The 21st incarnation of To Save and Project, the Museum of Modern Art’s annual festival of newly restored international films from the world’s archives, has become one of cinema’s most important showcases for the diversity of restoration activities. This year’s selections run the gamut from silent masterpieces to neglected and forgotten films from India, Syria, Czechoslovakia, Thailand, Brazil, Argentina, and even Hollywood.
One curious result of comparing films from so many cultures and eras is noticing how many recurring elements they have in common. Notice from the first week of programs how many films have weddings. More strangely, notice how many have water hoses.
7th Heaven (1927) – Director: Frank Borzage
When can an unabashedly sentimental tearjerker seem delicate and restrained even during the most eye-rolling twists? When it’s directed by Frank Borzage, a master who combined noble emotions and classy style with Hollywood’s brand of ecumenical spirituality. He invented a certain cinematic tone, or at least perfected it. That mastery is on full display in 7th Heaven (1927), the heart-wrenching romance between a downtrodden prostitute in Paris and a big bluff palooka who rises one level from working the sewers to cleaning the streets with a hose.
Chico (Charles Farrell), who forever brags that he’s “quite a remarkable fellow”, intervenes when Diane (Janet Gaynor) is being whipped by her evil sister Nana (Gladys Brockwell). His awkward heroism leads to Diane moving into his room on the seventh floor, with the camera frequently following them up seven flights of stairs to their “heaven”. It may be an attic, but it’s as huge as the set designer can make it. On the day Chico decides they might as well get married, WWI is declared, and he must depart within the hour.
As the second half of 7th Heaven turns into a war picture marked by model work and backlot battles, self-proclaimed atheist Chico gives God a chance to preserve their happiness. Chico vows that every morning at 11, he and Diane will communicate mystically by gazing into the ether. This is part and parcel of Borzage’s commitment to the idea that true love conquers all, redeems all, and triumphs morally overall.
7th Heaven is way over the top – and wait till you see the ending – but there’s no guff like classic Hollywood guff and no director like Borzage to pour it on with open heart and technical prowess. He’s abetted by the intimacy of silent cinema and its power to envelop viewers in its spell. In a theatre, only the most desiccated eyes won’t produce some waterworks, if not quite as much as Chico’s hose.
7th Heaven is the first and most famous of Gaynor and Farrell’s 12-screen pairings. At the first Academy Awards, prizes went to Gaynor, Borzage, and writer Benjamin Glazer, with art director Harry Oliver getting a nod. This blockbuster was once classed among the high points of cinema, and if cultural tastes in sentiment have somewhat left it behind, that’s more to our detriment than the film’s. MoMA’s tinted print is a new digital restoration with clarity sharp enough to slice vegetables.
The Mirage (Māyā Miriga, 1984) – Director: Nirad Mohapatra
The Mirage, an Indian film in the Odia language, is the only international film feature made by Nirad Mohapatra in collaboration with several family members. This is what I call a “nothing happens” movie, and that’s not a slam but a badge of honor. Indeed, quite a bit happens as we spend time with a privileged family in a large old house. Both family and house have seen better days.
A slow, serene accumulation of incidents and details lets us know everyone in the place and how they interact: the retired teacher who heads the family, his wife, his dying mother, their several grown sons and their wives, plus a single young daughter. Births, deaths, and marriages all happen in the house as family members chafe at their prospects or lack of same. Most of the sons want to leave, representing a decline in the old tradition of many generations of a prosperous family remaining together.
More than any other filmmaker, Mohapatra seems to be India’s answer to Yasujiro Ozu and his melancholy vision of life frittering away. People get along, but most of them feel enervated until their real lives begin elsewhere, and loneliness will be the legacy for those left behind. The older generation’s favorite theme is how things aren’t what they used to be.
“Why all the melodrama?” asks one modern daughter-in-law over what seems to her a minor issue. The secret is the complete absence of melodrama in the face of disappointments. The Mirage‘s philosophical title refers to the idea that the reality we see around us is an illusion, as are all things in which we invest our daily lives. As the carefully placed camera observes and accepts all this without fuss, the idiomatic Indian score now and then swells mournfully. Visually, the film ends as it began, but in between, all has changed – and all has stayed the same.
It took the Film Heritage Foundation three years to restore The Mirage from a battered 16mm negative and a fading 35mm print into this 4K digital restoration.
Calamity (Kalamita, 1982) – Director: Věra Chytilová
Czechoslovakia’s Věra Chytilová is most famous for Daisies (Sedmikrásky, 1966), a satire so brash, chaotic, and good that it got pulled from theatres in its own country. That’s how you know you’ve struck a nerve.
Calamity (1982) isn’t that raucous, but its world contains no serenity. The breezy, handheld aesthetic gives an impression of being improvised among flustered people, equally quick to anger and laughter. Frequent laughter is the most surprising element. You’d think everyone was enjoying themselves.
In its opening scenes of a father wondering how his son’s college exams are going, you might think Calamity is an extension of The Mirage. Honza (Boleslav Polívka) is young, tall, handsome, long-haired, and confused. As he quits school to get a “real” job as a train engineer, several aggressive women throw themselves at him. They all get in bed with him at various points, seemingly to no avail. If a male filmmaker were telling Honza’s story, he’d be a successful Casanova. In Chytilová’s hands, he’s the one who comes across as a blushing virgin, and this may be one symptom of his not knowing what he wants from life.
In the last act, Honza’s train is stuck in a snowdrift with a cross-section of people, including all three women who have competed for his attention. The symbolism is clear: the train is stuck in society’s rut, going nowhere with all aboard. Indeed, the plot of Calamity is like a train, its scenes strung together almost at random along the track of Honza’s bewilderment, and we receive no assurance that it’s on time for its destination instead of beyond control. One of the ironic jokes about the fascist era is that at least the trains ran on time (unfortunately for many). Chytilová’s international film almost glories in its knowledge that nobody’s going anywhere.
Raskolnikow (1923) – Director: Robert Wiene
Germany’s Robert Wiene had been directing films for years when he made his name with the Expressionist landmark The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), tossed into world cinema like an aesthetic grenade of dreamlike delirium. Though most of his later international films are forgotten, he remained a major director through the silent era.
Made in collaboration with the naturalistic actors of the Moscow Art Theatre, who relocated to Berlin from Soviet Russia, Wiene’s Raskolnikow (1923) adapts Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment by staging the events against the brazenly Expressionist sets of Andrej Andrejew. Refusing to believe in straight lines or right angles, every window, lamppost, and stairway is jagged, tilted, and theatrical. The only thing standing upright is Gregory Chmara, the titular student, first seen brooding about life in his garret. As we’re introduced to the gaunt figure, glaring moodily toward the camera with his hands on his cheeks, we can’t help thinking, “How Russian!”
Apart from the anti-realist design, Raskolnikov is impressively faithful to Dostoyevsky, meaning that beyond its hero’s personal story, it becomes a vast social canvas of misery, ennui, and despair redeemed only by faith and love. Seemingly all the novel’s details and characters are here: the prostitute Sonia (Maria Kryshanovskaya), her drunken father (Mikhail Tarkhanov) and desperate mother (Mariya Germanova), Raskolnikov’s loving mother (Elisabeta Skulskaja) and sister (Alla Tarasova), his best friend Razumihin (Andrei Zhilinsky), the wily investigator Porfiry Petrovich (Pavel Pavlov), the odious suitor Svidrigailov (Petr Sharov) and a dozen minor figures.
The doomed pawnbroker (Vera Toma) is depicted in process shots as looming hugely over desperate crowds, and one man’s speech about how such vermin don’t deserve to live can’t avoid a foreboding chill about where Germany was heading. It’s easy to imagine Raskolnikov‘s poverty and frustration resonating with Weimar audiences, making his path to moral self-destruction almost unbearably moving and sobering. One difference from the novel is that Wiene cuts the story off without the redemptive coda; there can be no such promises here.
Filmmuseum München has constructed this tinted and digitally restored Raskolnikow from several prints worldwide to make the most complete in existence. The result is dazzling enough to make us think more of Wiene’s invisible output, which needs the same treatment. Maybe people will start admitting that Wiene’s direction of actors and story construction is as important as his eye-catching set designers’.
A Real Woman (Mulher de Verdade, 1954) – Director: Alberto Cavalcanti
Alberto Cavalcanti‘s Brazilian comedy, A Real Woman (1954), opens with a pack of drunken musicians making a noisy midnight choir outside a tall apartment building of the new middle-class São Paulo. The tenants call the cops and a donnybrook ensues, leading to the hospital and jail. That’s how the nurse, Amelia (Inezita Barroso), meets and somehow falls for petty crook “Bamba la Zona” (Colé Santana), who confronts the police about his constitutional rights to free speech before they teach him otherwise.
Out of love, Bamba becomes a fireman – another movie, like the international film Seventh Heaven, about men with hoses! Bamba and Amelia get hitched but keep it a secret because the hospital only employs single nurses, and Amelia unusually insists on keeping her job. Then she’s romanced by the rich and handsome Lauro (Valdo Wanderley), who enlists the doctor to violate the rules and coerce Amelia into marriage when Lauro pretends to be dying. From then on, Amelia juggles two husbands in two worlds under the guise of long working hours. Speaking of exhaustion, she’s clearly fulfilling wifely duties with both men, or maybe that’s her source of energy.
The first thing to notice is that such a premise would never have gotten past Hollywood’s censorship. We need only compare A Real Woman with Hollywood fare like Wesley Ruggles’ Too Many Husbands (1940) and its remake, H.C. Potter’s Three for the Show (1955). In Hollywood’s story, a remarried woman finds her late first husband is still alive, and the lively crisis finds them all moving in together while she decides what to do. In the meantime, all marital relations are off. In fact, the men share a room to keep an eye on each other, which is another complication Hollywood wasn’t prepared to fully explore.
By contrast, Cavalcanti’s film not only winks at Amelia’s spousal shell game but pays most of its attention to comparing different levels of society. This point is signaled in the opening credits, presented over an array of mannequins dressed up in ways that foreshadow the action. Bamba’s working class world of sambas emphasizes the casual mixing of races, as seen in the married apartment dwellers and Bamba’s Afro-Brazilian buddy (popular performer Caco Velho), who picks up a domestic servant for his girlfriend.
Lauro’s world of snooty pretensions and posh set design, in which his thrice-divorced aunt makes a crack about the historical practice of marking slaves as their property, includes its own sexual variants. Prominently featured is an effeminate, French-speaking hairdresser who’s visually paired with another of his chic type at Lauro’s party. A special guest at the shindig, billed as “Ivan (Ivaná)”, is nightclub performer Ivan Damiao in wasp-waisted drag as his alter ego Ivaná, who sings for their supper. That performance is poorly shot and recorded, as though from another room, but it’s a fascinating detail decorating a story called A Real Woman.
Keeping these diverse worlds from crashing into each other becomes Amelia’s concern, so part of the fun is watching the husbands unwittingly make friends and begin their fateful journey to the truth, which is delayed as long as possible. A Real Woman is made on a tight budget with emphasis on its slyly unwinding script plus a few songs, mostly sung and strummed by Amelia.
Director Alberto Cavalcanti was a Brazilian who hardly spent time in his country. He trained with French avant-gardists, then spent years in British documentaries and worked at Ealing Studios, where his films included the fascinating wartime propaganda Went the Day Well (1942). A Real Woman belongs to a handful of Brazilian films made by Cavalcanti in the first half of the ’50s before heading back to Europe as a filmmaker for hire; have camera, will travel. He landed in Austria, East Germany, France, Italy and Israel.
As with other peripatetic artists without a portfolio, this internationalism obscures his career and our ability to assess or even access his films. That’s why projects like this are important. In this case, the Locarno Film Festival undertook a 4K digital restoration with Cinemateca Brasileira and other partners.
Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By (Et j’aime à la fureur, 2021) – Director: André Bonzel
André Bonzel’s documentary, Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By (2021), is constructed from footage of home movies shot by himself, by long-lost family members, and by strangers whose films he collected in markets over the years. The film is dedicated to all those strangers who one day picked up a camera and filmed their lives.
Those strangers were the pioneers of the personal handheld cinema that saturates and defines our society, although their activities seem quaint to us. As Bonzel observes, people only filmed happy moments of their vacations and relaxations, rarely moments of distress except surreptitiously in war or accidents. We see that the camera’s presence encourages people to “act” for it, to smile and dance and make faces.
Bonzel is best known as one of the creators of the mockumentary Man Bites Dog (1992), a dark absurdist satire about a serial killer that makes no attempt to resolve its contradictions while exploring how our behavior is affected by media. Aside from footage of his conspirators and when they played the film at Cannes, that’s not Bonzel’s subject in Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By. He’s discussing his life and several generations of his family across the 20th Century, a history shaped by cinema and sex all the way back to the fortune made by a man with many mistresses and bastard children.
Bonzel owes his information to two precious gifts. One gift is hundreds of family movies collected by a distant late relative, all carefully labeled. Another is a notebook left by his beloved and scandalous Aunt Lucette, seen in footage as a little old lady far from her glory years as a topless dancer in nightclubs. Her scandals aren’t so much related to her remarkably free life, which was no more so than the men in her family, but to her willingness to expose a dark wartime secret of Uncle Jean-Paul, another camera buff.
Combining his own family’s films with those of the strangers he’s obsessively collected all his life, Bonzel infers that they can stand in for each other because many people have had similar lives, at least in 20th-century France. His many stories include a great uncle who ran away to the circus in America, finding happiness and tragedy. The latest story is his discovery of true love and marriage after a spendthrift youth. He concludes that we film what we love. Thus he provides a panorama of privilege, loneliness, horniness, and regret, all captured by the truths and lies of footage that both hides and implies these things.
For international film buffs, one of Bonzel’s fascinating themes is an awareness of the earliest 1895 films of Louis Lumière, whose presence recurs in odd ways throughout the footage. One of Bonzel’s ancestors even made a salacious remake of Lumière’s famous slapstick comedy about a spraying garden hose (yet more hoses!) to spell out its symbolism.
The English title, Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By, is a non-attempt to translate the French title Et j’aime à la fureur, a quote from a Baudelaire poem in which he says he loves with a fury all things that mix sound and light. André and Anna Bonzel will be present at the screening.
Stars in Broad Daylight (Nujum al-Nahar, 1988) – Director: Ossama Mohamed
In near silence and darkness, a thick, heavy-grained wooden door opens outward to swing past the camera, a small chain and padlock dangling at the side. When the door swings far enough to expose its other side, the eye is drawn to a bright chink of light by the handle. Two chickens are slowly lowered from a square hole in a ceiling, followed by a naked boy who is upside down, holding them while bathed in a shaft of sunlight. Two children with uplifted eyes sit on the floor between an alcove and a stack of sacks, their arms held up as though to receive a blessing.
These are the first three images of Stars in Broad Daylight (1988), the feature debut of Syrian filmmaker Ossama Mohamed. According to MoMA, this international film was shown once in Syria and then banned by the dictatorship of Hafez al-Assad, and that’s not too surprising. Those opening images give the impression of exquisite visual poetry, but the film rapidly reveals itself as a bitterly satirical critique through the lens of one extended family. We’ll learn that the pretty title is itself a promise of violence, as in, “I’ll make you see stars in the daylight when I slap you.”
The first part takes place on the busy day of a double wedding on the property of a prosperous rural landowner. Like a mullah, an old man calls over the countryside that God will punish anyone who doesn’t come to the wedding and have a great time. As you might guess, the wedding quickly goes south because it was flawed in conception. A brother and sister are being married off to cousins, who are also siblings; it’s a financial deal. The farm brother (Zuhair Abdulkarim) is partly deaf from being boxed on the ears by his uncle as a child, and he’s regarded as backward. Such is the legacy of violence within a family where everyone makes a show of kissing each other and proclaiming their love and unity.
When the deaf man’s putative bride runs away with a bus driver, sister Sana (Sabah As-Salem) also refuses to marry the cousin who’s just arrived from life in Germany. This precipitates the savagely comic crisis, punctuated with many slaps, that occupies the rest of the action. Men in the family are forever hitting each other, scratching and bruising their faces, and women are similarly slapped and bullied by brothers and cousins.
Hints of larger politics creep in. To general applause, little twin boys are encouraged to recite a poem of anti-Israel propaganda that promises they’ll grow up to be soldiers. One cousin (Fuad Ghazi) is currently in his military service, and he explains that the Israelis look like the Syrians. When the deaf man flees to Damascus at the end, it’s a city plastered with posters and banners of al-Assad’s face showing up in every composition. Dignified family parades are undercut by mocking use of Johan Strauss Sr.’s Radetzky March, a nod to the German cousin, as well as military propaganda.
One of the director’s favorite visual devices is placing mirrors in the image and using them to reflect what’s happening on the other side of the room in addition to the half we see through the camera lens. These reflections create an almost abstract, intellectual form of staging the action that implies there’s always more happening than we know, that layers lie within layers. Stars in Broad Daylight, restored by the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, boasts many quietly virtuosic stagings and exuberantly orchestrated mobile shots.
My Dear Wife (Mia Luang, 1978) – Director: Vichit Kounavudhi
A high-fashion widescreen melodrama in pastel colors as beautifully restored by the Thai Film Archive, Vichit Kounavudhi’s My Dear Wife opens with freeze-frame credits during a wedding ceremony. The young couple are doctors destined to live in a snazzy home with servants, children, and other bric-a-brac. They spend their honeymoon in Japan, and a lengthy segment later in the film returns there for more postcard production value. All this high-end consumerism, as with TV serials like Dallas or Dynasty, accounts for at least half the story’s appeal.
In such glamorous trappings, the couple can’t have a simple happy-ever-after. After she’s had the requisite two children, the beautiful, confident, and strong-willed Viganda (Viyada Umarin) receives her first shock when she learns that her dazzling husband Anirut (Jatupon Paupirom, a heart-throb who died in a car accident at 30) has knocked up a barmaid. He calmly explains that men have needs, but it means nothing serious if he sleeps around, as she’ll always be Number One.
My Dear Wife frequently shows Buddha statues to imply that Viganda’s calm recusal from her husband’s activities is saintly. Someone also gives her advice, borrowed from Mao Tse-Tung, about when to attack and when to retreat. The upshot is that she becomes part of a simmering triangle with an unstable divorcee (Wonguen Intrawuth) who becomes a third wheel.
This international film’s two-and-a-half-hour running time presents a long series of arguments, developments, and counter-moves in which patience and frustration run neck-and-neck for Viganda, especially when hubby goes on about how men work. Several other characters also enter the picture, and one of the plot’s interesting points is the implication that the worst ancillary damage happens to supporting characters who get caught in the main characters’ wake.
Along the way, we get much evidence of Thailand’s engagement with international culture, whether in booming Japan or via American disco music. There’s even a prominently displayed LP of Paul Simon’s There Goes Rhymin’ Simon while the mistress is making a drunken spectacle of herself. This cosmopolitanism is part of Thailand’s cultural and economic progress, of which this sleek, well-budgeted film is also a sign.
As is common in domestic melodramas, the conflicts represent underlying tensions in traditional vs. modern values. Viganda is a strong, dynamic, professional, modern woman. Yet, she feels stymied by the situation that her dignity and reserve have given her selfish, thoughtless husband the space to take advantage of her. But if she complained and nagged, that would be another excuse for him. Her tolerance works to some extent in allowing things to self-destruct, yet it creates other issues beyond her control. As is the intention of this drama, there’s much room for argument and discussion.
My First Wife is based on a popular novel by Krisna Asosksin, famous and prolific in her country for her domestic and social issues novels. This one has been filmed several times, including as TV serials. In the novel and film, the object seems to be raising thorny domestic issues from the conflicting perspectives of the women, who are all treated sympathetically, while the man stands around insisting on his prerogatives.
Rosaura at 10 O’Clock (Rosaura a las 10, 1958) – Director: Mario Soffici
Mario Soffici’s Rosaura at 10 O’Clock is a seductive, hypnotic, sinuous international film of formal and conceptual brilliance from a high point in Argentine cinema. The film’s source is the bestselling debut novel from the country’s own Marco Denevi, whose layering of narratives from multiple tellers is partly a nod to the English novelist Wilkie Collins. The unfolding flashbacks that re-interpret what we’ve seen bear similarities to other classics like Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), or Max Ophüls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), but this film is its own sophisticated animal.
Rosaura at 10 O’Clock begins as we watch a woman in a headscarf, seen only from the back, approach a boarding house in Buenos Aires. When the maid opens the door, the pushy landlady (a delightful María Luisa Robledo) enthusiastically greets Rosaura and hustles her inside. Then, the film cuts to this landlady, Doña Milagros, telling much of the story to the police in flashback.
She begins with how a mousy little sad-eyed painter of middle age, Camila Canegato (Juan Verdaguer, also delightful), came to stay 12 years ago and how everyone in the house gradually learned of his passionate, troubled romance with the rich young Rosaura (Susana Campos), whose portrait he painted. They can only communicate by secret letters. When all seems hopeless, Rosaura miraculously appears on the doorstep, seemingly ready to marry Canegato. Now, their troubles begin.
Up to this point, Rosaura at 10 O’Clock has been a wry comedy with a dozen characters. Alberto Dalbés, Amalia Bernabé, and María Concepción César are among the terrific cast, with Soffici himself playing a role. The gorgeous widescreen black and white photography by Anibal Gonzalez Paz becomes expressionist and delirious when Canegato tells his story, which morphs into a thriller of murder. The last secrets won’t be revealed until we get Rosaura’s version.
Along the way, the film revisits Rosaura’s arrival at the house several times, always from a different point of view. The themes of love, loneliness, creativity, crime, and the conventions of melodramatic fiction are balanced beautifully. The 4K restoration from the 35mm negative is a joy. In short, Rosaura at 10 O’Clock is one of the festival’s most entertaining films.
The Craving (1918) and The Post Telegrapher (1912) – Director: Francis Ford
The Craving (1918) is a silent film from Francis Ford, who was once more important in Hollywood than his little brother John. Francis gave John work, and there’s some speculation about whether John contributed to this story of an alcoholic and his elaborately superimposed hallucinations. PopMatters reviewed this film and its accompanying short subject, Francis Ford’s The Post Telegrapher (1912), in “Silent Film Restorations ‘The Craving’ and ‘Annie Laurie’ Radiate the Medium“.