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A poetic montage by Ron Rice, a diary film by Ken Jacobs, a feminist exploration of sexual awakenings by Cathy Cook, and four works by rediscovered filmmaker Roger Jacoby will be preserved and made available through the 2021 Avant-Garde Masters Grants, awarded by The Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation.

During his short life Ron Rice (1935–64) completed only three films. Senseless (1962), his second and least seen work, arose from an attempt to film the counterculture in Venice, California, and a utopian commune in Mexico. Rice combined home movie–style footage, street photography, landscapes shot from moving vehicles, and images from a bullfight in Acapulco. The result, anti-narrative in structure but formalist in its montage, was “close to being a film equivalent of On the Road,” according to avant-garde film scholar David E. James. Anthology Film Archives will oversee the preservation.

The State University of New York at Binghamton will preserve Ken Jacobs’s Binghamton, My India (1969), an experimental documentation of his first year of teaching at the college. Jacobs was hired after students petitioned the administration; alongside Larry Gottheim he organized the SUNY system’s first department of cinema. In Jacobs’s words, Binghamton, My India “said something necessary at the time: the numinous is everywhere, even upstate Rust Belt Binghamton. The light was perfect, [the] students brilliant.”

Cathy Cook, Associate Professor in the Cinematic Arts at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has made films since 1982. The Match That Started My Fire (1992), produced between the second and third waves of feminism, uses a montage of educational and industrial films to explore female sexuality and to illustrate 20 short candid stories of sexual discovery related by a diverse collection of subjects. George Kuchar, whose videos Cook had performed in, has a cameo. The film won the Best of Festival award at the 30th Ann Arbor Film Festival and will be preserved by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will preserve four works by Roger Jacoby (1945–85), a key transitional figure between the pre- and post-liberation eras of gay experimental filmmaking. Dream Sphinx Opera (1973) and L’Amico Fried’s Glamorous Friends (1976) demonstrate Jacoby’s use of hand-processing to manipulate film emulsion to create abstract images. The former uses found footage from costume dramas and stag films to send up heterosexual romance, while the latter approximates an Abstract Expressionist painting in motion. Both feature Jacoby’s muses Sally Dixon, the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Film Curator, and Ondine (Robert Olivo), a veteran of several Andy Warhol films. After being diagnosed with HIV, Jacoby moved to Seattle, where his films took on a more journalistic and personal style. How to Be a Homosexual Part I (1980) turns the camera on members of his community, including his sister and mother, a deaf friend, and a gay couple in the Gay Activist Alliance. How to Be a Homosexual Part II (1982) focuses on Jacoby himself, seen tending to his ailing body, and his partner Jim Hubbard.

Over the course of 19 years the Avant-Garde Masters Grant program, created by The Film Foundation and the NFPF, has saved 207 films significant to the development of the avant-garde in America. Funding is provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. The grants have preserved works by 81 artists, including Kenneth Anger, Shirley Clarke, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Oskar Fischinger, Hollis Frampton, Barbara Hammer, Marjorie Keller, George and Mike Kuchar, Carolee Schneemann, and Stan VanDerBeek.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen Jean Renoir’s The Woman on the Beach, but it’s a film that’s never left me, and I was excited to know that The Film Foundation had collaborated on a restoration with the Library of Congress, funded by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. I remember it discontinuously, in powerful, resonant fragments. “The Woman on the Beach was a perfect theme for treating the drama of isolation,” wrote Renoir in his autobiography. “Its simplicity made all kinds of development possible.” The story, adapted from a novel called None So Blind, is a kind of spiraling dance of death between two men and the woman they both love: a famous painter (Charles Bickford) who has lost his sight in an accident caused by his young wife (Joan Bennett), who seeks the company of a traumatized WWII vet (Robert Ryan) when he crosses her path patrolling a desolate stretch of beach for the Coast Guard. Renoir noted that with his last American film, he had moved away from any ambition to depict “the bonds uniting the individual to his environment,” a constant in his work before and after. “I was embarked on a study of persons whose sole idea was to close the door on that absolutely concrete phenomenon we call life.” The production of the film, recounted in detail by the great film scholar Janet Bergstrom in a 1999 article for Film History, is far more complex than the narrative of the finished film. RKO purchased the rights to the story in serialized form and gave notes to the author, Mitchell Wilson, before it was published as a novel. A script was written and Bennett, set to star, insisted on Renoir as a director, over the strenuous objections of the assigned producer, Val Lewton, who moved on from RKO before production began. During the shoot, the script was constantly amended, partly to address objections from the Production Code Administration. There was a disastrous August 1946 preview in Santa Barbara, followed by series of new edits that were screened for, among other people, Mark Robson and John Huston, who gave their input. Renoir went to work with a different writer, Frank Davis (both men were good friends of the independent producer and director Albert Lewin) and reworked and/or re-shot somewhere between one third and one half of the film. The Woman on the Beach was finally delivered in April 1947. “Renoir managed to maintain a consistent perspective despite everything,” writes Bergstrom, “a consistency that came from paring down the elements of the film in almost Langian style by the time it was finished.” What exactly does “Langian” mean? That Renoir’s solution to dealing with the multiple limitations imposed on him by the enforcers of the Code and all the “Helpful Creative Suggestions” he undoubtedly had to endure from RKO execs was to remove secondary characters and explanatory scenes, to pull out dialogue, and to make the film more and more abstract. Which is undoubtedly why certain images and scenes have not just lingered but expanded in my memory—Ryan’s nightmare of jumping from his destroyed ship, falling to the bottom of the sea and into the arms of his beloved…Ryan riding on horseback through the fog and discovering Bennett by a shipwreck… and the remarkable moment where Bennett and Bickford sit next to each other, by the fireplace, both looking off in different directions, drily ruminating on their wreck of a marriage. It’s a very special film, quite unlike anything else by Renoir, and finally quite unlike anything else, period.

- Kent Jones

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THE WOMAN ON THE BEACH (1947, d. Jean Renoir)
Restored by the Library of Congress and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

24 years ago, I was thumbing through a copy of Cahiers du Cinéma and came across an item on a low budget ($50,000 to be exact) first film called Xiao Wu by a young Chinese director named Jia Zhangke. I was intrigued, because the description of Xiao Wu seemed wholly different from the Fifth Generation films of Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, or even Tian Zhuangzhuang. The film made its way through the international film festival circuit, first appearing in Berlin, and then a year later in Nantes and Pusan and Vancouver, and then in 1999 at the San Francisco International Film Festival. I served on the jury that year and I enjoyed meeting Jia, who was officially represented by the estimable Peggy Chiao—I have a fond memory of taking a Vertigo tour, and Peggy correcting the guide’s translation of the Chinese characters outside Scottie’s apartment building. It’s nice to make friends with filmmakers, but the work of assessment is something else again. Xiao Wu was a rare experience: I’d been hearing that it was great, and it actually exceeded my expectations. The minimal but pointed narrative of a young pickpocket in Jia’s hometown of Fenyang on an aimless downward path seemed to emanate from the reality of the city itself, which becomes a living breathing entity. This is partly due to the tactility of Yu Lik-wai’s images, partly due to the immersive density of the soundtrack, and Jia’s extraordinary patience and attention to ongoing life, which he translates into cinema. Xiao Wu put me in mind of Godard’s films in the 60s and Altman’s in the 70s, an immediate response to the world in the process of evolving. Xiao Wu was restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and the Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, in close collaboration with Jia. I’m looking forward to revisiting the film myself. It was the gateway to a singular and often surprising career. The nature of Jia’s filmmaking has changed, but his commitment to documenting and dramatizing the ongoing changes in the common life of his country has remained steadfast.

- Kent Jones

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XIAO WU (1997, d. Jia Zhangke)
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.

A non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation and the exhibition of restored and classic cinema, the Foundation has overseen the restoration of over 900 films to date. In her keynote address at the Lumière Festival’s Classic Film Market, Bodde explained how it came about.

“It was 1990 and Martin Scorsese and a group of his fellow filmmakers like Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, Kubrick and Pollack were really agitated at the idea that the cinema they grew up loving was literally fading away.

“At the time, there was no home video market and the studios had not instituted a systematic approach to their collections. So they created the Film Foundation to build a bridge between studios and the non-profit archives to raise awareness and funds for film preservation projects.”

As time went on, the Film Foundation turned its attention to independent films too. “Films that are independently produced are quite vulnerable, they are not housed necessarily in an archive or a studio vault,” Bodde explained. “What’s amazing is that, as these films are brought back out, it revitalizes filmmakers – women, people of color – that weren’t given proper attention when they were made, like Nina Menkes’ ‘The Bloody Child’ (1996) or ‘The Juniper Tree’ (1990) by Nietzchka Keene,” she went on.

The dialogue is ongoing between the Foundation and the film archives, which are invited to submit projects to the Foundation’s board once a year – a selection is made by the board based on criteria such as historical and cultural relevance, the film’s condition and its estimated restoration budget.

“The archives are our allies,” she said. “The studios are more challenging. They are not moved by morality, they are moved by economy, so you have to see what’s in their best interest.

“There has to be a recognition on the part of the studios that there is value to the library. At the moment, everyone is looking for that horrible word: ‘content’ – things they can monetize – and the library would be one of those. So you appeal to the fact that there is an audience for everything.”

In 2007, the Film Foundation decided to extend its reach beyond the U.S. with its World Cinema Project (WCP), launched in collaboration with its long-time partner Cineteca di Bologna, and a decade later the African Film Heritage Project was born. To date, 46 films have been restored under the WCP.

“The WCP is unique because once at-risk films are identified and restored, and the program takes on available distribution rights. Often, the films have only been seen in their country of origin, and we help bring them out and they become these discoveries,” said Bodde, who brought clips of one such film, the recently restored Iranian cult movie “Chess of the Wind” (1976) by Mohammad Reza Aslani.

Confiscated during the Islamic Revolution it was believed to be lost. Rediscovered in 2014, it was smuggled to Paris for restoration. The film has toured the festival circuit and is distributed globally by Foundation partners like France’s leading heritage film distributor Carlotta and Criterion in the U.S., which has released several DVD boxsets of WCP movies. It is partnerships like these that give restored films a second lease of life, said Bodde.

“As one newspaper said: It’s like walking around with a film festival in your bag,” she joked. “To put these films into context the way Criterion does so well, with essays and background and notes about the restoration, is fantastic,” she enthused. “These partnerships help the films reach a wider audience: they fill in a lot of gaps and shift our understanding of film culture.”

Asked about the future and the ever-growing changes in film consumption, accelerated by the pandemic, Bodde said: “We’ll keep doing what we do. The technology changes – it changed in 1927 with sound and then color! How we look at film’s changes: we stream things. I can watch a film on my phone if I so choose. But the films still have the same power – I mean not on my phone, I don’t think,” she joked. “But they are still communicating and inspiring, so we’ll keep that as our guiding light.”

The MIFC runs alongside the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon until Oct. 15.