MoMA Announces TO SAVE AND PROJECT: The 20th MoMA International Festival Of Film Preservation

The Museum of Modern Art announces To Save and Project: The 20th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation, which will screen from January 11 to February 4, 2024.

This year's edition of MoMA's annual festival includes more than 80 newly preserved features and shorts from 18 countries, many having world or North American premieres and presented in original versions not seen since their initial theatrical releases. The festival opens with the North American premiere of the Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler The Black Pirate (Albert Parker, 1926), introduced by filmmaker Alexander Payne.

MoMA's complex restoration faithfully reconstructs the film's original palette of rich browns and greens, capturing the look of Technicolor's Process Two such as it hasn't been seen in nearly 100 years. To Save and Project is organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film, MoMA, with Francisco Valente, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film, MoMA, and Cindi Rowell, independent curator. 

The 2024 program features the world premiere of John Ford's Arrowsmith (1931) in its original theatrical release version, as well as Andy Warhol's never-before-seen Bitch (1965) in a special program with a newly struck 35mm print of Mike Nichols's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Other festival highlights include the North American premieres of Wim Wenders's Lightning over Water (1980); Chantal Akerman's All Night Long (1982) and Hôtel des acacias (1982); Alain Tanner's Messidor (1979); Agnès Varda's The Creatures (1966), starring Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli; Agnieszka Holland's Fever (1981); Idrissa Ouédraogo's Yam Daabo (1987); Menelek Shabazz's Burning an Illusion (1982); Kōzaburō Yoshimura's Undercurrent (1956); Wong Tin-lam's The Wild, Wild Rose (1960), a cosmopolitan Hong Kong retelling of Bizet's Carmen starring Grace Chang; Aribam Syam Sharma's The Chosen One (1990), which offers a rare glimpse of moviemaking in the Indian state of Manipur; and Richard Eichberg's Weimar melodrama Pavement Butterfly (1929), presented in a tribute to the actress Anna May Wong. 

This year's spotlight on Black cinema includes the world premiere of the Barbados-born Menelik Shabazz's Burning an Illusion (1981), which will be shown with Fronza Woods's Killing Time (1979) and Fannie's Film (1981) in a program exploring the image and place of Black women in contemporary Western society. The series will also feature Ouédraogo's Yam Daabo (1987), Desiré Ecaré's Concerto for an Exile (1968), and David Schickele's Bushman (1971). A long-believed-lost promotional newsreel by Paulin Soumano Vieyra celebrating the first World Festival of Black Arts, held in 1966 in Senegal, features appearances by Aimé Césaire, Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, and many others. To Save and Project will also pay tribute to the filmmaker and visual anthropologist Skip Norman with two programs of new restorations spanning two decades, from 1966 to 1986. Norman was an artist who lived and worked in the US and West Germany in the late 1960s and 1970s, making powerful and provocative films like Blues People (1969) and Strange Fruit (1969). He also collaborated with Helke Sander, Lothar Lambert, Harun Farocki, Mirra Bank, and the poet Nikki Giovanni on films that remain politically relevant to this day. 

Festival offerings also reflect a renewed appreciation for many female filmmakers from around the world. These include Mirra Bank's Spirit to Spirit: Nikki Giovanni (1986), which will be presented by the filmmaker on January 18. Additionally, on February 3, there will be an evening dedicated to two trailblazing women at the New York Philharmonic—the conductor Antonia Bricco and double bassist Orin O'Brien—with a special screening presented by the singer-songwriter Judy Collins and documentarian Molly O'Brien. Other highlights include a program of experimental films from the 1960s–80s by the Argentinian artist Narcisa Hirsch and a program of Kafka-inspired avant-garde 1950s shorts by the London-based Italian émigré Lorenza Mazzetti. 

To Save and Project unveils a selection of films that were either banned or heavily censored, reconstructed to their original versions. This includes Agnieszka Holland's Fever (1981), banned shortly before martial law was declared in Poland and the filmmaker was driven into exile; Bahrudin Bato Čengić's Life of a Shock Force Worker (1972), a noteworthy rediscovery of Yugoslavian cinema; and Tsui Hark's Dangerous Encounters: 1st Kind (1980), which unnerved the Hong Kong censors in a climate of political instability. The festival also presents international cult classics, such as Richard C. Sarafian's Vanishing Point (1971), a definitive car chase movie cowritten by the Chilean novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante; Franco Rossi's Smog (1966), the first Italian feature shot entirely in the US; Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz's drive-in horror movie Messiah of Evil (1974); and Flash Gordon (1936), a 13-chapter Hollywood serial from 1936 that is still widely regarded as one of the greatest comic book movies ever made. 

Festival highlights also include special related programming: 

On January 13, the screenwriter and biographer David Stenn presents Monta Bell's Man, Woman and Sin (1927), a sophisticated psychodrama, unseen for nearly a century, starring the legendary John Gilbert and Jeanne Eagels. The presentation will also include a rare screen test of Adele Astaire, along with a 1930 Fox Movietone newsreel featuring America's hottest Jazz Age band and teenage sensation, Anita Page. 

A Loaded Conversation: Andy Warhol's Bitch and Mike Nichols's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, on Saturday, January 13, at 4:30 p.m. in Titus Theater 2, will be presented on the occasion of a new book by Philip Gefter, Cocktails with George and Martha. Between the two films, there will be an onstage conversation with Gefter, Mike Nichols biographer Mark Harris, Greg Pierce from the Andy Warhol Museum, and the actor, poet, and filmmaker Gerard Malanga. 

On January 14, the celebrated archivist Rick Prelinger will present two self-curated programs of some of his favorite sponsored films from the 1930s–50s in unique vintage prints. 

On Saturday, January 20, the festival pays tribute to Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa, American actors who radically redefined the ways in which Asians were depicted in Hollywood cinema. Yunte Huang, the award-winning author of the new book Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong's Rendezvous with American History, will introduce the North American premiere of Pavement Butterfly (1929) and two films starring Hayakawa. 

The 50th anniversary of the group known as DEVO has prompted a restoration and remastering project in the band's film, video, and audio archives. On January 27, DEVO founder Gerald Casale and restoration head Peter Conheim will showcase these restorations, including Bruce Conner's Mongoloid (1977), as well as never-before-seen 16mm film footage from DEVO's breakthrough appearance at NYC's Max's Kansas City in 1977. 

See accompanying screening schedule for full program details and guest appearance dates. 

As the first cultural institution to collect film as an art form, The Museum of Modern Art has long been at the forefront of the preservation and restoration of moving-image material. Founded in 2003, MoMA's annual To Save and Project festival has become the Museum's showcase for presenting new restorations from our archive, as well as work from colleagues around the world—archives, foundations, studios, independent filmmakers and others— engaged in saving our cinema heritage. 

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