New York Film Festival Announces Revivals Slate

Yesterday the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced the films to be screened at the 51^st New York Film Festival under their newly coined “Revivals” moniker, a section of the festival formerly known as the “Masterworks” that celebrates newly restored classic films by some of the world’s greatest filmmakers. The full slate this year includes eleven films made between 1946 and 2000 and is described by the NYFF’s Director of Programming and Selection Committee Chair, Kent Jones, as representing “a cross-section of cinema history.”

It just so happens that a few of the films in the Revivals section are from directors in the Criterion Collection. Here is a list of those films:

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993) 139 min
Director: Martin Scorsese
Country: USA
Edith Wharton’s 1925 novel about a secret passion within the social universe of Old New York struck many writers and fans as an odd departure for Martin Scorsese. When it was released in 1993, The Age of Innocence was greeted with equal amounts of admiration and puzzlement. 20 years later, this stunning film seems like one of Scorsese’s greatest – as visually expressive as it is emotionally fine-tuned, the movie is a magnificent lament for missed chances and lost time. With an extraordinary cast led by Daniel Day-Lewis as Newland and Michelle Pfeiffer as Ellen. Grover Crisp and his team at Sony have now given Scorsese’s film the long-awaited restoration it deserves – this is the world premiere. Restored by Sony Pictures Entertainment.

THE CHASE (1946) 86 min
Director: Arthur Ripley
Country: USA
This crazily plotted 1946 adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s even crazier novel The Black Path of Fear is the very essence of the post-war strain of American cinema now known as “film noir.” Robert Cummings plays an everyman vet whose life is turned upside down when he finds a wallet that belongs to a sadistic gangster (Steve Cochran) who hires him as his chauffeur. The lovely Michèle Morgan is the gangster’s captive wife and Peter Lorre is his “assistant” Gino. For many years, The Chase was available only in substandard prints. When the negative was found in Europe, a full-scale restoration was undertaken, and here is the glorious outcome. Restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, funding provided by The Film Foundation and The Franco-American Cultural Fund.

THE LUSTY MEN (1952) 113 min
Director: Nicholas Ray
Country: USA
Nick Ray made six films (and shot material for several more) for RKO under Howard Hughes, with whom he enjoyed a tumultuous but close relationship. This one, set in the tough, restless world of the rodeo circuit, about “people who want a home of their own,” as Ray himself put it, was to be his last credited film at the studio. It is also one of his very best, and it has become more heartbreakingly lonesome and expressive with each passing year. With Robert Mitchum, Susan Hayward and Arthur Kennedy and a great supporting cast, shot by the great Lee Garmes, and now restored to its full elegiacal beauty. Restored by Warner Brothers in collaboration with The Film Foundation and The Nicholas Ray Foundation.

PROVIDENCE (1977) 110 min
Director: Alain Resnais
Countries: France/Switzerland/UK
Alec Guinness once aptly likened his fellow actor John Gielgud’s voice to the sound of “a silver trumpet muffled in silk.” Gielgud’s extraordinary instrument is heard throughout Alain Resnais’ first English-language production. English playwright David Mercer’s script is set for most of its duration within the feverish mind of a dying novelist (played by Gielgud) during a sleepless night, as he compulsively conjures a labyrinthine narrative in which the same five people (played by Dirk Bogarde, Ellen Burstyn, David Warner, Elaine Stritch and Denis Lawson) are cast and recast. Resnais’ opulent, handsome film, with a lush romantic score by Miklós Rósza, has been long overdue for a restoration – it’s a feast for the eye and the ear. Restored by Jupiter Communications in collaboration with Director of Photography Ricardo Aronovich.

SANDRA (Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa) (1965) 105 min
Director: Luchino Visconti
Country: Italy
Shady family secrets, incestuous sibling bonds, descents into madness, decades-old conspiracies: with Sandra, Luchino Visconti traded The Leopard‘s elegiac grandeur for something grittier and pulpier: the Electra myth in the form of a gothic melodrama. Claudia Cardinale’s title character returns to her ancestral home in Tuscany and has an unexpected encounter with her long-lost brother and a reckoning with her family’s dark wartime past. Shooting in a decaying mansion set amid a landscape of ruins, Visconti found a new idiom for the great theme of his late career: the slow death of an aristocracy rooted in classical ideals but long since hollowed out by decadence and corruption. Restored by Sony Pictures Entertainment and Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee (ASAC).

THEY LIVE BY NIGHT (1948) 95 min
Director: Nicholas Ray
Country: USA
After his years in New York left-wing theater and on the road with Alan Lomax, Nick Ray went to Hollywood to work with his friend Elia Kazan. John Houseman brought Ray to RKO, then owned by Howard Hughes, and in 1948 the young director made one of the most striking debuts in American cinema. Adapted from Edward Anderson’s 1935 novel Thieves Like Us (which would be revisited in 1974 by Robert Altman), They Live By Night is at once innovative (the film opens with the first genuinely expressive helicopter shot), visually electrifying, behaviorally nuanced, and, in the scenes between the young Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell, soulfully romantic. Restored by Warner Brothers in collaboration with The Film Foundation and The Nicholas Ray Foundation.

The restored slate also features some Criterion-related films like director Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang starring Michel Piccoli and Juliette Binoche, and Try and Get Me by director Cy Enfield whose film Zulu is a long out of print Criterion Laserdisc. Any way you look at it this Revivals/Masterworks portion is one of my favorite aspects of the festival. At last year’s NYFF I got to see Criterion’s restoration of Heaven’s Gate with director Michael Cimino in attendance and it was one of the best theatergoing experiences of my life. For potentially one of the best theatergoing experiences of your life be sure to check out some of these restorations at the festival when general public tickets go on sale September 8^th.

To read the complete list of Revivals films, click here.