Film Restoration

The HFPA has joined Netflix and Mr. Michel Merkt to become the major sponsors of the reconstruction and restoration of Napoleon, by Abel Gance (1927).

Although Javier Porta Fouz has been the artistic director of the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival (Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente, popularly known as BAFICI) since 2016, his relationship with the festival began much earlier, having programmed 19 of the previous 23 editions. In a rare moment of calm in the days before the festival, which takes place this year from April 20 to May 1, Porta Fouz told us about his expectations regarding what will happen in the coming days and what should not be missed.

Standing in front of the same Westwood movie theater where his 1991 film New Jack City premiered 31 years ago, filmmaker Mario Van Peebles can’t help but reflect on that night as he celebrates the restored 35mm print opening the “Perpetratin’ Realism” program, sponsored by the American Cinematheque and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.   The blistering crime thriller and gangster movie opened in theatres on March 8, 1991 – four days after the world first saw the video of LAPD officers beating Rodney King, and the premiere became the setting for brawls and gun violence in New York, Chicago, and Las Vegas, resulting in at least one death.

At the 1992 Academy Awards, the Indian director Satyajit Ray was presented with the honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement in film. Ray was dying, filmed in his hospital bed.

The Story of a Three-Day Pass, the first film by seminal African American director Melvin Van Peebles is returning to theaters after a new 4K restoration by Indiecollect. The restored film which made its world debut in 2020 at the HFPA’s Restoration Summit, tells the story of a Black US serviceman stationed in Paris who falls in love with a French woman.

In 1963, with his MGM film, A Child is Waiting starring Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland, director John Cassavetes had burned his bridges with the Hollywood studio system. Producer Stanley Kramer had fired him from the movie after Cassavetes fought with everyone including his leading lady, one report saying Garland and Cassavetes had to be physically restrained during a clash.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog was the 27-year-old Alfred Hitchcock’s third silent film, but the one he considered his “first true film. ” It was the one that started his remarkable oeuvre of suspense films over the course of his six-decade career.

When navy combat photographer Morris Engel decided to make Little Fugitive in 1953, there was no such thing as an independent film made outside the studio system. “My wife grew up in Hollywood and worked as a messenger at MGM, so she knew all about how films were made,” Engel explained at a screening of his movie at Brooklyn College.

By the 1920’s, director D. W.

The start of talkies in 1929 in Hollywood jumpstarted Lionel Barrymore’s brief career as a director as studios required an experienced hand with spoken dialogue and Barrymore had had great success on stage before he became a movie actor.  Ten Cents a Dance was the last movie he directed, and he was offered the job after being nominated for a directing Oscar for Madame X in 1930.