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MoMA PRESENTS INAUGURAL FESTIVAL OF PRESERVED FILMS FROM WORLD’S ARCHIVES

Exhibition opens MoMA’s new venue at the Gramercy Theatre in Manhattan

To Save and Project: The MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation
October 11 - November 7, 2002
MoMA at the Gramercy Theatre

NEW YORK, August 29, 2002 As the inaugural film and media exhibition in its new venue, MoMA at The Gramercy Theatre, The Museum of Modern Art presents a new annual program: To Save and Project: The MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation. This year’s festival, which runs from October 11 to November 7, 2002, includes 67 fiction and documentary features, experimental and animated shorts, commercials, and home movies spanning more than a century of cinema history. The films have been preserved by more than 25 archives in nearly as many countries, from the United States, Greece, and Japan, to Sweden, Vietnam, and the Vatican. Virtually all of the preserved prints in To Save and Project are having their New York premieres; some are shown in versions never before seen in the United States. The opening night screening of Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950) will be introduced by Curtis Hanson, director of L.A. Confidential (1997) and Wonder Boys (2000), who is a longtime champion of film preservation; and Grover Crisp, head of film preservation at Sony Columbia. This preservation festival, the first of its kind in New York, is organized by Steven Higgins, Curator; Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator; Anne Morra, Assistant Curator; and Samantha Safran, Executive Assistant Film Programming, Department of Film and Media.

To Save and Project is the first in what will be an annual MoMA celebration of the collaborative effort to rescue the world’s film heritage. Every year, the member institutions of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) preserve hundreds of motion pictures, working together to find the best-surviving materials for each film. Their work is a race against time: Of all the feature films made before 1952, half have disappeared entirely. For those produced before 1930, the figure is even more dishearteningonly one-fourth survive. As co-curator Steven Higgins observes, “The preserved films in this festival span the entire history of the moving image and are vivid reflections of the diverse cultures that produced them, making To Save and Project a tribute to the passion and commitment of film conservators and archivists around the world.”

MoMA’s three contributions to this program are a newly restored print of Fail-Safe (1964), Sidney Lumet’s classic of cold war brinkmanship, restored in conjunction with Sony Columbia; an exceptionally rare silent John Ford feature, Bucking Broadway (1917), restored with the film archive of the CNC in Bois d’Arcy (France); and the
Thomas Ince-produced Rumplestiltskin, from 1915. The exhibition will also feature virtually unknown films by celebrated directors like Luis Buñuel, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Michael Curtiz; new versions of films by Claude Chabrol, Max Ophuls, and Augusto Genina, with additional material or alternate endings; and many works that have not been seen by the public in decades. Highlights include pristine new prints of Satyajit Ray’s riveting Abhijan (The Expedition) (1962), Nicholas Ray’s brooding drama In a Lonely Place (1950), Charles Chaplin’s overlooked masterpiece, Limelight (1952), which is presented at MoMA on its 50th anniversary, and Jacques Tati’s Play Time (1967), the first and only French film shot in 70mm, which has been painstakingly restored by a consortium of French institutions to the director’s original full-length conception. This will be the first presentation of the restored Play Time in New York.

To Save and Project’s documentary strand ranges from Leone XIII, a fascinating short film from 1898 in which Pope Leo XIII employs a recent technology, the movie camera, to bless the viewing audience, to the Academy Award-winning Hearts and Minds (1974), Peter Davis’s deeply personal, controversial look at the Vietnam War. The latter film, which the director will introduce on October 19, is paired with a riveting piece of Viet Cong propaganda, Ngu Thuy Girls (1969), recently preserved by the Vietnam Film Institute in Hanoi. Other nonfiction work includes Hilary Harris’s Seawards the Great Ships (1960), Scotland’s first Oscar winner, which is a powerful look at the rise and fall of the River Clyde shipbuilding industry, and Chick Strand’s avant-garde landmark Fake Fruit Factory (1986), about women who make papier-mâché fruits in a family-run factory in Mexico.

Special focus is given to director Ernst Lubitsch, with screenings of five silent features from GermanyMadame Dubarry (Passion) (1919), Meyer aus Berlin (Meyer from Berlin) (1919), Anna Boleyn (1920), Sumurun (One Arabian Night) (1920), and Romeo und Juliet im Schnee (Romeo and Juliet in the Snow) (1920)as well as his early Hollywood sound feature The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), starring Maurice Chevalier and Claudette Colbert. Another highlight is a rare New York screening of Hugo Santiago’s Invasión (Invasion, 1969), an Argentine film with a script written by Jorge Luis Borges, the first he wrote directly for the screen. The Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira is represented with his first film, Douro Fania Fluvial (Hard Labor on the River Douro) (1931) as well as another nonfiction work, O Pinto e a Cidade (The Painter and the City) (1956), which will be paired in a program with Quem Espera por Sapatos de Defunto Morre Descalço (He Who Waits for a Deadman’s Shoes Shall Die Barefoot, 1970), the debut film of João César Monteiro, acclaimed Portuguese director of Silvestre (1982) and God’s Comedy (1996). Japanese master Kenji Mizoguchi’s Taki No Shiraito (The Water Magician) (1933) will be screened with an extremely rare half-hour fragment from his Tokyo Koshinkyoku (Tokyo March) (1929). Luis Buñuel’s whimsical short Menjant Garotes (Eating Sea Urchins) (1929) is shown with Abel Gance’s La Folie du Docteur Tube (1915) and Jean Epstein’s La Chute de la Maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher) (1928) in a program of Surrealist films. Works by Hilary Harris and Jim Davis are among the other avant-garde and experimental films on view.

Other discoveries include the 1919 short Jön az ocsém (My Brother Is Coming), the last Hungarian film Mihály Kertész (Michael Curtiz) made before his successful move to Hollywood; the European release version of Claude Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) in a print whose restoration was overseen by Chabrol himself, and Max Ophuls’s swashbuckling costume drama The Exile (1947), shown with both the studio ending and the alternate European ending the director preferred. The festival will also trace cinema’s technological history by looking at groundbreaking experiments in sound and color; the program includes 3-D tests from the late 1920s, and the 1923 short Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, believed to be the first appearance of African-American musicians in a sound film, using Lee DeForest’s Phonofilm synchronization process.

Film’s fragile nature has made the work of archivists and preservationists more critical than ever. The Department of Film and Media’s preservation program at MoMA is part of a coordinated effort by the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) to safeguard what remains of film history. This effort involves the transfer of nitrate-based films to acetate safety stock; the conservation of existing nitrate and acetate films; and the restoration of faded, damaged, or cut films to versions that match the original works as best as possible. Cellulose nitrate, the most common stock used during the first half-century of cinema, essentially feeds on itself and deteriorates into powder after a few decades. Triacetate stock and, increasingly, polyester stock, both introduced in the 1950s, are now the medium onto which film transfers are made.

Many programs in To Save and Project: The MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation will include pristine prints, newly struck from restored negatives, while others will include prints that are a poignant reminder of film’s fragile nature. In every case, however, the version being screened will be the best available copy. In celebrating film preservation, this annual festival will celebrate the history of cinema itself.
NOTE: Daily admission to this program will be $6.00, $4.25 seniors and students with valid ID, for its opening four days, from 1114 October.

No. 62
Press contact: Paul Power, 212/708-9847, or paul_power@moma.org

Public Information: MoMA at The Gramercy Theatre, 127 East 23 Street, between Lexington and Park Avenues, closer to Lexington.

Box Office Hours: From 1:308:30 p.m. Mondays and Thursdays; Fridays, 1:309:30 p.m.; Saturdays 12:309:30 p.m.; Sundays 12:307:30 p.m.; closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Daily Admission: Opening week: $6, $4.25 seniors and students with valid ID. From October 17: $12, $8.50 seniors and students with valid ID. Admission to MoMA at The Gramercy Theatre is the same as admission to MoMA QNS, which varies based on the exhibition schedule, and comes with a pass to MoMA QNS. Free for members and children under 16 accompanied by an adult. Friday after 4:00 p.m., pay what you wish. Admission to MoMA QNS is good for free admission to MoMA at The Gramercy Theatre, and vice versa, for up to 30 days from date on ticket.

Subway: · 6 Local train to 23 Street station.
· N or R train to 23 Street station.
Walk east on 23 Street for MoMA at The Gramercy Theatre

Bus: · M23 to Lexington Avenue
· M1 to Park Avenue and 23 Street
· M101, M102, or M103 to Third Avenue and 23 Street

The public may call the box office at 212/777-4900 for detailed program information. Visit us on the Web at www.moma.org

When the festival is over, do you think MoMA could be persuaded to put all these films in an emormous tea chest, label it 'City Screen, York' and have a courier collect it (not Securicor, though)?