News

Tom Quinn, the founder and head of Neon, is taking a bold and necessary step forward in the name of cinema. Neon will be releasing Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria as a “road show”—going one theatre in one city at a time across the country…and that’s it. No Blu-ray, no DVD, and most importantly of all: no streaming. No, Memoria will not be sharing a “swimlane” with (imagine algorhythmically generated “similar” films here). You will have to see it in a theatre, or miss it.

Will the film eventually turn up on some other platform? Possibly. But the gesture is very important.

In his resplendent Charles Eliot Norton lectures on the “crisis” of music in the 20^th century, Leonard Bernstein posed the rhetorical question: does this focus on music and its development actually matter? Is it relevant? “The world totters,” said Bernstein, “governments crumble, and we are poring over musical phonology and syntax. Isn’t it a flagrant case of elitism? Well, in a way it is. Certainly not elitism of class—economic, social or ethnic—but of curiosity, that special inquiring quality of the intelligence. And it was ever thus. But these days, the search for meaning through beauty and visa-versa becomes even more important, as each day mediocrity and art-mongering increasingly uglify our lives. And the day when this search for John Keats’ truth/beauty ideal become irrelevant, then we can all shut up and go back to our caves. Meanwhile, to use that unfortunate word again, it is thoroughly relevant.”

These lectures were delivered almost 50 years ago. They could have been written yesterday.

We have arrived at a strange moment. The terms “elitism” and “elites” have been rendered so elastic as to become all but meaningless, and the same could be said of “friend,” “community,” “freedom” and “democratic.” And, of course, “social.” Market-driven logic is sold, relentlessly, as “reality.” And in the process, art is treated as a doormat, a tabula rasa on which one can project any half-baked “idea” or program. And the artists? Or the people who give themselves to art? Who pronounce the word cinema without shame, but with real pride? I can say from personal experience that the labels come fast and furious at the mere mention of the word. My own favorite was “effete,” a word that good old Spiro Agnew used to flog from the podium.

The reality of the market is not reality, period: there is an infinity of dimensions to being alive, and art is a precious reminder of just that. It is the polar antithesis of commerce, and it addresses us not as a consumer but as a fellow human being. That goes for every single title that’s been restored and preserved by The Film Foundation since its inception, including the 2000 title Mysterious Object at Noon, the first feature from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, known to many as Joe.

It’s wonderful that so much is available now, to see at home. The trade-off is that it is offered to us in the basest possible manner, determined by a bottom-line, lowest-common-denominator approach to programming, equalizing absolutely every moving image under the sun, and all but encouraging the consumer to bail the minute they get bored or distracted or confused or challenged or anything but lulled by more of the same. Again.

Films should be widely available. They should also be valued. That was why John Cassavetes made it so difficult to see his films when he was alive, and that is the point of Joe and Tom’s grand gesture.

- Kent Jones

Follow us on Instagram, and Twitter!

MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON  (Thailand, 2000. d. Apichatpong Weerasethaku)
Restored in 2013 by the Austrian Film Museum and Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, LISTO laboratory in Vienna, Technicolor Ltd in Bangkok, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Restoration funded by Doha Film Institute.

"As for me, addressing you here, I admire everything, like a savage." This quote from Victor Hugo, favoured by the much missed Bertrand Tavernier (who was President of the Institut Lumière from its creation in 1982) to whom the 13th edition of the Lumière Festival (steered by Thierry Frémaux) is clearly set to pay tribute, perfectly illustrates the passion that is invested into the biggest global event dedicated to heritage cinema. It’s an immoderate love for the 7th art which has transformed the festival into an incredibly popular gathering, which will once again raise its curtain from 9 to 17 October with a colossal line-up of over 420 films.

The 2021 Lumière Award is set to be handed to Jane Campion, who will form the focus of a retrospective, as well as delivering a masterclass on 15 October. Also worth a mention, within the context of the "Permanent History of Women Filmmakers” section, is a retrospective dedicated to Kinuyo Tanaka, who was a woman director in the golden age of Japanese film.

Stealing focus among the various guests the festival plans to honour (with several premières gracing the agenda) are Paolo Sorrentino (who will deliver a masterclass on 10 October and whose film The Hand of God [+] is set for a screening), Marco Bellocchio (notably with his documentary Marx Can Wait [+]), Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Lost Daughter [+]), Bulle Ogier (also delivering a masterclass), Catherine Corsini (The Divide [+]), Joachim Trier, presenting The Worst Person in the World [+], Juan Antonio Bayona, Édouard Baer (with Adieu Paris, among other works), composer Philippe Sarde (who’s also planning a masterclass), Gessica Généus (Freda [+]), Yvan Attal (The Accusation [+]), Christian Carion (My Son [+]) and the trio Gaspar Noé - Dario Argento - Françoise Lebrun with Vortex [+]. Tributes to the sorely missed Sydney Pollack and Gilles Grangier also deserve a mention.

Standing out in the Celebrations category are "1971, The Birth of Blaxploitation", "Clint Eastwood: 50 Years of A Filmmaking Career", the 30-year anniversary of Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh and a tribute to Fernando Solanas. The Re-Release Events line-up, meanwhile, will shine a light on the adventures of Antoine Doinel by way of François Truffaut’s films, as well as showcasing the Infernal Affairs trilogy and three Japanese cult horror films.

The "Big Classics in Black and White" line-up will include works coming courtesy of Buñuel, Duvivier, Carné, Kurosawa, Welles, Wilder, Lubitsch, Franju and Fellini, to name a few, while the "Sublime Moments of Silent Film" selection will notably present works by Eisenstein, along with Louis Feuillade’s Judex series. Likewise on the agenda, we find "Epic Screenings" (Pollack, De Palma, Swain, Barboni, Chahine, etc.), documentaries about film, a Jurassic All-Nighter, a string of titles supported by the Lumière Classics label (directed by McCarey, Powell and Pressburger, Renoir, Scola, Dmytryk, Corbucci, Tanner, Decoin, Clément, Castellani, Berlanga and Bardem, Fernández, etc.) and "Treasures and Curiosities" (Nemec, Jancsó, Makavejev).

And one to mention in closing, running from 12 to 15 October, is the 9th edition of the International Classic Film Market which will honour Switzerland, will feature America’s Margaret Bodde (who oversees The Film Foundation founded by Martin Scorsese) as its Expert Guest, and will decipher the current state of the sector during thematic round table talks, in addition to the usual film screenings and presentations of various line-ups.

Michael Powell’s glorious version of Béla Bartók’s 1911 one-act opera began life with its star, the American operatic bass singer Norman Foster (not to be confused with the actor and director). Foster wanted to pair the opera with Bartók’s equally compact ballet of 1916, The Miraculous Mandarin, and film them at a new studio in Salzburg, for German television. Foster came to Powell via production designer Hein Heckroth, one of the director’s most cherished collaborators. Foster would sing and play the role of Bluebeard and the Uruguayan mezzosoprano Ana Racquel Satre would be Bluebeard’s fourth wife Judith. Powell bought a recording with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Bluebeard and he was sold (the ballet, on the other hand, left him non-plussed and that idea was dropped). He ordered a copy of the score and got to work on a script, and commenced to criss-crossing Europe in his red land rover for finance and production meetings, alighting in Vienna, then Heckroth’s home base of Frankfurt, then Munich, then Salzburg, then Zagreb to meet with the conductor Milan Horvath. Shooting started while the studio was still being built, Powell and Heckroth conjured wonders out of color and lights and polystyrene forms and camera placement and movement, and the production wrapped in eight and a half days. “What did it matter that there was not enough money to pay everybody the fees that had been agreed?” wrote Powell in the second volume of his autobiography. “There is always something a little unreal about being paid for doing something that you love to do. All of us were artists, and all of us had a little of this feeling—fortunately for Norman. We ate well, we drank well, and we slept well, and we loved one another. We knew what we were doing, and we saw that it was good. We had made new friends, and no enemies. It was one of the most delightful experiences of my life in movies.” After it was broadcast on German television (in black and white!), Bluebeard’s Castle languished in obscurity for many years. It has just been restored by the BFI and The Film Foundation, and will be screened at this year’s New York Film Festival.

I realize that since I started writing these posts, I’ve given a lot of attention to titles by Michael Powell, the majority of them made with Emeric Pressburger. For many reasons. On a personal note, I came to Powell’s films through Martin Scorsese, the founder of The Film Foundation, and Thelma Schoonmaker, who was married to Powell in the last years of his life and who has devoted so much time and loving care to the meticulous restoration and preservation of his films and his writings. Margaret Bodde and I discovered a lot of these movies in a screening room with Marty and Thelma, and over the years I’ve come back to them again and again. And with every new viewing, they seem to become more wondrous—that’s the way it is with all great films. There have been many great filmmakers, but only a very few like Michael Powell, the spirit of whose work is all but inseparable from the spirit of the art form itself.

- Kent Jones

Follow us on Instagram, and Twitter!

HERZOG BLAUBARTS BURG (BLUEBEARD'S CASTLE) (1963, d. Michael Powell)
Restored by the BFI National Archive and The Film Foundation in association with The Ashbrittle Film Foundation. Restoration funding provided by the BFI National Archive, The Louis B. Mayer Foundation and The Film Foundation.

A look into the movies that have become inaccessible in this time of unprecedented accessibility.

In 2017, film archivists at Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation estimated that half of all American films made before 1950 are now lost, unable to be viewed, and perhaps more than 90% of films made before 1929 are similarly gone forever. At the Library of Congress, experts have found that 70% of silent films have been completely lost, with many of the remaining silent films being incomplete or lower-quality versions.

While this seems like it would be limited to the olden, Golden Age days of film—a result of chain-smoking studio executives waving away rolls upon rolls of film in trans-Atlantic accents, banishing them to damp, dark basements to never see the silver screen again—the loss of movies from recent history is becoming more and more common as the streaming wars rage on.

Take, for instance, the 1981 film Possession, an international production with all of the ingredients to be an enduring cult classic. Directed by Andrzej Żuławski, this mind-boggling divorce horror movie (a genre we can only hope to see more of in the future) stars Isabelle Adjani in a role that won her the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival. She plays a far more unhinged prototype of Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne; opposite of her is rising star Sam Neill as a Berlin spy and absent husband. The film chronicles the tense and terrifying erosion of their marriage, blending elements of realism with the alien and supernatural. The whole thing takes place in West Berlin, with the Berlin Wall in view for a hefty amount of screentime to add an extra degree of Cold War tension and mystery. Possession is an irresistibly weird movie, a status which resulted in the film being cut by over 40 minutes in its original American release.

With such a fascinating story behind it, Possession is a hidden gem of a film—emphasis on the hidden. The movie has been missing from streaming services for years; you can’t even rent or buy it on Amazon Prime or YouTube or iTunes. For all intents and purposes in the streaming era, Possession just doesn’t exist. Unless, of course, you scour the secondhand markets of Amazon and eBay, where I was ecstatic to purchase a Korean version of the DVD for a mere $5 (European and American prints of the disc range anywhere from $30 to upwards of $80).

This kind of movie scarcity may seem like a fluke, with Possession being a single example of something valuable falling through the cracks, but it’s hardly the only film to suffer the fate of extinction. Another work from the not-too-distant-past that seems incapable of reaching our screens is 1999’s beauty pageant mockumentary Drop Dead Gorgeous. The film contains a bevy of talent, from Allison Janney to Kirsten Dunst, Kirstie Alley to the late Brittany Murphy. It’s perennial Oscar-nominee Amy Adams’ first role ever. That alone (and Denise Richards’ awe-inspiring talent portion performance, of course) should cement it as a staple for streaming!

Somehow, though, Drop Dead Gorgeous wasn’t available on streaming platforms until two decades after its release. Once it arrived, many a think piece came out praising the film’s absurd but truthful depictions of teenage girlhood, bolstering its status as a cult classic. After searching in vain for the movie for years, I was lucky enough to catch it on Hulu during the short window it was there. But it has inexplicably disappeared again. Now, it’s still unavailable for streaming or purchase digitally—once again, secondhand DVDs are your only option to see it.

Physical media, though going out of style, is the only way to access many great movies that streaming has excluded over the years. The Diana Ross 1972 vehicle Lady Sings the Blues received a Blu-Ray rerelease this year, after only scarce, decades-old copies could be found online and in stores. Surely Ross’ name and ongoing legacy deserve better preservation than that. 1977’s New York, New York stands as another unlikely lost movie, if not for it’s A-list director and stars (Martin Scorsese, Liza Minnelli, and Robert De Niro), then for its extraordinarily famous theme: the song “New York, New York,” most notably covered by Frank Sinatra, came from this film! In spite of that enduring cultural touchstone of a song, the movie has all but ceased to exist.

The list goes on and on, made up of everything from Oscar winners (1978’s Coming Home starring Jane Fonda, Jon Voight, and Bruce Dern) to controversial independent ventures (Spring Breakers, director Harmony Korine’s first writing credit, and the NC-17-rated Kids). The fact is, there is no way to know what these streamers are missing unless you know these lost films for yourself. Many require you to hunt them down, to buy secondhand, to potentially pay exorbitant amounts for first edition copies because those are the only ones in existence. Though streaming seems to offer an endless number of titles at the click of the button, there’s a limit to what these platforms house, and many hidden gems are too often forced out of the cinematic consciousness as a result.

With all of that being said, Possession has lucked out. Via some kind of divine intervention (because what else could motivate the resuscitation of a 40-year-old movie?), Metrograph has created a 4K restoration of the film to be released both in theaters and digitally. Possession is set to premiere at Austin’s Fantastic Fest in the last week of September, after which it will be available in person and online through Metrograph in New York on October 1 before opening nationwide October 15. Hopefully, this rerelease will prompt revivals of other lost movies, so we can finally watch what we didn’t know we’d been missing.