The East End’s only film festival entirely devoted to the preservation of film and its culture returns with a long weekend of restored classics, rarities, exciting rediscoveries, special presentations, guests and more.
The Festival of Presevation Pass will grant you immediate entry at the door to all screenings and events throughout the weekend, and includes a special invite to The Preservation Party, Saturday night November 9th.
Intro by George Feltenstein
Plays 11/8 at 6:00pm
Sixty-five years ago, Alfred Hitchcock released his stylish, brilliantly self-parodic espionage thriller, which changed every Hollywood action production in its wake. A successful Madison Avenue executive (Cary Grant) is mistaken for a Fed by foreign agents (led by James Mason, villainously debonair) and pushed into a cross-country medley of imposing set pieces.
Intro by Christopher Tellefsen
Plays 11/8 at 9:00pm
Harmony Korine’s debut feature is an audacious, lyrical evocation of America’s rural underbelly, and an elegy in the southern-gothic tradition of William Faulkner and William Eggleston. Shot in Korine’s native Nashville—standing in for the tornado-ravaged Xenia, Ohio—the rough-hewn film follows two young friends, Tummler and Solomon, as they ride around town, huffing glue and hunting stray cats, their every local encounter charged with vaudevillian anarchy as well as deep pathos.
Kids and Families Matinees
Plays 11/9 at 11am and 11/10 at 12pm
A special program of newly restored classic cartoons from prolific animator, director, and producer Walter Lantz from directors Paul Smith, Tex Avery, James Culhane, and Lantz himself. Featuring, among others, legendary characters Woody Woodpecker (the screwball mascot of Universal Pictures), Chilly Willy (the only penguin not equipped for cold weather), Smedley Dog (an anthropomorphic sidekick hound), and Professor Dingledong (a German-accented mad scientist).
Intro by Dave Kehr
Plays 11/9 at 12:45pm
The setting is the desert of western Texas, a land of high temperatures, low rainfall, and no shade, into which a frail young woman from the east (Lillian Gish, in one of the great performances of silent film) has been thrust against her will, totally unprepared for the desolation—physical, social, psychological—that awaits her.
Intro by Ramin Bahrani
Plays 11/9 at 3:00pm
(SAYAT-NOVA) A breathtaking fusion of poetry, ethnography, and cinema, Sergei Parajanov’s masterwork overflows with unforgettable images and sounds. In a series of tableaux that blend the tactile with the abstract, The Color of Pomegranates revives the splendors of Armenian culture through the story of the eighteenth-century troubadour Sayat-Nova, charting his intellectual, artistic, and spiritual growth through iconographic compositions rather than traditional narrative.
Intro by Alexander Payne
Plays 11/9 at 5:15pm
Working together for the 12th time, John Wayne and director John Ford forged The Searchers into a landmark Western offering an indelible image of the frontier and the men and women who challenged it. Wayne plays an ex-Confederate soldier seeking his niece, captured by Comanches who massacred his family. He won’t surrender to hunger, thirst, the elements or loneliness.
Intro by Kevin Schaeffer
Plays 11/9 at 8:45pm
With a screenplay by Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone) and Michael Wilson (The Bridge on the River Kwai), based on the 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle, this classic sci-fi tale brings us an astronaut crew (Charlton Heston, Jeff Burton, and Robert Gunner) that crash-lands on a planet in the distant future, where intelligent talking apes are the dominant species — and humans are the oppressed and enslaved.
Panel Discussion
11/10 at 11:00am
Featuring presentations and a discussion with archivists, historians, curators and top preservation experts. Free admission, followed by brunch on the third floor.
Presentations by:
Alan Berliner. Filmmaker and artist.
Berliner's work is featured in SHC's third floor exhibit "Think Like a Filmmaker."
Joe Lauro. CEO of Historic Films Archive.
David Schwartz. Independent curator, writer, and representing The Film-Makers' Cooperative, the oldest and largest distributor of independent and avant-garde films in the world
Cassandra Moore. Vice President, Mastering and Archive at NBCUniversal.
Screening + Commentary by Ron Magliozzi & Katie Trainor
Plays 11/10 at 1:30pm
With the introduction of small-gauge film stock in 1923 affordable home moviemaking was born. Over the subsequent decades, thousands of reels of amateur film were shot, amounting to one of the largest and most significant bodies of moving-image work produced in the 20th century.
Q&A with Ernie Gehr
Plays 11/10 at 3:30pm
“I’m a city walker, and a city filmmaker of both interior and exterior phenomena, a chronicler of the invisible daily life in the city. With no fancy equipment or gadgets, I go about my business and try to blend with the crowd. Yes, sometimes I encounter resistance, and a ‘no-no’ gesture, but most of the time I’m left alone, especially in my old age, ‘that crazy old man.
Intro by Martin Scorsese
Plays 11/10 at 8:30pm
Novelist Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) seems to have found the perfect woman in Ellen (Gene Tierney), a beautiful socialite who initiates a whirlwind romance and steers him into marriage before he can think twice. Yet the glassy surface of Ellen’s devotion soon reveals monstrous depths, as Richard comes to realize that his wife is shockingly possessive and may be capable of destroying anyone who comes between them. A singular Hollywood masterpiece that draws freely from the women’s picture and film noir alike, Leave Her to Heaven boasts elegant direction by melodrama specialist John M. Stahl, blazing Technicolor cinematography by Leon Shamroy, and a chilling performance by Tierney, whose Ellen is a femme fatale unlike any other—a woman whose love is as pure as it is poisonous.
Special Screening || 35mm
Plays 11/11 at 2:00pm
Dorothy Arzner - one of Hollywood’s only female directors in the early 20th century who helped launch the careers of Katharine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, and Rosalind Russell - was the first woman to direct a film with sound. The Wild Party, Paramount’s first talking picture, was also fans’ first chance to hear silent era star Clara Bow talk.
Special Screening || 35mm
Plays 11/11 at 4:30pm
Employing large props, walls of water, sweeping crane shots, reverse motion and neon with new special effects, the title The Gang’s All Here might as well refer to the contents of Busby Berkeley’s bag of tricks, which sends this sentimental wartime love story soaring into outer space.
Co-presented with Cinema Tropical and OLA
Plays 11/11 at 7:00pm
(LLÉVAME EN TUS BRAZOS) Class conflicts and erotic torments come to a head in Julio Bracho’s formally daring masterpiece, one of the most important melodramas of the decade. Take Me in Your Arms follows a fisherman’s daughter (the incomparable Ninón Sevilla, also serving as an uncredited producer with brothers Pedro and Guillermo Calderón) through a nightmare of exploitation and misery—along the way becoming a famous soubrette—in order to erase her father’s debts while she tries, again and again, to reunite with her true love (Armando Silvestre)
Special Screening
Plays 11/11 at 9:00pm
Director Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho) adds provocative layers of meaning to this darkly funny examination of suburban sociopathy that hits all the noir trademarks. The all-American obsession with celebrity turns monstrous in this deliciously subversive (and disturbingly prescient) satire of our television-mediated, true-crime-obsessed age.