It seems like every month, there’s an exciting new 4K re-release or a newly restored rediscovery that’s reaching audiences for the first time. But the busy calendar of film restorations is more of a recent development in the history of the field that’s just about to celebrate its first centennial.
Margaret Bodde, executive director of The Film Foundation, remembers a story Martin Scorsese told her that inspired his interest in film preservation when he lived in Los Angeles in the 1970s. “He went to a screening at LACMA that Ron Haver put together. I think it was the 20th Century Fox story, so it was all these different film prints from Fox,” she said. “They screened ‘Niagara’ followed by ‘The Seven Year Itch,’ you’re talking about only 20 years after these films were huge hits for the studio. The print for ‘Niagara’ was pretty faded. It wasn’t what the director intended it to look like, but it was screenable. Then, they put up a print of ‘The Seven Year Itch,’ and it was so bad, it was so washed out, so faded, it had gone pink. Everything was kind of almost one color.”
Years later, newly wed couple Amy Heller and Dennis Doros used their distributor and restoration knowledge to start Milestone Films highlighting works that traditional distributors had overlooked. Starting with early sound films about exploration and art documentaries, their collection grew to include Charles Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep” and the revolutionary film “I Am Cuba.” Doros describes the early days of Milestone Films as “We just got Daddy’s barn and started a distribution company.” Heller added, “We got into a one-bedroom apartment, and my mother-in-law wanted to give us china, a 16-piece set for a one-bedroom apartment. Instead, we asked for a fax machine, and we dedicated a whole closet to it.”
Around the same time, documentarian Barbara Moss approached her fellow board members at New York Women in Film and Television to show them a decaying film reel and sound the alarm that the history of women’s contribution to cinema could be lost forever. “Whether it was well-known or independent, it was mostly men whose work was being preserved,” said Terry Lawler, co-chair of the Women’s Film Preservation Fund. “[Moss] had remembered when she was in film school, she asked the teacher if there were any films by women, and he said no, there weren’t any, and that was not true.”
Much has changed over the years in the field of film preservation and restoration. This year’s Restored and Rediscovered festival at the Jacob Burns Film Center will spotlight several organizations celebrating milestones of their own. IndieCollect, which specializes in restoring and preserving the works of independent filmmakers, will commemorate its 15th anniversary, and the New York Women in Film and Television’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund has helped save and restore a number of movies by women filmmakers for 30 years.
The Film Foundation, which helps restore movies from major Hollywood studios, independent filmmakers, and those worldwide, and Milestone Films, which specializes in saving and restoring canon-challenging works, share 1990 as their foundational year. That year also marked the beginning of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, which promotes “cooperation between the archives, the labs, the distributors, and the studios to work together to restore films,” according to Doros, signaling a new age of collaboration for the profession.
While archives like MoMA, George Eastman Museum, UCLA Film and Television Archive, Academy Film Archive, Library of Congress, and others have preserved and restored films for decades, the renewed interest in older films dovetailed with the growth of the home movie market. “When the DVD home video home entertainment market opened up, the demand for these films to have the best image quality, the audience demanded better and better image quality, and that really helped the field of preservation almost better than anything else because then the studios had an incentive,” Bodde said.
Over the years, film restoration organizations worked together to bring these movies out of archives, basements, attics, and closets, but they still face financial challenges to fund the painstaking work. IndieCollect’s first batch of restorations was funded by Kickstarter. The Film Foundation and the Women’s Film Preservation Fund found a partner in America Movie Classic’s Preservation Festival during their early years before the cable channel became the home for zombie series and prestige TV dramas in the 2010s. Today, many film restoration organizations work with foundations and archives to pool resources and funding to complete a restoration. “We have been able to raise more money lately than we were at the beginning, so we are able to give more films more money,” said Lawler. “It is still not what is needed and still not what we’d like to do. The problem is that the need keeps growing faster than we can grow.”
While thousands of titles await restoration, all organizations are limited to how many projects they can take on in a given year due to the expensive and time-consuming nature of a well-done restoration. “Since we support all eras, all genres, and disciplines, we’re trying to sort out if there are any films that are currently in real peril like mold or vinegar syndrome (a form of film decay),” said Kirsten Larvick, co-chair of the Women’s Film Preservation Fund. “Does something need urgent attention? What is completely out of circulation?”
“IndieCollect only restores about five to ten movies a year,” said Cameron Haffner, restoration & filmmaker services manager at IndieCollect. “Maybe like 10% of the films we restore are acquisitions from filmmakers who are like, ‘My film is going to disappear just because I have to dispose of it.’ IndieCollect has to step in, acquire it, preserve it, clean it, and digitize it before significant vinegar syndrome sets in and it starts decaying beyond repair or beyond the standard for digitization because then it just gets remarkably expensive.”
The Film Foundation, which also gives grants for preservation projects, works with partnering archives to find out which titles they’re looking to restore to discuss with the organization’s board of directors, who may suggest additional titles for restoration funding. “A good example of that is Satyajit Ray’s ‘Days and Nights in the Forest,’ that’s one of Wes Anderson’s favorites,” said Bodde. “He loves Ray, and this is a film that he’s particularly fond of. He said it’s hard to see, let’s try to restore that. That process takes time to identify the rights holders and work out a plan for accessing the original negative and get funding. All those things have finally come together thanks to our partners at the Film Heritage Foundation and the Criterion Collection. Then the Golden Globes Foundation provided the funding so that the film is going to premiere at Cannes and Wes will be there.”
Working with Burnett on restoring “Killer of Sheep” and “My Brother’s Wedding” was a moment of clarity for Heller and Doros. “It made us realize that if we were going to take risks on films, we might as well take risks on films that we believed should be available, both for aesthetic and cinematic reasons, and for political and historical reasons,” she said. That includes their efforts to bring “The Annihilation of Fish” back to audiences. After a sour review sank its distribution deal, the film remained in limbo for years. Burnett turned to his friends at Milestone to get it released in 2002, and the group spent 19 years getting the rights to the film back for its long-overdue release.
This year’s edition of Restored and Rediscovered, running from May 15-22 at the Jacob Burns Film Center, features a variety of films and a panel discussion about the state of film preservation and restoration. The series will screen three restorations from The Film Foundation including John Ford’s “The Searchers” with an introduction by TFF board member and “The Holdovers” director Alexander Payne, one of the recent World Cinema Project restorations of Sergei Parajanov’s “Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors,” and a collaboration with Milestone Films that brought back Charles Burnett’s “The Annihilation of Fish” for its long awaited theatrical release. The Women’s Film Preservation Fund will kick off their 30th anniversary celebration with a screening of “The Affair at Raynor’s,” a restored serial episode, and Francis Marion’s “Just Around the Corner,” one of the early feature films directed by a woman, both with live musical accompaniment. IndieCollect’s restoration of the Sundance hit “Girl’s Town” will close out the series’ fourteen-film program, including restorations from France, the Philippines, and Australia.
After the series concludes, there will be many more restorations to watch. IndieCollect’s latest releases, “Northern Lights” and Lily Tomlin’s one-woman show “The Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe,” will screen in theaters in June and July, respectively. The Women’s Film Preservation Fund is currently accepting preservation applications for a new grant cycle through June 30 and plan on hosting many more screenings and events commemorating their 30th anniversary, including the premieres of two of their latest restorations, “The Heart of the Matter” and “Two Lies,” later this year.
Among The Film Foundation’s busy slate of new restorations, Bodde is excited for the new restorations premiering at the Cannes Film Festival this week, including King Vidor’s “Duel in the Sun,” Satyajit Ray’s “Days and Nights in the Forest,” and Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina’s “Chronicle of the Year of Embers.” While “The Annihilation of Fish” is making its way through theaters, Heller and Doros suggested audiences check out Milestone’s latest releases, Bridgett Davis’ “Naked Acts” and David Schickele’s “Bushman,” a prescient docu-drama hybrid about a college student who’s wrongfully arrested and deported. The pair also recently made headlines for giving their storied company away to film historian Maya Cade, who was instrumental in restoring “Naked Acts.”
“I know a lot of young people, and they don’t look at decades, they don’t say, oh, this film is black and white. This film is old. This film was made in another country,” said Bodde. “They’re very open to cinema. If it speaks to them, moves them, or interests them, then they’re open to it. I’m very hopeful that young people will love and care about cinema. There are also a lot of young people who are interested in the field of film preservation, and that makes me very hopeful.”
(Disclaimer: Monica Castillo is the Series Curator and Senior Film Programmer of the Restored and Rediscovered Film Festival.)