For film aficionados of all stripes, one of the highlights of each fall season in New York City is undoubtedly the Museum of Modern Art’s “To Save and Project,” its annual festival of film preservation, running October 24 through November 22. Now entering its 12th year, the event’s slate of films programmed by curators Joshua Siegel and Dave Kehr this go-around constitute the widest ranging and most varied selection of moving-image work you’re likely to see at any time, all in one place.
The festival opens with a restoration of Allan Dwan’s “The Iron Mask,” a late-period silent film — and Dwan’s last — made in 1929, starring Douglas Fairbanks, a sequel to the successful “The Three Musketeers” and the final swashbuckler the actor would make. “I thought it was the end of fine art,” Dwan exclaimed to Peter Bogdanovich in his book, “Who the Hell Made It,” about the emergence of the talkies.
Despite his reluctance to move to sound, Dwan made some of his best pictures late in his career, and as evidenced by MoMA’s retrospective last summer, he is one of the most underappreciated of the classical Hollywood filmmakers. He had one of the lengthiest careers within the studio system, so long that, as relayed to Bogdanovich in the same book, the director Orson Welles once exclaimed: “He started directing, didn’t he, just about the time of the invention of the electric light?”
Speaking of Welles, he’s represented in the program with “Too Much Johnson,” his first film, an unfinished silent work in three parts shot in 1938, and recently discovered in a warehouse in Italy. On the more obscure front, there’s “To The Last Man,” a low-budget 1933 Randolph Scott western directed by Henry Hathaway (unfairly categorized under the “Lightly Likeable” section in critic Andrew Sarris’s “American Cinema” tome), and two Poverty Row curiosities: restored 35mm prints of Edgar G. Ulmer’s melodrama “Her Sister’s Secret,” and Alfred L. Werker’s subversive “Repeat Performance.”
At the center of the festival are two films from Hollywood journeyman John Boorman that give unusual insight into his eclectic body of work. “Leo the Last” stars Marcello Mastroianni in one of his best performances, and the film, composed of a muted color palate, stands in contrast to “Excalibur,” which explodes in hazy shades of blacks, blues, and purples, a hallucinatory take on the King Arthur myth that is almost the complete opposite from the more boots-on-the-ground “Leo.” Both films display the wide range of the formal and narrative modes Boorman is capable of, and deserve to be slotted next to his more famous work such as “Deliverance” and “Point Blank.”
For more cinematic hallucinations, there’s “The Bubble,” a 1966 oddity written and directed by Arch Oboler that was supposed to be the launch of the 4-D Space-Vision, a system that never took off. If that’s not enough images jumping off the screen, the “3-D Funhouse!” program features a handful of rare shorts from the 1940s and ’50s made in the United States, Canada, and the USSR.
“To Save and Project” is simply too massive to address everything, but for the sake of brevity a few that you’d be foolish to pass up: Derek Jarman’s startling twofer “Caravaggio” and “Sebastiane,” both presented in digital 2K restorations; the sadly departed Raul Ruiz’s “The Golden Boat,” a truly bizarre film from the master of bizarre films, shot in the streets of New York and starring members of the Wooster Group, Jim Jarmusch, Vito Acconci, and many, many more; “The White Game,” made by the Swedish documentary collective Grupp 13 about a clash between student activists and racist police in May 1968; and the rambunctious “Joe Bullet,” the first film made in South Africa with an all-black cast that promises to stand tall next to the best Blaxploitation-classics of the era.
Among the rarities and treasures from around the world that are ripe for rediscovery, one of the most interesting will be the recreation of the “Cine Virus” program from 1978, organized by Michael Oblowitz and the now-famous Hollywood filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow. The original program was pegged to the release of a special issue of the journal Semiotext(e) called “Schizo-Culture,” and its reappearance is presented in conjunction with “The Return of Schizo-Culture,” a performance at MoMA PS1 in November. Among the highlights are legendary NYC underground filmmaker Eric Mitchell’s “Mass Homicide,” Bruce Connor’s “Mongoloid,” with music by Devo, and a rare screening of Bigelow’s “Set-Up,” her student film at Columbia that was recently preserved by MoMA, which features two men fighting (one of them weirdly the bug-eyed actor Gary Busey) and the semioticians Sylvère Lotringer and Marshall Blonsky in voiceover deconstructing the images we’re seeing on screen.
