranian mansion of an earlier era, being especially cruel to the wheelchair-bound Lady Aghdas (Fakhri Khorvash), who’s introduced smashing bottles with a little swinging flail.

After behaving like one of those obnoxious figures in an episode of Perry Mason or Murder She Wrote who anger everyone until the inevitable murder, the patriarch gets dispatched. Sheyda Gharachedaghi scores this scene and others in a hooting modernist dissonance with traditional instruments. For the record, the composer is a woman, as is production designer Houri Etesam, and these aren’t traditional choices in Iran’s cinema or anybody’s.

Despite the murder, Chess of the Wind is no whodunit because we see clearly who engages in the conspiracy to knock him off and hide the body. Then the plot goes in a direction strongly reminiscent of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique (1955).

At various points, for punctuation, the action shifts to a wide shot of women washing clothes at a fountain while commenting and gossiping about the action. These scenes are presented without cuts but with the camera sometimes gliding in slowly. This “Greek chorus” or “vox populi” element indicates that the working classes are always paying attention and judging the activities of their “betters”. Since this chorus is all female, it carries a whiff of Susan Glaspell’s story “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917), which might have been known to Aslani through its incarnation as a 1961 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Let’s ask him.

A crucial role belongs to Shohreh Aghdashlou, making her film debut as the servant girl or handmaiden Kanizak. She serves her Lady Aghdas even to the point of a startling implication of lesbian passion, presented distantly but noisily. We can imagine this scene raising Persian eyebrows in 1976. Since being Oscar-nominated for House of Sand and Fog (Vadim Perelman, 2003), Aghdashlou has a thriving Hollywood career that includes the X-Men and Star Trek franchises and the sci-fi television series The Expanse. Today she sounds like Leonard Cohen, and that’s not a knock.

Houshang Barlou’s photography frequently curves with catlike prowl around the characters in this claustrophobic setting. In one hair-raising sequence, it even tracks someone down the stairs. These sequences cast an orange-yellow light, perhaps to increase a sense of fevered delirium. In the making-of, Arslani makes visual references to Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) and innovative Iranian painter Kamal-ol-Molk.

Chess of the Wind premiered badly at a Tehran festival in 1976 and soon joined the legacy of pre-Islamic Revolution cinema being banned in 1979. Recently rediscovered by an accident that can fairly be called miraculous, it’s been revelatory at festivals.

 

Two Girls on the Street (Két lány az utcán, 1939) Director: André de Toth

Director André de Toth is known as a Hollywood guy, the only director in this whole set who worked there. Among the many cinematic emigres who landed in Hollywood during WWII, he built a reputation as a reliable craftsman in B films, mostly thrillers and westerns. Dark Waters (1944), Ramrod (1947), and Pitfall (1948) are worthy examples. Despite being blind in one eye, he directed the 3-D horror House of Wax (1953).

The third of his five Hungarian films, Two Girls on the Street follows the perspective of two women of different classes who become roommates in the big city. The slightly older and wiser Gyöngyi (Mária Tasnádi Fekete) – who begins the story by being tossed out of her comfortable home with an unwed pregnancy and loses the baby in childbirth – takes pity upon the naïve and somewhat tiresome Vica (Bella Bordy).

While these characters bewail the fate of women and laborers and bemoan men in general and rich men in particular, de Toth’s script is savvy enough to present its women as flawed, multi-faceted humans. Vica comes across as a clumsy schemer who tries to manipulate people without showing finesse, which often ends badly. However, one of her ploys succeeds in landing the women in a snazzy apartment under the patronage of Gyöngyi’s father.

Gyöngyi also gets manipulative under the guise of being protective, as though Vica is her lost daughter or little sister. Gyöngyi shows jealousy of Vica and resents her attention from a rich architect (Andor Ajtay), and this behavior may imply a submerged erotic attraction between the women. In case you think that’s a stretch for any 1939 film, their all-girl nightclub band shows that one of its members is an effeminate man in drag who mingles freely in the dressing room.

After some narrowly averted melodrama, both women move on to new phases. The final scene shows Vica, now literally on top of everyone else in a new highrise, oblivious to the struggling female laborers who have replaced her in the working-class chain. It’s a cynical little note to strike in the middle of a happy ending. The film’s booklet points out that this cynicism matches the recurring theme song, which is about “saving your breath” because everybody lies.

Shot in the streets of Budapest full of urban bustle and modern construction, Two Girls on the Street mixes realism with a few moments of subjective expressionism. The story is brisk and beady-eyed, with commentary and observation from various side characters. As we’ve hinted, some language and sexual elements are franker than concurrent Hollywood films.

 

Kalpana (1948) Director: Uday Shankar

Among India’s most important 20th Century artists is dancer and choreographer Uday Shankar, a pioneer in mixing modern with traditional elements into a hybrid of his invention. The highly personal Kalpana is his only film. We said earlier that Muna Moto may be the most avant-garde film in Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 4, but Kalpana runs neck and neck with it.

Kalpana opens with a movie pitch between Shankar and a money-minded mogul whose motto is “Box office!” Shankar pitches the script as dramatized before our eyes. It’s his tale of founding a modern dance troupe and school in the Himalayas (as he did in real life), as tricked up with Hindi melodrama about the artist’s struggle between a Good Girl (symbolizing art) and a temptress (symbolizing the commercial world). Shankar’s wife, Amala Uday Shankar, plays the good Uma, and Lakshmi Kanta plays Kamini, the jealous vamp.

There’s much strife and digression, but that’s not the point. The point is that much of this is conveyed via modern dance numbers that take full advantage of cinematic language by doing things you can’t show on a stage. Visual devices include the editing and superimposition of multiple images on different planes of perspective. Some pieces are presented more theatrically, yet with sweeping camera moves and much elaborate design and lighting.

By coincidence, another film from this year used similar devices: Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes. Kalpana is shot in black and white by K. Ramnoth rather than glorious color, but much of it looks as striking as a Busby Berkeley film on a smaller budget. Workers are instructed to become machines in one number that evokes Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927).

The emphasis on dance and symbolism makes the storyline almost an abstract concept, although there are many moments of social criticism via direct lectures. Mr. Gandhi and Mr. Nehru are mentioned by name as Shankar implores that India move forward into the modern world by forsaking caste and regional division, the oppression of women, and the lure of the commercial. Early scenes convey an abusive childhood full of beatings, while gaps in this section’s narrative strongly imply that footage may be missing.

One detail that modern viewers will notice is that we first meet the hero as a boy being punished for dressing as a girl to dance on a homemade stage. Cross-dressing isn’t singled out for blame, only the desire to dance. In a later dance, female and male figures superimpose on each other to imply an internal sexual collaboration.

In the bonus discussion, scholars trace Kalpana‘s influence on the Bollywood cinema of Guru Dutt (a student of Shankar), Raj Kapoor and V. Shantaram, and the fact that Satyajit Ray watched it many times. Some of the participants went on to big film careers. For the record, Shankar’s younger brother is an equally major figure in music, Ravi Shankar.

Each film in Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 4 comes with a brief intro by Scorsese and a bonus segment of appreciation. My only complaint about this fine and noble series is that new volumes emerge too slowly. We must remember to be grateful that they emerge at all. Each box is an illuminating treasure of film history far from Hollywood, so this is possibly the single most important ongoing series in home video.

Usually, this feature would offer mini-reviews of the six films in the latest “World Cinema Project,” an essential release from the Criterion Collection. However, life got hectic enough (including three Covid diagnoses in my house) that I haven’t been able to sample the set like I wanted to but didn’t want to let its release go by. Therefore, consider this post more informative than critical, a detailed look at what’s in the latest box set instead of an opinion of their quality. 

I have a feeling that quality isn’t really a concern here, but mostly wanted to make sure people knew that there’s a fourth box set from Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, a group that restores and preserves films that could have otherwise been lost to history. In this case, they have highlighted films from multiple eras (as old as 1939 and as new as 1976) and countries, including Cameroon, Argentina, Iran, and Angola. Criterion has been accused of being too Euro-centric in the past, and these “World Cinema Project” sets go a long way to correcting that impression. Each film has been delicately remastered, and the entire box set is accompanied by a fantastic booklet of essays about the six works assembled. Below, you will find descriptions of all six films, courtesy of Criterion, along with a list of the special features. Buy it here. You won’t regret it. (Also don’t miss Godfrey Cheshire’s four-star review of one of the titles, “Chess of the Wind,” linked here.)

“Sambizanga” (1972)

A bombshell by the first woman to direct a film in Africa, Sarah Maldoror's chronicle of the awakening of Angola's independence movement is a stirring hymn to those who risk everything in the fight for freedom. Based on a true story, "Sambizanga" follows a young woman (Elisa Andrade) as she makes her way from the outskirts of Luanda toward the city's center looking for her husband (Domingos Oliveira) after his arrest by the Portuguese authorities—an incident that ultimately helps to ignite an uprising. Scored by the language of revolution and the spiritual songs of the colonized Angolan people, and featuring a cast of nonprofessional actors—many of whom were themselves involved in anticolonial resistance—this landmark work of political cinema honors the essential roles of women, as well as the hardships they endure, in the global struggle for liberation.

“Prisioneros de la Tierra” (1939)

The most acclaimed film by one of classic Argentine cinema's foremost directors, Mario Soffici's gut-punching work of social realism, shot on location in the dense, sweltering jungle of the Misiones region, simmers with rage against the oppression of workers. A group of desperate men are conscripted into indentured labor on a treacherous, disease-ridden yerba maté plantation under the control of the brutal foreman Köhner (Francisco Petrone)—a situation that boils over in an explosive act of rebellion led by the defiant Podeley (Ángel Magaña), and made all the more tense by the fact that Köhner and Podeley love the same woman: Andrea (Elisa Galvé), the sweet-spirited daughter of the camp's doctor. The expressionistic, shadow-sculpted cinematography of Pablo Tabernero evokes the feverish dread of a place where suffocating heat, economic exploitation, and unremitting cruelty lead inexorably to madness and violence.

“Chess of the Wind” (1976)

Lost for decades after screening at the 1976 Tehran International Film Festival, this rediscovered jewel of Iranian cinema reemerges to take its place as one of the most singular and astonishing works of the country's prerevolutionary New Wave. A hypnotically stylized murder mystery awash in shivery period atmosphere, Chess of the Wind unfolds inside an ornate, candlelit mansion where a web of greed, violence, and betrayal ensnares the potential heirs to a family fortune as they vie for control of their recently deceased matriarch's estate. Melding the influences of European modernism, gothic horror, and classical Persian art, director Mohammad Reza Aslani crafts an exquisitely restrained mood piece that erupts into a subversive final act in which class conventions, gender roles, and even time itself are upended with shocking ferocity.

“Muna Moto” (1975)

Director Dikongué-Pipa forged a new African cinematic language with "Muna Moto," a delicate love story with profound emotional resonance. In a close-knit village in Cameroon, the rigid customs governing courtship and marriage mean that a deeply in love betrothed couple (David Endéné and Arlette Din Belle) can be torn apart by the lack of a dowry and by another man's claiming of the young woman as his own wife—a rupture that sets the stage for a clash between a patriarchal society and a modern generation's determination to chart its own course. Luminous black-and-white cinematography and stylistic flourishes yield images of haunting power in this potent depiction, told via flashback, of the challenges of postcolonialism and the devastating consequences of a community's refusal to deviate from tradition.

“Two Girls on the Street” (1939)

The maverick Hollywood stylist André de Toth sharpened his craft in his native Hungary, where he directed five films, including this chic, dynamically paced melodrama studded with deco decor and jazzy musical interludes. Mária Tasnádi Fekete and Bella Bordy sparkle as upwardly mobile working women—one a musician in an all-girl band, the other a bricklayer—who join forces as they both try to make it in Budapest, supporting each other through changing economic fortunes, the advances of lecherous men, and the highs and heartbreaks of love. Kinetic camera work, brisk editing, and avant-garde imagery abound in "Two Girls on the Street," an often strikingly modern ode to the power of working-class female solidarity.

“Kalpana” (1948)

A riot of ecstatic imagery, performance, and set design, the only film by the visionary dancer and choreographer Uday Shankar is a revolutionary celebration of Indian dance in its myriad varieties and a utopian vision of cultural renewal. Unfolding as an epic film within a film, "Kalpana" tells the story of an ambitious dancer (Shankar) determined to open a cultural center devoted to breathing new life into India's traditional artistic forms; meanwhile, the obvious adoration between him and his lead dancer (Shankar's wife and collaborator, Amala Uday Shankar) arouses the jealousy of his enterprising companion (Lakshmi Kanta). Swirling surrealist dance spectacles—featuring dance masters and young performers, many of whom would become stars in their own right—are interwoven with anticolonial, anticapitalist commentary for a radical, proto-Bollywood milestone that is one of the most influential works in Indian cinema.

New introductions to the films by World Cinema Project founder Martin Scorsese

New and archival interviews featuring Indian film historian Suresh Chabria and filmmaker Kumar Shahani (on "Kalpana"); Argentine film historians Paula Félix-Didier and Andrés Levinson (on "Prisioneros de la tierra"); "Two Girls on the Street" director André de Toth; and "Sambizanga" director Sarah Maldoror and Annouchka de Andrade, Maldoror’s daughter

New program by filmmaker Mohamed Challouf featuring interviews with "Muna moto" director Dikongué-Pipa and African film historian Férid Boughedir

"The Majnoun and the Wind" (2022), a documentary by Gita Aslani Shahrestani, daughter of "Chess of the Wind" director Mohammad Reza Aslani, featuring Aslani, members of the film’s cast and crew, and others

PLUS: A foreword and essays on the films by critics and scholars Yasmina Price, Matthew Karush, Ehsan Khoshbakht, Aboubakar Sanogo, Chris Fujiwara, and Shai Heredia

This boxed set of Blu-rays and DVDS, curated by Martin Scorsese and distributed by the Criterion Collection, contains six recently restored foreign-language films, forgotten or unknown beyond their native countries.

At a time when world news seems especially grim and the divisions between people appear to outnumber their similarities, it’s a gift to savor the latest installment on disc from the World Cinema Project, a venture established in 2007. Curated by Martin Scorsese and distributed by the Criterion Collection, these boxes—the new one is volume four—house six films on nine discs, with each movie included on both Blu-ray and standard-definition DVD to maximize options for viewers.

All the films (none in English) are recently restored to best possible effect, generally in 2K or 4K, with the present set yielding particularly impressive results. The funding for such costly, time-consuming work comes primarily from Mr. Scorsese’s own Film Foundation, though several other cinema-loving charities also make generous contributions. These efforts either return lost treasures to public consciousness or reveal works hitherto unknown beyond the borders of their native lands—some from as long ago as the 1930s, others made as recently as the last decade of the 20th century.

Scene from ‘Prisioneros de la Tierra’ (1939) PHOTO: CRITERION COLLECTION

“Prisioneros de la Tierra” (1939), the earliest picture in this set, is directed by the Italian-born Mario Soffici, its script adapted from short stories by the ill-fated Horacio Quiroga, born and bred in Uruguay. But the film is thoroughly Argentine, a classic Latin melodrama in which the villain, Köhner (Francisco Petrone), meets a cruel but fitting end, even as the central lovers, Chinita (Elisa Galvé) and Podeley (Ángel Magaña, sort of an Argentine Pedro Armendáriz), confront undeservedly tragic fates. What makes the film special, besides the caliber of its principal players and its exotic jungle setting (shot on location rather than in a studio), is Soffici’s keen eye for cinematic detail, from the Beethoven records Köhner plays to soothe his savage breast to the often intoxicated ministrations of Chinita’s dolorous doctor father.

Scene from ‘Two Girls on the Street’ (1939) PHOTO: CRITERION COLLECTION

Released just a few months later, the Hungarian “Two Girls on the Street” (1939) lays several claims to interest—not least its director, whom fans of old Hollywood know as André de Toth (“House of Wax,” “Pitfall”). Here, before his trans-Atlantic transformation, he is Tóth Endre, already a gifted stylist with a penchant for daring overhead shots. Yet this film’s strong proto-feminist stance, in which two young women seek new, urban lives in Budapest while regularly battling loutish men, proves its biggest draw. Well, that and its documentary depiction of the sparkling Hungarian capital before wartime devastation. Only the abrupt “happy” ending disappoints.

A scene from ‘Muna Moto’ (1975) PHOTO: CRITERION COLLECTION

Two African films—“Sambizanga” (1972), from Angola, and “Muna Moto” (1975), from Cameroon—provide fresh views of that continent’s cinematic accomplishments. The former, the only picture in this box directed by a woman, Sarah Maldoror, offers a harrowing tale in Portuguese and two Bantu languages of a man torn from his village by colonial forces during the unrest that later leads to his nation’s independence. The movie’s divided focus concentrates not just on the sufferings of the imprisoned man, but even more so on those of his valiant wife. The latter, written and directed by Dikongué-Pipa, bends narrative perspective in novel ways to craft a bitter monochromatic fantasia, in French, in which a young man is cheated of true love not just by his selfish, greedy uncle, but also by the tribal society in which he lives.

Ironically, the movie that bridges the greatest distance is this set’s most recent: Mohammad Reza Aslani’s “Chess of the Wind” (1976), from Iran. That’s partly because the picture seems to take place a very long time ago (specifics are left vague), but even more so because the world represented in Mr. Aslani’s film was essentially erased in 1979 by his country’s Islamic revolution.

Happenstance alone saved this movie from oblivion, and how lucky we are for it—a moody tale of ugly family and class dynamics, reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe, complete with an utterly unexpected, numbing final shot.

Scene from ‘Chess of the Wind’ (1976) PHOTO: CRITERION COLLECTION

The longest film in the box, at just over 2 1/2 hours, is also arguably the most important. “Kalpana” (1948), the Hindi word for imagination. Written, produced and directed by the celebrated Indian dancer Uday Shankar (elder brother of the renowned sitarist and composer Ravi Shankar), it documents his life’s work—and, loosely, his life story—in a spectacle of melodrama, fantasy, social realism, romance and politics. And, yes, he is also its star. Yet so accomplished is the effort—with tableaux inspired by Sergei Eisenstein and Fritz Lang—that it’s hard to believe this was Shankar’s first movie. It was also, sadly for us, his last.

Short, lively introductions to each film by Mr. Scorsese enhance this set, as do varied supplements that should not be overlooked. The real treasures, of course, are the films themselves—guaranteed to enrich any cineaste’s perspective. Currently the World Cinema Project has preserved 50 films, of which 32 are now available on Criterion discs—most, but not all, in these sets. And Mr. Scorsese and his collaborators are forging ahead, rescuing other important but neglected pictures, so this list will grow. We can only hope Criterion will continue to take it from there.

 

Mr. Mermelstein writes for the Journal on film and classical music.

Film at Lincoln Center announces Revivals for the 60th New York Film Festival (September 30–October 16, 2022). The Revivals section showcases important works from renowned filmmakers that have been digitally remastered, restored, and preserved with the assistance of generous partners.

Festival Passes are now on sale. NYFF60 single tickets will go on sale to the General Public on September 19, with pre-sale access for FLC Members and Pass holders prior to this date.

“The Revivals section continues to look beyond acknowledged and revered classics, and to challenge the conventions of the canon,” said Florence Almozini, Senior Director of Programming at Film at Lincoln Center. “This year’s lineup proves once again that even relatively recent decades are full of potential cinematic discoveries, by showcasing significant works from artists of diverse backgrounds and origins in striking new restorations.”

The Revivals section connects cinema’s historical significance and present-day cultural influence through a selection of world premieres of restorations, rarities, and more. Highlights from this year’s slate include 

No Fear No Die, Claire Denis’s rarely screened second feature, a forceful examination of the lives of immigrants in France and the psychic toll of the violence imposed by colonizers upon the colonized; and Canyon Passage, the first of Jacques Tourneur’s remarkable Westerns and a film that Martin Scorsese called “one of the most mysterious and exquisite examples of the Western genre ever made,” with Scorsese and Steven Spielberg consulting on this restoration. 

Additional highlights include four newly restored short and medium-length films by the pioneering queer Black experimental filmmaker Edward Owens: Autre Fois J’ai Aimé Une Femme, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, Remembrance: A Portrait Study, and Tomorrow’s Promise; Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso, a landmark in American independent cinema and an enduringly rich work of DIY filmmaking that remains a resonant and visionary examination of violence (and its reverberations), friendship, and gender; a long overdue restoration of Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, five decades after its scandalous premiere at Cannes, which uses an obsessive, talkative ménage à trois as the jumping-off point for an intense exploration of sexual politics; and Pedro Costa’s first feature, O Sangue, a beguiling fairytale about the trials undergone by two brothers in the wake of their father’s violent death that Costa has noted as “the beginning of [his] love—maybe love is the wrong word—for domestic cinema. A kind of cinema that shows how people live.” Balufu Bakupu-Kanyinda’s Le Damier, a meticulously composed work of political cinema that takes aim at the absurdity of authoritarianism, will screen with Radu Jude’s previously announced short film The Potemkinists (a Currents selection), which revisits the history of the battleship Potemkin through a comic dialogue between a sculptor and a representative from Romania’s Ministry of Culture. 

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

Presented by Film at Lincoln Center, the New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema and takes place September 30–October 16, 2022. An annual bellwether of the state of cinema that has shaped film culture since 1963, the festival continues an enduring tradition of introducing audiences to bold and remarkable works from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. 

As part of its 60th anniversary celebration, the New York Film Festival will offer festival screenings in all five boroughs of New York City in partnership with Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Staten Island), BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) (Brooklyn), the Bronx Museum of the Arts (Bronx), Maysles Documentary Center (Harlem), and the Museum of the Moving Image (Queens). Each venue will present a selection of films throughout the festival; a complete list of films and showtimes will be announced later this month. NYFF60 tickets, including those for partner venue screenings, will go on sale to the General Public on September 19 at noon.

FLC invites audiences to celebrate this milestone anniversary by reflecting on their NYFF experiences with our NYFF Memories survey and by taking part in our Letterboxd Watch Challenge.

Please note: Masks are required for all staff, audiences, and filmmakers at all times in public spaces at FLC indoor spaces. Proof of full vaccination is not required for NYFF60 audiences at FLC indoor spaces, but full vaccination is strongly recommended. Visit filmlinc.org/safety for more information. For health and safety protocols at partner venues, please visit their official websites.

Festival Passes are on sale now in limited quantities. NYFF60 single tickets, including those for partner venue screenings, will go on sale to the General Public on Monday, September 19 at noon ET, with pre-sale access for FLC Members and Pass holders prior to this date. Support of NYFF benefits Film at Lincoln Center in its nonprofit mission to promote the art and craft of cinema. NYFF60 press and industry accreditation is now open and the application deadline is August 31. NYFF60 volunteer call is now open.

 

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

Beirut the Encounter
Borhane Alaouié, 1981, Lebanon, 97m
Arabic with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Set in 1977 during the Lebanese Civil War, Borhane Alaouié’s melancholic, meditative docu-fiction study of longing and life amid conflict begins as the lines of communication between East and West Beirut have been reestablished and two former university friends, a Christian woman (Nadine Acoury) and a Shiite man (Haithem el Amine), reconnect. They make a pact to record their thoughts and feelings to share with each other before the woman departs the next day for the United States, and we follow the two through the everyday system of checkpoints, traffic jams, and moments of tension that define their experience of Beirut. An entrancingly personal and atmospheric film poem about human connection in troubled times, Beirut the Encounter is a too-little-seen masterwork of Lebanese cinema. Beirut the Encounter was restored in 2018 from the original negative by the Royal Film Archive of Belgium – CINEMATEK. The 35mm negative was scanned and digitally restored in 2K. The magnetic soundtrack was also digitized by the Royal Film Archive of Belgium – CINEMATEK.

Black God, White Devil
Glauber Rocha, 1964, Brazil, 120m
Portuguese with English subtitles

A landmark work of militant cinema and a key film of the Cinema Novo movement, the then-25-year-old Glauber Rocha’s second feature begins in the 1940s as a ranch laborer named Manoel (Geraldo Del Ray) finds himself in conflict with his boss, who is trying to stiff him on payment; Manoel kills the boss and heads out on the lam with his wife (Yoná Magalhães). The two become self-styled outlaws and, later, join up with self-appointed saint Antonio das Mortes (Mauricío de Valle), who preaches a gospel of meeting the violence of the world with still more violence. A film at once alluringly mystical and radically political, Black God, White Devil interweaves documentary elements and iconoclastic formal experimentation to yield one of world cinema’s all-time great shots across the bow. New 4K restoration from Metropoles Productions, based on original 35mm materials preserved by the Cinemateca Brasileira. Restoration by CineColor Digital and JLS Studios.

Canyon Passage
Jacques Tourneur, 1946, U.S., 92m

Ablaze in breathtaking Technicolor, the first of Jacques Tourneur’s remarkable Westerns is a complex, morally ambiguous portrait of an Oregon mining community where the friendship between an enterprising merchant (Dana Andrews) and an avaricious gambler (Brian Donlevy) is tested by romantic rivalry, gold, and greed. An unusually rich, philosophical frontier tale, Canyon Passage conjures a dreamily idyllic vision of the Old West punctuated by sudden, shocking bursts of violence—Tourneurian flashes of a world ruled by chaos and chance. The result is what Martin Scorsese has called “one of the most mysterious and exquisite examples of the Western genre ever made.” Restored by Universal Pictures in collaboration with The Film Foundation. Special thanks to Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg for their consultation on this restoration.

A Confucian Confusion
Edward Yang, 1994, Taiwan, 125m
Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles

Edward Yang’s panoramic satire is set in the material world of 1990s Taipei, the skyline choked by smog and lit up by the neon signs of globally branded corporations. With his rapier wit, Yang observes the self-absorption of a gaggle of 20-something urbanites, including “culture company” impresario Molly (Ni Shujun), her wealthy fiancé (who fears Molly may be cheating on him), her talk-show-host sister, and the sister’s estranged husband, a novelist whose latest book imagines a reincarnated Confucius returning—with considerable horror—to a modern society ostensibly built upon his teachings. Though it signaled a shift in tone from his earlier, more dramatic films, the ambitious and incisive A Confucian Confusion finds Yang once again searching for the soul of a country he no longer quite recognizes. New digital restoration by The Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute through a grant from Edward Yang’s widow Kaili Peng.

Le Damier
Balufu Bakupu-Kanyinda, 1996, Democratic Republic of Congo, 40m
French with English subtitles

Set in a fictitious African country, Balufu Bakupu-Kanyinda’s medium-length comedy recounts the tale of the country’s president—the founder and “first citizen” of his nation—settling in for an all-night game of checkers with a man who purports to be the grand champion. However, the game soon devolves into a satirical and incisive parable about the brutal confrontation between dictatorship and its political opponents. A meticulously composed work of political cinema, Le Damier takes aim at the absurdity of authoritarianism and doesn’t miss. Restored in 2K in 2021 by NYU Tisch, in association with Villa Albertine – French Embassy in the United States and the Cinémathèque Afrique of the Institut français.

Screening with:
The Potemkinists / Potemkiniștii*
Radu Jude, 2022, Romania, 18m
Romanian and Russian with English subtitles
North American Premiere

Radu Jude revisits the history of the battleship Potemkin—the source story for Sergei Eisenstein’s classic 1925 work of Soviet montage—as a comic dialogue between a sculptor and a representative from Romania’s Ministry of Culture about cinema, monument-making, and art’s conflicted role in the continual revisionism of history. 

*The Potemkinists is a Currents selection. For more information about the Currents lineup, visit here.

The Day of Despair
Manoel de Oliveira, 1992, Portugal/France, 76m
Portuguese with English subtitles

One of Portugal’s greatest filmmakers portrays one of its greatest writers in this biographical gem, the culmination of the trilogy that Manoel de Oliveira began with Doomed Love (1978) and Francisca (1991). As with Francisca, The Day of Despair finds Oliveira depicting the life of the 19th-century writer Camilo Castelo Branco, here played by Mario Barroso. Drawing from Branco’s correspondence with the writer Ana Plácido, this film follows Branco’s final days, with the great, scandalous author tormented by his own internal tensions as his health takes a dive and the possibility of continuing to write grows ever more remote. Oliveira’s execution of this portrait of an anguished master of letters—marked by gorgeous, enveloping, painterly images—yields an essential tribute. This copy is the result of the 4K digitisation of the original 35mm camera negative and the final sound mix, on magnetic tape, both elements conserved by the Cinemateca Portuguesa. Color grading and digital restoration of the image were made by Cineric Portugal in 2022 using a distribution print as reference.

Drylongso
Cauleen Smith, 1998, U.S., 86m
World Premiere

Cauleen Smith’s 1998 feature debut, a landmark in American independent cinema, follows Pica (Toby Smith), a woman in a photography class in Oakland, as she begins photographing the young black men of her neighborhood, having witnessed so many of them fall victim to senseless murder and fearing the possibility of their becoming extinct altogether. This project serves as a point of departure for Smith to explore Pica’s relationship with her family, as well as her relationship with a friend (April Barnett) who becomes the victim of an enigmatic and elusive serial killer lurking in the background. An enduringly rich work of DIY filmmaking, Drylongso remains a resonant and visionary examination of violence (and its reverberations), friendship, and gender. A Janus Films release. 4K restoration undertaken by The Criterion Collection, Janus Films and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Supervised by Director Cauleen Smith. The NYFF60 Revivals presentation of Drylongso is sponsored by Turner Classic Movies.

Eight Deadly Shots
Mikko Niskanen, 1972, Finland, 316m
Finnish with English subtitles

Inspired by the events surrounding a 1969 mass shooting in Pihtipudas, Finland, Mikko Niskanen’s riveting four-part mini-series chronicles the plight of a farmer, Pasi (played by Niskanen himself), whose economic hardships lead him to take up moonshining with a friend, effectively causing him to lapse back into despondent alcoholism. As Pasi sinks deeper into poverty and deeper into the bottle, we witness the routines, rituals, and quotidian dramas of his life, captured with a transfixing attentiveness to the passage of time. Hailed as the crowning achievement of Finnish filmmaking by no less an authority than Aki Kaurismaki, this naturalist epic is a triumph of psychological cinema, and a powerfully relevant exploration of economic injustice. A Janus Films release. Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, Yleisradio Oy, Fiction Finland ry, and Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Additional support provided by the Ministry of Culture and Education in Finland, Tiina and Antti Herlin Foundation, and the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation.

The Long Farewell
Kira Muratova, 1971, USSR, 97m
Russian with English subtitles
North American Premiere

Completed in 1971 but not released until perestroika in 1987, Kira Muratova’s fourth feature is a majestic psychodrama centering on the relationship between a mother and a son and rendered with a borderline avant-garde sense of aesthetic freedom and formal experimentation. Divorced Evgenia (Zinaida Sharko) has devoted her life to raising her son, Sasha (Oleg Vladimirsky), but their bond is tested when he becomes a teenager and visits his father in far-off Novosibirsk, planting seeds for the young man’s desire to move out from beneath his overbearing mother’s thumb. Muratova transfigures the resulting blow-ups and reconciliations as a kinetic and atmospheric symphony suffused with resentment and love, sensitivity and obliviousness, freedom and duty. A Janus Films release. Restored in 4K by STUDIOCANAL in collaboration with The Criterion Collection at L’Immagine Ritrovata/Éclair Classics.

The Mother and the Whore
Jean Eustache, 1973, France, 210m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere

At long last presented in a striking new restoration worthy of the film’s reputation, 50 years after its scandalous premiere at Cannes, Jean Eustache’s hard-to-see masterpiece uses an obsessive, talkative ménage à trois—Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bernadette Lafont, and Françoise Lebrun—as the jumping-off point for an intense exploration of sexual politics among liberated yet alienated moderns. The Mother and the Whore abounds with references and allusions to 15 years of New Wave images and language while also documenting the mix of strategies and fictions that lovers and other strangers use to make contact and to armor themselves. Léaud, Lafont, and Lebrun, the basis of the film, portray its unforgettable characters with an absolute intensity and a mesmerizing, endlessly rich sense of humanity. A Janus Films release. The Mother and the Whore has been restored and remastered in 4K in 2022 by Les Films du Losange with the support of CNC and the participation of La Cinémathèque suisse and of Chanel. Image restoration by L’Immagine Ritrovata/Éclair Classics, supervised by Jacques Besse and Boris Eustache. Sound restoration by Léon Rousseau-L.E. Diapason.

No Fear No Die
Claire Denis, 1990, France, 90m
French with English subtitles
World Premiere

Claire Denis’s rarely screened second feature is a radically physical cinematic journey into the shadowy (under)world of illegal cockfighting. Isaach De Bankole and Alex Descas star as Dah and Jocelyn, two immigrants (from Benin and French Antilles, respectively) living on the outskirts of Paris who earn money from cockfights. The escalating violence of the bouts—at the encouragement of the white owner of the restaurant (Jean-Claude Brialy) in whose basement the fights are held—takes its toll on the pair, and Jocelyn dreams of a life outside the brutal environment of feathered pugilism. Drawing inspiration from the writings of Frantz Fanon, the ruggedly unsentimental and psychologically evocative No Fear No Die is a forceful examination of the lives of immigrants in France and of the psychic toll of the violence imposed by colonizers upon the colonized. A Film Desk Release. Restored in 4K by Pathé in 2022 with the help of the French National Center of Film and Motions Pictures (CNC) at Hiventy Laboratory. Special thanks to Claire Denis, Agnès Godard, and Pascal Marti for their collaboration. 

O Sangue
Pedro Costa, 1989, Portugal, 95m
Portuguese with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere

Admirers of Pedro Costa’s more recent work are often thrown for a thrilling loop by the glossy, liquid textures and lush atmospherics of the director’s first feature, a beguiling fairytale about the trials undergone by two brothers in the wake of their father’s violent death. Costa, who was barely 30 when O Sangue premiered, had spent the seven years leading up to its production immersing himself in the films of Fritz Lang, Kenji Mizoguchi, Robert Bresson, Jacques Tourneur, and Nicholas Ray. But the film, which begins with a slap to the face, is never less than a bracingly original stream of images and impressions: a nocturnal journey through a brittle forest; a burst of fireworks seen from the balcony of a ghostly hotel; a glittering fairground dream scored to a rhapsodic pop song. “O Sangue,” Costa said in a 2006 interview, “was also the beginning of my love—maybe love is the wrong word—for domestic cinema. A kind of cinema that shows how people live.” This DCP results from a digitization of the original 35mm camera negative and from original 35mm monaural magnetic and optical sound elements preserved at Cinemateca Portuguesa, Museu do Cinema / ANIM. Negative 4K scan on wet gate Oxberry-Cineric scanner and audio recording supervised by Franco Bosco at ANIM. Digital grading and image restoration supervised by Carlos Almeida at IrmaLucia Efeitos Especiais, Lisbon. Colorist: Gonçalo Ferreira. Image Restoration: André Constantino, Ana Cunha. Uncompressed monaural soundtrack supervised by Hugo Leitão at Estúdio Espreita o Som, Lisbon. Image and sound restorations approved by the director, October 2021–February 2022. Special thanks to José Manuel Costa, Rui Machado – Cinemateca Portuguesa, Museu do Cinema / ANIM and Clarão Companhia Prod.

Four Films by Edward Owens
Autre Fois J’ai Aimé Une Femme, 1966, U.S., 16mm, 24m
Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, 1967, U.S., 16mm, 6m
Tomorrow’s Promise, 1967, U.S., 16mm, 45m
Remembrance: A Portrait Study, 1968–70, U.S., 16mm, 6m

This program collects four newly restored short and medium-length films by the pioneering queer Black experimental filmmaker Edward Owens. A student of Gregory Markopoulos, Owens combined the strikingly staged, dramatically lit compositions of Markopoulos’s work with image-layering and superimpositions of pop cultural iconography to arrive at a singularly entrancing evocation of people and places. Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts pursues a dialectic of visual spaces and of stillness and motion. Autre Fois J’ai Aimé Une Femme conjures illicit desire on the surface of the skin, in the sound of a ferocious row, in magazine clippings, and in classical paintings. Tomorrow’s Promise focuses on the body by way of starkly lit portraits to meditate upon the tension between presence and absence, before shifting to zero in on the figure of a pensive bride. And Remembrance: A Portrait Study is an ode to Owens’s mother and her friends, adorned with the sounds of Marilyn Monroe singing “Running Wild” and Dusty Springfield’s “All Cried Out.” Restored by Chicago Film Society, The New American Cinema Group, Inc./The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and the John M. Flaxman Library at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant Program and the Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

The Passion of Remembrance
Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien, 1986, UK, 82m

A landmark work in British avant-garde film and video, the Sankofa collective’s greatly influential first film, The Passion of Remembrance, ambitiously explores themes of racism, homophobia, sexism, and generational tensions as embodied in the reality known by a Black British family over the years. Interweaving two narrative threads—one in which a man and a woman discourse on their own experiences living in the UK, another in which events from three decades in the lives of the Baptiste family are staged—Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien tease the accumulated fragments into a spellbinding, heterogeneous mosaic that powerfully evokes the multiplicity of Black experience and identity and critiques the British state’s treatment of its marginalized residents. This 4K remaster by the BFI National Archive, undertaken in collaboration with the directors and cinematographer Nina Kellgren, is based on the original 16mm negative and magnetic soundtrack final mix. It screens in a simultaneous transatlantic premiere with the BFI London Film Festival. 

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Festival Passes are now on sale. NYFF60 single tickets will go on sale to the General Public on September 19, with pre-sale access for FLC Members and Pass holders prior to this date.

Members of the press and industry are invited to apply for accreditation. Press and industry screenings will begin Monday, September 26. The deadline to apply for press and industry accreditation is Wednesday, August 31 at 5pm ET.