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).

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 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.

By the 1920’s, director D. W.

When director Elia Kazan made America America in 1963, his most celebrated work was behind him. He never regained the audiences of his heyday in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and his last few movies had all lost money.

In 1957, John Cassavetes corralled a few students from the acting workshop he started in New York City to make a film as an exercise. There was no script, no permits for locations, just a 16mm camera and an idea for a theme on which the actors were to improvise.

The instrumental strains of “Harbor Lights,” the popular song from 1937, sound over the opening prologue: “With their hates and desires men are changing the face of the earth – but they cannot change the sea. Men who live on the sea never change – for they live in a lonely world apart as they drift from one rusty tramp steamer to the next, forging the life-lines of Nations.

FTA is the title of a documentary, lost for almost 50 years, directed by Francine Parker and produced by 15-time Golden Globe nominee and 7 times winner Jane Fonda with eight-time Golden Globe nominee and two-time winner Donald Sutherland. The film is about the tour that the two famous actors did of military bases across the United States, the Philippines, and Japan in 1971, bringing political satire, songs, poetry, conversations and questions about the role of the United States in the Vietnam war to the soldiers, many of whom were actively opposed to the conflict at the time.

Trapped, a nearly lost movie from 1949 which was restored last year thanks to a grant from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, was the featured presentation at the opening night of Noir City 17, the annual festival sponsored by the Film Noir Foundation. The historic Castro movie theater in San Francisco was again the venue.

For the second year running the Hollywood Foreign Press Association enjoyed a special spot in the annual Il Cinema Ritrovato (Rediscovered Cinema)  which takes place in Bologna, Italy. The festival showcases classic, rare and restored movies and has become a must-see event for cinephiles.