Film Restoration and Preservation

[wilberfan]

Nice.  Thanks Marty!   How do we participate? 

[WorldForgot]

Martin Scorsese Foundation Launches Free Virtual Screening Room For Film Restorations
The Playlist

Martin Scorsese is taking his love of cinema in a new direction. His long-running nonprofit The Film Foundation, dedicated to film preservation and the exhibition of restored and classic cinema, is officially launching a free virtual screening room to showcase film restorations.

The first Film Foundation restoration screening is set to launch Monday, May 9, and will feature the 1945 romantic comedy "I Know Where I'm Going!," directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The film stars Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesey. Scorsese is a longtime admirer of Powell and Pressburger. His longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker was married to Michael Powell for six years and the Scorsese was able to get to know the legendary English filmmaker intimately through her.

Nice.  Thanks Marty!   How do we participate? 

https://delphiquest.com/film-foundation/restoration-screening-room

[wilder]

James Mockoski: New 4K Restoration of Francis Ford Coppola's One From the Heart Coming Soon

James Mockoski, archivist and restoration supervisor for Francis Ford Coppola's company American Zoetrope, revealed today that he is overseeing a brand new 4K restoration of One From the Heart (1982). Preliminary plans for an upcoming 4K Blu-ray release have not yet been revealed.

Description: Legendary director Francis Ford Coppola shines his spotlight on a Las Vegas couple (Teri Garr, Frederic Forrest) whose break-up on the 4th of July leads them both to a night on the strip in pursuit of their romantic fantasies (Raul Julia, Nastassia Kinski). But in this town of gamblers and dreamers, should they bet it all on dreams, or give true love another roll of the dice?

Featuring breathtaking design, show stopping set pieces, the stunning photography of Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now, The Last Emperor) and accompanied by the wonderful Oscar nominated music of the one and only Tom Waits, this neon explosion of color, sound and innovation is a cinematic valentine for all movie lovers.

[wilder]

L'Inferno (1911) was recently restored in 4K and is getting a very limited run blu-ray release via IndieGogo

L'Inferno is a 1911 Italian silent film, loosely adapted from Inferno, the first canticle of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. L'Inferno took over three years to make, and was the first full-length Italian feature film.

The ambitiousness of early Italian film production is marked in a series of grand-themed epic feature films that were produced long before the feature film took hold in Europe and America. Only the Australians had embraced the feature film before the whole-hearted dedication to the form by the Italians.

In L'Inferno (1911) we have a fine example of early epic filmmaking, for the scope of the subject matter is broad and the production is visually impressive. Themes of Italian history were often chosen in early Italian feature films to signal the solemn artistic intent of their filmmakers and to provide a more dramatic perceived context within which to mount lengthier stories. L'Inferno is no exception from this trend.

Based on the first part of Dante Alighieri's mammoth epic poem The Divine Comedy, L'Inferno faithfully follows the source poem in its representation of the journey of the author Dante through the realm of Hell as guided by the master poet Virgil. The production design is highly-influenced by and faithful to the illustrations of Gustave Dore, and is a visual treat for the viewer.

[wilder]

The new 4k restorations of the "Three Colors" trilogy open at Film at Lincoln Center with a national rollout to follow. "Three Colors: Blue" opens July 8, "Three Colors: White" opens August 5, and "Three Colors: Red" opens August 26.

[wilder]

A 4K restoration of Álex de la Iglesia's Acción mutante (1993) is forthcoming from Severin

In a futuristic Spain lorded over by the rich and good-looking (often thanks to cosmetic surgery), a group calling themselves Accion Mutante (Mutant Action) begin a violent uprising. Led by Ramon (Antonio Resines), bearing assorted disabilities, and united by their disgust with the status quo, they massacre everything from an aerobics class to the wedding of heiress Patricia (Frédérique Feder). Kidnapping the young woman, the gang go on the run with the authorities pursuing and distrust rearing its ugly head among them, while Patricia falls for Ramon ("Not the Stockholm Syndrome again!"). And things only get more brutal when the crew wind up on a desolate mining planet...

[wilder]

Hundreds of classic Polish films made available for free online
Notes from Poland

Hundreds of classic Polish films have been made available to watch legally for free online as part of a project funded by the European Union and Poland's culture ministry.

Among the films published on the 35mm.online website – all of which have English subtitles – are works by famed directors Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieślowski, including the former's Man of Marble and Man of Iron and the latter's Three Colours trilogy.

The new service includes 160 feature films, 71 documentaries, and 474 animated films and TV shows, including classic children's favourites such as Reksio. The project also features 3,108 episodes of the Polish Film Chronicle, a newsreel shown in cinemas before films from 1944 to 1994.

As well as being available on the 35mm.online website, the films can also be viewed through an app for Android and iOS phones and an Android app for smart TVs.

[wilder]

[wilder]

György Kovásznay's Habfürdo (1979) was just restored in 4K and there's speculation Arbelos (or Criterion?) will be putting it out



A man wants out of a marriage and tries to convince a friend of the bride-to-be to tell her the bad news.

Hungarian artist, writer, and editor György Kovásznay was a prolific painter and animator, working primarily in the 1960s and 70s. He made a couple dozen shorts, but Habfürdő (variously translated as "Foam Bath" or "Bubble Bath") is his sole feature, and his magnum opus. The plot is slight—focused on a studious nurse, her sexy nurse friend, and her friend's hypochondriac fiancé—but the animation is a roiling, dynamic tapestry of ever-shifting styles. Kovásznay considered his films to be extensions of his painting, and brings to them a kinetic, kaleidoscopic energy and a visual style that Eyeworks co-curator Alexander Stewart has likened to Ralph Bakshi. Habfürdő is a modernist-infused cartoon, with musical numbers, that reflects on social and personal relationships in a communist society in flux.

A supremely strange animated rumination on domesticity and marriage. I can't claim to really know much about Hungarian animation, but this film's style, in which the character models and backgrounds are in constant motion, stretching and twisting and ballooning in concert with the emotional register of the characters (or, sometimes, seemingly just on a whim), feels pretty radical to me--like a proto-Bill Plympton but on a metric ton of acid.

Currently streaming on Mubi

[wilder]

MEU NOME É TONHO (Dir. Ozualdo Candeias, 1969)

Spectacle Theater and Cinelimite are proud to present Ozualdo Candeias second feature, the essential Cinema Marginal film, MEU NOME É TONHO.

Completed just two years after Candeias' debut cornerstone, A MARGEM, MEU NOME É TONHO is Candeias' first exploration into the Brazilian western. Photographed by master cinematographer, Peter Overbeck (THE RED LIGHT BANDIT) and scored by the virtuosic Brazilian composer, Paulinho Nogueira, Candeias follow-up feature is a raw and poetic western which compares to almost nothing in the western canon (a la the Italian Spaghetti westerns of Leone or Corbucci or any of the films of John Ford, Hawks, etc).

Filled with an unsettling sense of macabre humor, unremitting violence, and a demonic collective laughter that is louder and perhaps even more perverse than the sounds of the colt revolvers from the antagonistic Manelão gang, MEU NOME É TONHO unravels as a sardonic descent into Candeias' madness which includes an anarchic sense of pacing and some of the most remarkable and bewildering moments of montage and hand-held cinematography in the history of cinema.

The story of Tonho's revenge on the Manelão gang while straightforward in nature is told through sparse dialog, symbolic imagery, and Candeias' unique sense of pace which is felt and controlled by the ambient sounds of the terrain juxtaposed by the echoing laughter of the depraved, land-grabbing gang. MEU NOME É TONHO is not just essential Brazilian cinema but is also some of the most inventive filmmaking that came out of the 1960's.

[WorldForgot]

Spectacle Theater iz the best venue in NYC, no contest.

[wilder]

A new restoration of Patrice Chéreau's The Wounded Man (1983) opens at Anthology Film Archives in NY January 5th

Henri is a frustrated teenager living with his parents in a provincial French coastal town. When they drag him to the train station to bid adieu to his sister, Henri sneaks off to a secluded bathroom and interrupts a hustler named Jean satisfying the masochistic desires of an older male client. Henri falls desperately in love with the sexy criminal, but Jean evades Henri's affections. Undeterred, Henri shadows Jean as he traverses the dark and dangerous underbelly of their sleepy village. But as he descends deeper and deeper into Jean's world, there may not be an easy way out.

Patrice Chéreau's 1983 drama is a revelation: an amazingly accomplished work that genuinely channels the transgressive, unsanitized sensibility of Jean Genet, boasting a breakout lead performance by young Jean-Hugues Anglade and a script that took co-writers Chéreau and legendary gay French author and activist Hervé Guibert six years to perfect. The result is a rich, strange, and sumptuous film leading us to exhilaratingly mysterious and unfamiliar spaces both physical and psychological.

[wilder]

2023 TBD

John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) on 4K UHD blu-ray from new label Deaf Crocodile



An unlikely partnership between a Highway Patrol Officer, two criminals and a station secretary is formed to defend a defunct Los Angeles precinct office against a siege by a bloodthirsty street gang.

"Almost all of John Carpenter's movies are owned by large entertainment conglomerates. One exception is ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, which is owned by people who made it," says Joseph Kaufman. "As executive producer of the film, I am excited to work with Deaf Crocodile on a 4K scan of the original camera negative, and the possibility of applying new technology, including HDR10 and Dolby Vision, to extract much more from the negative image than has been possible before, while still respecting the movie's original roots."

[wilder]

Deaf Crocodile is Kickstarting a blu-ray release of Jiří Barta's The Pied Piper (1986)

Born in Prague in 1948, Barta studied film at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, and began making his first stop motion animated shorts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, often using wood, fur, hair and other organic materials to create his strange and Gothic visions.  His early short "The Vanished World Of Gloves" (Zaniklý svet rukavic, 1982) is a marvelous and eccentric tour through cinema history, told entirely through animated gloves.

In the mid-1980s, Barta began work on his first feature – and acknowledged masterpiece -- THE PIED PIPER (KRYSAR, 1986).  Based on The Pied Piper of Hamelin, is set in a dark and twisted medieval village of narrow streets and weird Gothic arches, half-CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI and half-Jan van Eyck.  The money-obsessed citizens, carved out of wood blocks and speaking in an onomatopoeic babble (invented by Barta himself) are like George Grosz caricatures, literally spouting coins from their mouths instead of words.  The rats are far more organic and sympathetic, made of real fur and whiskers, constantly tunneling and burrowing under the towering arches and cobblestone streets above.  (In one of the film's many surreal moments, a rat emerges from a gargoyle's gaping maw.)

Your continued support is what allows us to bring these cinematic and cultural gems back from oblivion - introducing them to all-new audiences.

[wilder]

4K restoration of Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation (1995) is forthcoming from Strand Relasing

The Doom Generation, restored in 4K with scenes edited for it's theatrical release in 1995, this version reflects the director's cut, intended by Araki. The film has been completely retimed and reedited for today's technological standards. The sound is remastered to compliment today's new audio standards in a new 5.1 mix.