The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has always believed that preserving the world’s film heritage is a cultural mission of vital importance and film restoration efforts have always been a primary beneficiary of HFPA grants. That mission continued this year with a donation of $350,000 to the Film Foundation, which was accepted at the HFPA’s Installation and Grants lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel by Steven Spielberg. With funding provided by the HFPA, The Film Foundation (TFF) has completed the restoration of 85 films. This year, in partnership with TFF and Film Independent at the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the HFPA has sponsored a screening series of some of the restored films at LACMA’s Bing Theater. This Thursday the ongoing festival concludes with the premiere of the restored copy of Salvatore Giuliano, (1962) by
Francesco Rosi. Although less widely known than some other Italian directors, Rosi, whom Martin Scorsese has called “one of the true masters of cinema”, was a seminal figure in the years following Neorealist cinema, and a precursor to some narrative trends that only now have been widely adopted. His movies specialize in themes of social and political justice closely tied to real people and current events utilizing hybrid fictional, documentary and “mockumentary” devices, decades ahead of their time. Salvatore Giuliano chronicles the life and times of one of Italy’s most infamous and famous outlaws, a Sicilian bandit and black marketer who rose to popular hero status and whose deeds were breathlessly covered by the media of the time. It’s a rare opportunity to see
a film that inspired the likes of Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde), Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) and Alejandro Gonzalez Iniarritu (Amores Perros).