The last few years have seen the resurrection of several so-called "lost" films," movies never distributed in America or significantly overlooked in their original theatrical runs. Films like Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l'echafaud, reviewed in recess in 2005), Army of Shadows and Overlord have found new life decades after they were originally produced.
Rialto Pictures, a New York-based restoration and distribution company, has been at the forefront of the revolution, taking old prints of films and scanning, cleaning and reprinting them, then distributing the films to art-house theaters across the country. The critical reaction has been overwhelming, reaching a peak in 2006 as Army of Shadows, a 1969 film by French director Jean-Pierre Melville, was named the top film of the year by both Premiere Magazine and New York Times critic Manohla Dargis.
Returning to undiscovered masterpieces is an understandable urge for film historians and enthusiasts like Rialto or the Criterion Collection series of DVDs, which has recently released Overlord and Elevator to the Gallows special editions and will release Army of Shadows in May, but it's less understandable in the context of today's film world.
After all, the trend has been toward remaking older films, not restoring and re-releasing them. Take Chris Rock's systematic removal of subtlety and intelligence from 1957 film Love in the Afternoon (2007's I Think I Love My Wife) as an example of how not to do it, and Martin Scorcese's The Departed (2006) as a lesson in crafting a solid film from used parts (Scorcese's film was adapted from Hong Kong hit Infernal Affairs).
Hank Okazaki, program director in Film/Video/Digital, runs the Duke Screen/Society, an annual screening series that featured Army of Shadows earlier this year. He said the backward trend is part of the process of understanding modern cinema.
"Sometimes you'll focus on recent films made about the past, and then you end up returning to older films," Okazaki says. "There's always a desire to show new work, but [programs are] always more substantial if you have older films as well."
In March, Criterion launched Eclipse, a new line of DVDs focused on the distribution of unseen works by important directors. The mission statement is simple: provide "lost, forgotten or overshadowed films in simple, affordable editions... a brief cinematheque retrospective for the adventurous home viewer."
For a company like Criterion, known for their scrupulous restoration process, the short turnaround for the Eclipse line-releasing a boxset of titles monthly-is a significant change.
Criterion was unable to "make a dent in the number of important unreleased films [they'd] like people to be able to see [without Eclipse]," said Criterion President Peter Becker in a statement.
The notion that companies like Criterion and Rialto are filling the niche of availability and education appeals to Okazaki.
"Art-house cinemas used to-in their heyday-do retrospectives, and a lot of film buffs got their education from those screenings. Today, there's none of that," he said. "Screen/Society, like Criterion and Rialto, are working on an educational mission."
That mission is reaching a wider and wider audience, and opening up an extraordinary variety of films for public consumption. Overlord, for example, released on DVD by Criterion, is a fiction film constructed from a hybridization of archival footage and original material.
Unlike what could technically be its closest brother, Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line (1988), in which real events are restaged and shot fiction-style before being cut into documentary interview footage, Overlord seems anything but fiction narrative produced in a new way.
New, of course, is the subjective word, since Overlord was made in 1975. But Okazaki is quick to note that discovering new styles in old film isn't the slightest bit strange.
"Things don't always just progress and advance," he said. "A 40-year-old film can seem daring and innovative today-Hollywood has gotten a little tame."
So the resurgence of unseen or previously ignored films in our theaters and our home theaters cannot be attached to a single movement: It could be representative of the re-emergence of film education for the masses or merely a rebellion against the products of our current studio system. But it's also quite possible that the reason for the proliferation might simply lie with the film enthusiasts.
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