“Restored and Rediscovered” at Jacob Burns Film Center

A film is a fragile artifact: a row of photographs printed on a slender strip of celluloid (a form of plastic). Films are also highly flammable. More than 40,000 reels perished in a blaze at the Twentieth Century Fox film vault in Little Ferry, New Jersey, in 1937.

“Films, like clothes, can get damaged the more you use them,” explains film programmer Monica Castillo. “You can love them to death, essentially.” Castillo has curated “Restored and Rediscovered,” a festival of preserved films, at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville starting May 13.

Film studios are businesses, not museums. It’s not in their economic interest to preserve the films in their vaults. Luckily, a number of organizations have sprung up to do this work. One of the major ones is the Film Foundation, founded by Martin Scorsese. The theme of preservation allows for a wide variety of genres: silent movies, Hollywood blockbusters, shorts, documentaries, independent films—even a Cuban satire. Death of a Bureaucrat (1966), directed by Tomas Gutiérrez Alea, is a Kafkaesque comedy about a young man threading his way through the corridors of government. Who knew the Cuban authorities allowed existentialist critiques of their own bureaucracy?

The earliest film in the festival is from 1915, the latest from 2000. (Yes, even relatively recent works may require preservation.)

Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925) is Ernst Lubitsch’s silent film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play. It seems like an insuperable task to adapt Wilde’s witty bantering comedy to a medium with essentially no dialogue, but Lubitsch shrewdly translates arch satire into purely visual terms. Luckily, actors of that era had incredibly mobile eyes. And some of the dialogue can be inferred from lip reading.

All the silent films will be shown as they were intended to be—with a live pianist improvising. Coincidentally, the musician, Ben Model, is himself a restorer of films, and will give a demonstration-lecture about his preservation efforts on May 18.

The festival includes renowned masterworks like The Third Man (1949), Carol Reed’s noir drama featuring Orson Welles’s most Machiavellian performance. Peeping Tom (1960), directed by Michael Powell, is the terrifying story of an evil amateur filmmaker: arguably the English equivalent of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which was released the same year. Both movies suggest that voyeurism—the essential act of watching a movie—is itself a form of violence.

More esoteric offerings include Harlem on the Prairie, a Western made for African-American audiences in 1937 and filmed at a black-owned ranch in Apple Valley, California. The film includes music by the Four Tones. Rare Blue Apes of Cannibal Isle (1974) is a treat for connoisseurs of the obscure. Shot in Malaysia by sexploitation auteur Donn Greer, Rare Blue Apes is a children’s film, with singing actors in huge animal masks—something like “Sesame Street” if it were set in a Hindu temple.

For tragic reasons, It Happens to Us (1972) is newly relevant. Made when abortion was still illegal, this documentary explores women’s experiences ending their pregnancies. Produced and directed by women, it tells harrowing stories—which are today being reenacted throughout the US since Roe vs. Wade was overturned.

The opening night film is Household Saints (1993), Nancy Savoca’s intimate tale of an Italian-American family based on Francine Prose’s fifth novel. A Q&A with Savoca and her producer (and husband) Richard Guay, will follow the screening.

This article appears in May 2024.