Restorations, Rarities, and Rediscoveries: Sag Harbor Cinema's Fifth Annual Festival of Preservation

Martin Scorsese at last year’s Sag Harbor Cinema Festival of Preservation I Photography by Doug Young

The East End’s annual Martin Scorsese Presents: The Sag Harbor Cinema Festival of Preservation, dedicated to the preservation of film and its culture in all their forms, returns for its fifth year with a rich program of restorations, rarities, and rediscoveries. Special guests including archivists, historians, collectors, and filmmakers will join to discuss and illuminate. The Festival, now five days, will be held over Veterans Day weekend from Friday, November 7th through Tuesday, November 11th.

“I love the variety of the lineup this year — not only in terms of the scope of the films, but also because it engages with several notions of preservation itself. Keeping our films, their artistry, and their idea(l)s alive and relevant is also a collective effort, in which the audience plays a very important part,” says SHC’s Founding Artistic Director Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan. “That sense of shared passion, enjoyment, and aesthetic experience is the ultimate meaning of a special weekend like this one.”

From hand-painted animation to avant-garde, and Hollywood classics to foreign masters, program highlights include:

Brand new 4K restorations of King Vidor’s 1946 incandescent Western melodrama Duel in the Sun, a Martin Scorsese favorite, with Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck; Richard Brooks’ The Professionals (1966), also a Western in Technicolor, set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution with Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, Woody Strode, and Claudia Cardinale; Charles Walters’ High Society, a 1956 musical remake of The Philadelphia Story with a stacked cast of Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, Louis Armstrong, and Frank Sinatra; Frank Tashlin’s 1955 musical comedy Artists and Models starring Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, and Shirley MacLaine; Michael Mann’s 1981 debut feature Thief starring James Caan; and Leos Carax’s 1991 Paris street romance The Lovers on the Bridge with Juliette Binoche and Denis Lavant.

Mark of the Renegade (Hugo Fregonese, 1951)

A blend of western, musical, and pirate adventure in glorious Universal Technicolor, Argentinian director Hugo Fregonese’s Mark of the Renegade (1951), based on Johnston McCulley’s (the creator of Zorro) 1939 novel Don Renegade, is set in 19th century Mexican-ruled Los Angeles and stars Ricardo Montalbán and Cyd Charisse.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Sergei Parajanov, 1965_

Following last year’s centennial celebration of Georgian-Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov with a screening of his mesmerizing The Color of Pomegranates, this year the Festival will screen a restoration of another one of Parajanov’s ravishing poetic works Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965), adapted from Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s novel of the same name. Shadows, a staggering folkloric masterwork, is widely considered the most important film in Ukrainian cinema.

Pre-Code Hollywood will be featured at the Festival with a special presentation by Film Forum’s Founding Repertory Director Bruce Goldstein accompanying a 35mm screening of Lloyd Bacon’s Footlight Parade (1933), a James Cagney-led musical with choreography by Busby Berkeley. The lineup will also include 4K restorations of Lowell Sherman’s 1932 Pre-Code comedy The Greeks Had a Word for Them, about three Manhattan showgirls on the hunt for wealthy husbands.

The Cotton Club Encore (Francis Ford Coppola, 1984)

With over twenty minutes of additional footage and never-before-seen dance sequences, The Cotton Club Encore, Francis Ford Coppola’s extended cut of his 1984 crime musical about the famed 1930s Harlem nightclub, brings the film back to the director’s original vision, which was not properly reflected in the original release. The film stars Richard Gere (actually playing the cornet), tap-dancing duo Gregory and Maurice Hines, Diane Lane, Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne (who broke through in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now just 5 years prior), Lonette McKee, Bob Hoskins, and James Remar. American Zoetrope archivist James Mockoski will be on hand to discuss Coppola’s process of “reconstructing” Cotton Club and his other films.

Nice Girls Don’t Stay for Breakfast (Bruce Weber, 2018)

Filmmakers are often agents of preservation through their own work, as is the case with Bruce Weber’s Nice Girls Don’t Stay For Breakfast (2018). Weber’s poetic portrait of Robert Mitchum is a collage of archival footage and conversations with the reluctant star of more than 120 films. The screening of the documentary will be followed by a Q&A between Weber and Mitchum’s granddaughter Carrie. The Festival will further explore the great photographer’s relationship with film through a new exhibit on the Cinema’s third floor.

Preservation also has an archaeological dimension: a celebrated example of New York 1980s underground cinema and ‘No Wave’ filmmaking, Sara Driver’s 1981 NYU thesis film You Are Not I, adapted from Paul Bowles’ short story. Shot by Jim Jarmusch and featuring Suzanne Fletcher and Nan Goldin, the film was thought to be lost after its negative was destroyed by a leak in a New Jersey warehouse. In 2008, a 16mm print was miraculously discovered among Bowles’ holdings in Tangier. Sara Driver will participate in a Q&A following the screening.

THE FILMS:

ARTISTS AND MODELS (Frank Tashlin, 1955)

BRAKHAGE SHORTS in 35mm

THE COTTON CLUB ENCORE (Francis Ford Coppola, 1984)

DUEL IN THE SUN (King Vidor, 1946)

FLEISCHER STUDIOS CARTOON PROGRAM

FOOTLIGHT PARADE in 35mm (Lloyd Bacon, 1933)

THE GREEKS HAD A WORD FOR THEM (Lowell Sherman, 1932)

HIGH SOCIETY (Charles Walters, 1956)

THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE (Leos Carax, 1991)

MARK OF THE RENEGADE (Hugo Fregonese, 1951)

NICE GIRLS DON’T STAY FOR BREAKFAST (Bruce Weber, 2018)