As much as we’re excited for the already enticing line-up for the 2016 New York Film Festival, their Revivals slate is always a place where one can discover a number of classics or revisit favorite films. This year is no different as they have newly restored films from Robert Bresson, Edward Yang, Jacques Rivette, Marlon Brando, Kenji Mizoguchi, and more. Check out the line-up below and return for our coverage this fall. If you don’t live in New York City, there’s a good chance a number of these restorations will travel in the coming months (or year) as well as get the home video treatment.
L’argent
Directed by Robert Bresson
1983, France, 83m
Robert Bresson’s final film, an adaptation of Tolstoy’s story The Forged Coupon, is simultaneously bleak and luminous, and sharp enough to cut diamonds. The story of a counterfeit bill’s passage from hand to hand and the resulting tragic consequences is rendered with a clean force that would be startling from a filmmaker of any age; coming from one in his early 80s, it was, and still is, astonishing. L’argent burns white hot—not with anger but with a perfect clarity of purpose: to direct us to see that habitual human callousness is what keeps us out of paradise. Restored in 2K, scanned in 4K from the original negative. A Janus Films release. Restored by MK2, in 2K from a 4K scan of the original negative.
The Battle of Algiers
Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo
1966, Italy/Algeria, 120m
Gillo Pontecorvo’s account of the popular uprising that led to Algerian independence from the French took “documentary realism” to a new level, electrifying and polarizing audiences throughout the world. Pontecorvo created a de-centralized structure in which the events themselves took center stage, cast the film almost entirely with non-actors, and filmed in grainy black-and-white to create a heightened “you are there” immediacy. Banned in France, embraced by the Black Panthers, and studied by the Pentagon following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, The Battle of Algiers, based on the book Souvenirs de la bataille d’Alger by Saadi Yacef (who also plays a character based on himself), returns in a new 4K restoration. A Rialto Pictures release.Restored by Cineteca di Bologna and Istituto Luce – Cinecittà at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in collaboration with Surf Film, Casbah Entertainment Inc., and CultFilms
Harlan County USA
Directed by Barbara Kopple
1976, USA, 103m
The mighty Barbara Kopple’s 1976 film, an impassioned documentary record of the year-long Brookside, Kentucky, miners’ strike that came to be known as “Bloody Harlan,” celebrates its 40th anniversary with a return to the festival where it had its premiere—before going on to win the Oscar for Best Documentary. Kopple and her crew spent a year and half in Harlan County, often under volatile conditions—she would later learn that there had been a price on her head. “It was an astounding experience,” she has said. “I learned what life-and-death was all about.” She also made a great film. A Cabin Creek Films release. The restoration of Harlan County, USA was funded by New York Women in Film & Television in 2004 through a Women’s Film Preservation Fund Legacy Grant and underwritten by the Academy Film Archive.
Jacques Rivette shorts
Aux quatre coins
Jacques Rivette, France, 1949, 20m
French intertitles with English subtitles
Le quadrille
Jacques Rivette, France, 1950, 40m
French intertitles with English subtitles
Le divertissement
Jacques Rivette, France, 1952, 45m
French intertitles with English subtitles
Rediscovered by Véronique Rivette this year and digitally restored by the Cinémathèque française, these three shorts offer a fascinating glimpse of the earliest stages of Jacques Rivette’s artistic development. In these “practice films,” the late New Wave master searches for the themes and approach to mise-en-scène that would later define his inexhaustibly rich oeuvre. Aux quatre coins is pure visual experimentation, while Le quadrille—co-written by and co-starring a baby-faced Jean-Luc Godard—is a chamber drama with two men and two women in a room, their relations expressed as a game of suggestive glances and the lighting and stubbing-out of cigarettes. Le divertissement presages Rivette’s gift for rendering Paris as a labyrinth of intrigues. Together, these films provide a crucial perspective on Rivette’s creativity before Cahiers du cinéma and his incomparable filmmaking career. The films have been restored by Les Films du Veilleur and the Cinémathèque française, in partnership with the Cinémathèque de Toulouse, le laboratoire Hiventy, Festival Côté Court, and the Forum des Images—Mairie de Paris, with the support of CNC. Special thanks to Véronique Rivette, and Samantha Leroy and Emilie Cauquy (Cinémathèque française).
The Living Idol
Directed by Albert Lewin
1957, USA, 100m
Albert Lewin began as a critic, went to work for Samuel Goldwyn in the 1920s, became Irving Thalberg’s right-hand man in the 1930s, and produced a handful of excellent films before becoming a director at age 48. Each of his six movies is rarefied, proudly literary, mythic, meticulously art-directed, and delicately haunting. His last—and strangest—is The Living Idol, based on his own novel about an archeologist who comes to believe that a jaguar in captivity is the physical manifestation of a Mayan god. This is not a great film, but it is a very unusual and a uniquely compelling one: it feels like an emanation from an alternate world of moviemaking. A Cohen Media Group release.
Memories of Underdevelopment
Directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
1968, Cuba, 97m
When Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1968 film was finally released here in 1973, it startled film critics and casual moviegoers alike. No one was expecting such a film out of Castro’s Cuba: a sharp, funny, pro-revolutionary period piece (the action is set in 1961, right after the Bay of Pigs) with a disaffected intellectual hero (Sergio Corrieri) who, as Vincent Canby wrote, “moves through Havana as if he were a scuba diver exploring the ruins of a civilization he abhorred but cannot bear to leave.” The English critic Derek Malcolm wrote that Memories of Underdevelopment is “one of the best films ever made about the skeptical individual’s place in the march of history.” A World Cinema Project release. A presentation by the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), Les Films du Camélia, and the Cineteca di Bologna. Restored by the Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory and financed by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project.
One-Eyed Jacks
Directed by Marlon Brando
1961, USA, 141m
The only film directed by Marlon Brando, an adaptation of Charles Neider’s novel (inspired by the life of Billy the Kid), is an unorthodox western that’s as fresh, unpredictable, and physical as Brando’s lead performance. This visually stunning production—the last Paramount film shot in VistaVision—could for many years be seen only in substandard public domain prints and discs. It has now been beautifully restored by Universal, with the support of The Film Foundation, and under the supervision of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. The formidable cast includes Karl Malden, Katy Jurado, Slim Pickens, Ben Johnson, Timothy Carey, Elisha Cook Jr., and the wonderful Mexican actress Pina Pellicer. Restored by Universal Studios in collaboration with The Film Foundation. Special thanks to Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg for their consultation on this restoration.
Panique
Directed by Julien Duvivier
1947, France, 91m
“If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to the cinema,” wrote Jean Renoir, “I would place a statue of Julien Duvivier above the entrance.” Duvivier made 70 films between 1919 and 1967, many of them landmarks of French cinema. His first postwar project, a noir adaptation of Georges Simenon’s Mr. Hire’s Engagement (later adapted by Patrice Leconte as Monsieur Hire), stars Michel Simon as a reviled voyeur framed for a murder by the girl he adores. Now widely considered the finest Simenon adaptation but criticized at the time for its bleakness, the long-unseen Panique has finally been given the vivid restoration it deserves. A Rialto Pictures release.
Taipei Story
Directed by Edward Yang
1985, Taiwan, 110m
Edward Yang’s second feature stars Hou Hsiao-hsien (who cowrote the script and mortgaged his house to fund the production) as a former baseball player who has come home to manage the family textile business, and Tsai Chin as his property-developer girlfriend. “The two main characters represent the past and the future of Taipei,” said Yang. “I tried to bring enough controversial questions onto the screen, so that viewers would ask themselves about their own lives.” Taipei Story is early evidence of Olivier Assayas’s assessment of Yang, who died far too young, as “the great Chinese filmmaker of modernity.” A World Cinema Project release. Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project at Cineteca di Bologna/L’immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique and Hou Hsiao-hsien.
Ugetsu Monogatari
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
1953, Japan, 94m
Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1953 adaptation of two 18th-century Japanese ghost stories (tempered with elements from Guy de Maupassant) is a peak in the history of cinema, a work of multiple mysteries, terrors, wonders, and ecstatic flights that takes audiences where few films do: to the realm of the unnameable. Ugetsu’s power can be felt in even the most degraded prints, but this restoration, made from a master positive print and a dupe negative, allows us to really see and appreciate the exquisite visual beauty achieved by the director and his cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa. Restored by The Film Foundation and KADOKAWA Corporation at Cineric Laboratories. Special thanks to Masahiro Miyajima and Martin Scorsese for their consultation on this restoration. Restoration funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in association with the Film Foundation and KADOKAWA Corporation.