Film history is a form of cultural memory in a world where such things are, unfortunately, often greeted with ignorance, indifference, or active resistance. People who preserve and restore film history are doing heroic work in more than one sense, as they race against time, nitrate deterioration, legal access, and the mystery of where the stuff is and whether it still exists.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York runs an annual festival called To Save and Project that serves as a benchmark and showcase of current accomplishments in film restoration. The 22nd installment runs from 8 January to 2 February and covers more than 75 titles from 23 countries. The bill of fare runs from silent shorts by D.W. Griffith to MoMA’s own restoration of Vixen (1968), Russ Meyer’s exploitation classic.
There’s jazz great Cecil Taylor rehearsing for a 1968 Paris concert. There’s Lino Brocka’s Macho Dancer (1988), a gay-themed Filipino feature. There’s a little Andy Warhol, a little blaxploitation, a little something for everyone’s cinematic needs.
In short, Dear Reader, there is such an overwhelming and bewildering array of restored films shown at To Save and Project that your intrepid previewer can only pick ten to discuss here. These aren’t a Top Ten, just ten representative and eye-opening titles from the world of silent films, early talkies, and non-English features with obscure to non-existent profiles in Region 1. Let’s look at them in alphabetical order.
The Falcons/Magasiskola (1970) – Written and directed by István Gaál
A lone white heron flaps across the sky to the strains of restlessly modernist high woodwinds, as composed by András Szöllösy, during the opening credits of István Gaál’s The Falcons. The herons aren’t the stars of the story, however. They’re prey.
A young man (Ivan Andonov) gets off a train in the middle of the countryside and is greeted by Lilik (György Bánffy), an older bearded man on a horse. The newbie, to be called Boy as a nickname, is arriving for Lilik’s mentorship as one of six trainers of falcons for the government.
Most of this mysterious, observational odyssey in earth tones consists of Boy being shown the ropes, sometimes literally. “It’s a man’s work,” says Lilik, although one self-possessed woman, Terez (Judit Meszléry), raises small animals and rotates among the men.
Boy’s jealousy will be one element leading to his disenchantment with the system, and a more direct cause will be the system itself. Lilik, who misses one lost perfect falcon named Diana, explains that “the lash is framework, order, security” and that too long a leash spells anarchy. He repeats “anarchy” several times as a thing to be avoided, and this is how political implications are introduced without anyone discussing politics.
István Gaál adapted Miklós Mészöly’s novel Magasiskola and suffused the nearly plotless fable with atmosphere and movement. Although one training sequence escalates to a frantic montage, like a dance number, most of the scenes borrow a leaf from the page of fellow Hungarian filmmaker Miklós Jancsó, a specialist in lengthy unbroken shots. Without overdoing it, Gaál stages many scenes so that photographer Elemér Ragályi can calmly pan left and right, now dollying forward or back, creating a spatial continuity as we focus on one or another new detail of the interactions among humans and birds.
The Falcons won a Jury Prize at the 1970 Cannes Festival. Gaál’s career in Hungarian cinema lasted 40 years. Andonov, who played our handsome, if frustrated, young hero, was a Bulgarian actor who soon became a prolific director in his own right. The cinematographer had the most prolific career of all, even bringing him to Hollywood.
The Girls/Gehenu Lamai (1978) – Written and directed by Sumitra Peries
As the black-and-white camera passes across a complex stream of textures, the opening scene of Sumitra Peries’ The Girls offers layers of background and foreground. In the background, a male parade waves fancy feathery doo-dads. A man in glasses looks toward the camera, or rather to whoever is viewing him, and the image freezes.
In the foreground, with its obstructing leaves, the bark of a tree, and a round mirror affixed to the tree, we see the mottled reflection of the anguished yet self-possessed Kusum, as played by major star Vasanthi Chathurani in her teen debut. This moment and her brief voice-overs will serve as the recurring “now” for a film structured around her memories in flashback.
The story of poor girl Kusum and rich boy Nimal (Ajith Jinadasa), whom she’d regarded as a big brother, is a non-melodramatic tale defined by differences in class, sex, and opportunity. They both attend a co-ed high school where everyone wears uniforms in the legacy of the British colony of Ceylon, and where some students freely argue the politics of whether Sri Lanka is really free. One angry boy states that books and films emphasize romance to distract people from their reality, but the story of The Girls, as a novel and a film, uses its unfulfilled romance to reveal how citizens enact political realities.
Kusum’s arc is contrasted with a sister who wins a beauty contest for a film role and gets pregnant out of wedlock, and the family chooses to accept and live with the social disgrace. Kusum’s only hope lies in getting a university scholarship, and her personal turmoil may affect this even when, in a fit of irony, Nimal graduates to become a teacher in the same school.
The camera exists in a constant state of gentle glides, pans, and dollies, and Peries likes to frame her characters by the architecture or decorously obscure them with nature’s leaves and trees. These stylistic choices convey an eternal restless movement through time and its forces.
Sumitra Peries, who died in January 2023, was Sri Lanka’s first woman filmmaker, and The Girls was her debut feature in a career spanning 40 years. The film was produced by her husband Lester James Peries, a prolific, award-winning filmmaker who’s widely considered the godfather of Sri Lankan cinema. The novelist whose work is being adapted is another major figure in Sinhalese culture, Karunasena Jayalath.
In 1968, Lester James Peries filmed Jayalath’s debut novel, Golu Hadawath, and that became a celebrated film, so The Girls continues that literary-cinematic thread. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the Peries family in Sri Lanka’s film heritage; it’s comparable to the impact of Satyajit Ray on Bengali film, especially for its concentration on rural families, real locations, and pictorial and psychological qualities. This is a film tradition that simply must be better known in the West.
Hula (1927) – Directed by Victor Fleming
In the year Clara Bow was dubbed “the It Girl”, she made further steps to sell “It” in Victor Fleming’s Hula (1927). The nothing plot is one of those Hollywood romances that finally bring the couple together after much teasing, frustration, and foolishness. What matters is the setting and the contrasts between social conventions and “primitive” wisdom.
An opening card alerts us we’re on “A Hawaiian isle–a land of singing seas and swinging hips–where volcanoes are often active–and maidens always are.” The maiden in question is Hula Calhoun, introduced bathing nude in a dreamy pond. While kicking her legs high in the air, she gets stung on the thigh by a bee, as in the birds and the bees. It’s not unlike the bite of love that will consume her as soon as she looks at visiting British architect Anthony Haldane (Clive Brook) and blurts, “Anthony, you’re a beautiful man!” as she shamelessly caresses his cheek and presses the dimple on his chin.
We’re getting ahead of ourselves. First, we must be introduced to Hula’s wealthy family of planters and their circle (“three gin-erations”), who are depicted as decadent drunks gambling in a smoke-filled room until her rather gross old papa (Albert Gran) throws open the curtains and says, “Anybody ready to drink breakfast?” That feels like an interesting comment on Haole plantations, though it’s really part of the general Roaring 20s and its bootleg mentality.
Rather than live with her own family, the natural and unspoiled Hula tends to live with “half-Hawaiian” bodyguard Kahana (Agostino Borgato, who doesn’t sound too Hawaiian). In general, Hula prefers eating with the local hired men. Thinking she’s paying an insult, a chic rival sniffs to Hula, “You’ve lived among natives so much, you’ve become as primitive as they are.”
One message of Hula is that “primitive” notions of love and marriage are superior to civilized conventions. “Conventions be hanged!” says Haldane at one point, but he insists on divorcing his wife before his romance with Hula can progress further than steamy kisses. Hula makes it plain that she requires no such conditions, but she’s willing to wait it out.
Despite the South Seas dream infecting Hollywood and popular culture at the time, Ethel Doherty’s screenplay, as adapted by Doris Anderson from Armine von Tempski’s novel, with title cards written by George Marion Jr., can hardly lay a broad claim to authenticity with its studio sets, or even to much local color. Even so, Olympic swimmer and surfing legend Duke Kahanamoku can be spotted in the luau scene.
The 1927 bestseller Hula was the first of Hawaiian-born Tempski’s popular novels. The film version of Hula made its reputation with Bow’s charming expressiveness and its continual teasing glimpses of flesh or people getting soaking wet. Even Haldane gets into the act, having his shirt ripped to shreds by a raging river. The film is a perfect example of silent Hollywood’s ability to remain chaste while getting the audience hot and bothered.
Life Begins Tomorrow/Morgen beginnt das Leben (1933) – Directed by Werner Hochbaum
One of the most surprising discoveries in this batch of previews is an unqualified technical masterpiece released at the dawn of Hitler’s takeover of Germany in 1933, Werner Hochbaum’s Life Begins Tomorrow.
Fading in from blackness, the camera dollies forward as a guard walks down a prison corridor to collect dishes. Robert Sand (Erich Haussmann) is introduced as a prisoner being released in the morning after five years.
In his cell, he stares at a photo of his wife, Maria. She’s played by Hilde von Stolz with a kind of Greta Garbo thing happening from certain angles. The photo transitions to the real woman working as a bartender, and so begins a painstakingly elaborate shot that will pan all over the set, picking out details among dancers and diners, bellboys and gigolos, until the conductor-violinist (Harry Frank) goes over to Maria.
She shows him the letter from her jailbird husband, and we guess that she hasn’t been faithful. Then begins another tour-de-force shot among the crowd.
Every sequence in Life Begins Tomorrow shows off some virtuosic flair that elevates a little two-penny magazine melodrama into art. Often without dialogue, we’re treated to sinuous camera moves, furious montages, sound tricks, subjective shots, outdoor sequences, street documentary, superimposed closeups during flashbacks, and any number of dazzling techniques.
In one amazing bit of brilliance, the camera adopts Sand’s POV, recalling playing the violin, with the foreground blurry at the bottom of the screen, while, as he lifts his gaze, we see his reflection in a distant mirror. Magnificent.
All this pizzazz holds together, making you wonder how a director of such command isn’t better known. Other flashy stylists of the early talkies, such as Alfred Hitchcock or Tay Garnett, aren’t better than this. Wikipedia reports that Hochbaum, a leftist, briefly emigrated to the Austrian industry as the Nazis took over Germany, but he returned later to make a few more films.
His last credit was in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war. Three Sergeants or Three Non-coms (Drei Unteroffiziere) was considered a propaganda film extolling military camaraderie. Apparently, he made no films during the war and died in 1946, at only 40, to be forgotten until 1978, when MoMA staged a retrospective of 12 films. Their press release describes Hochbaum’s independent debut, Brothers (Brüder, 1929), as “unequivocal in its attack on capitalism and its warning of imminent danger of fascism: a shot of a rich man changing his suit for a military jacket and swastika is without parallel in propaganda films of this period.”
No wonder he tried to leave, and it’s too bad he didn’t get farther. We can imagine an alternate world in which he landed in Hollywood along many fellow exiles. It wasn’t to be. After the 1978 retro, he seems to have been forgotten again.
What accounts for his career stopping in 1939? Had he refused to be part of the war effort? Surely the industry would have wanted him. Was he blacklisted or fired? A subject for further research.
Margarita and the Wolf/Margarita y el lobo (1969) – Written and directed by Cecilia Bartolomé
Impudent, rude, unladylike, and refreshing, Cecilia Bartolomé’s Margarita and the Wolf (1969) shows what the most playful and confrontational impulses of the French New Wave looked like in the New Spanish Cinema.
Shot in black and white, this fearless and exuberant 45-minute student project opens with still frames of a courtroom while we hear a cheeky version of the Mission Impossible theme. We’ll soon hear spoofs of the Beatles and “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf”. In fact, “cheeky” describes the whole movie, as well as funny, feminist and, most proudly, “vulgar”.
Margarita (Julia Peña) petitions for a divorce from her rich husband, Lorenzo (José Antonio Amor). It’s Franco’s Spain, so she’ll only get a separation supported by her husband, and she’ll take it. The structure of Margarita and the Wolf is mostly a series of flashbacks to different elements of the heroine’s life and marriage, complete with whimsical musical numbers by Carlos Villa. She freely takes a lover and drops him. She works on painting and songs. She issues statements to the viewer, such as the following:
“Generally, husbands are very happy if their wives are good friends. They’re amused by our charming chats. Through practice of our role of parrots, we give them a perfect recital of feminine stupidity. Talking about celebrity gossip, recipes, beauty, horoscopes, it’s clear that we are women. Repugnant, but all is as it should be, and they are at peace. That’s the best path to lesbianism.”
Was this the first time “lesbianismo” was pronounced in a Spanish film? No wonder it got banned and the filmmaker wasn’t allowed to work under her own name. Had this received a general release, there’s no telling what would have happened.
Bartolomé’s inspiration is Christiane Rochefort’s 1963 French novel Les stances à Sophie (translated as Cats Don’t Need Money). Rochefort’s father had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Dogmatic leftists would argue that Margarita is thoroughly bourgeois in her orientations while critiquing bourgeois marriage, but feminism has its own agenda, and Margarita and the Wolf still feels radical.
On the Empty Balcony/En el balcón vacío (1962) – Directed by Jomí García Ascot
Written and narrated by María Luisa Elío and directed by her husband Jomí García Ascot, On the Empty Balcony (1962) is reputed to be the first feature about exiles from the Spanish Civil War.
The incidents, almost snapshots, are structured by memory to question how time works and whether it exists. This idea is introduced in the opening scene, as the camera pans (via concealed edits) through the rooms of a Spanish apartment and the narrator names the family: mother and father in the living room listening to Bach, older sister studying in her room, and our narrator, the youngest daughter, secretly taking apart a watch that doesn’t belong to her, trying to understand it.
She sits by a large window on a balcony. She witnesses a young man scramble down from the roof to conceal himself in someone’s window. In a quiet masterpiece of suspense, the girl determines to look in the wrong direction, as if unaware, while armed police look down from the roof.
Across the courtyard, however, a woman begins yelling and pointing out “the communist”, and we understand that treachery and strife among neighbors mark this national trauma that will bifurcate the country and lead to sieges and bombings. As the child puts it, the war has begun.
These swiftly flowing incidents of travel and exile are based on Elío’s memories without being her literal story. Elío plays the adult woman, while the haunting presence of child actress Nuri Pereña foreshadows Ana Torrent’s somber charisma in Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), also set during the war.
On the Empty Balcony is a collective memory of alternatives refracted through an imagined woman, who grows up in Mexico and briefly visits the old Spanish apartment as an adult. In real life, Elío revisited Spain several years after making the film. The fictional father doesn’t escape prison, while hers did.
Elío and Ascot made On the Empty Balcony independently, almost privately, with the help of their literary and artistic friends. Famous writers Juan García Ponce and Álvaro Mutis are among the cast. José Torre’s black-and-white photography is crisp and lovely, now and then interspersed with documentary footage. The negatives are lost, so the digital restoration derives from 16mm prints.
La Paga (1962) – Written and directed by Ciro Durán
Here’s a restoration of a film virtually nobody has seen. According to a 2025 Cannes Film Festival interview with Vladimir Durán, a son of Colombian filmmaker Ciro Durán, his father self-produced his debut feature at 23. The filmmaker’s first wife, Marina Gil, served as co-producer and script girl.
La Paga was shown only once in Venezuela, shortly before he spent nearly a year as a Colombian political prisoner. Vladimir made it his mission to find and restore the 1962 one-hour film after his father’s death in January 2022.
La Paga makes abundantly clear what Durán told his son: that his inspirations were the Soviet classics in which he immersed himself. From the opening shot of a black-silhouetted man blowing a horn in the morning sun, we have the idealization of the manual laborer. The next two shots feature a lean worker, a hoe over one shoulder, walking directly toward the camera, then walking away into the distance. After montages of backbreaking work in the sun, the first lines are spoken eight minutes in, and it’s only some boss squatting on his rump and bellowing at a man to get back to work.
The man silently receives some refreshment from his pregnant wife and naked son before plodding back to the fields. In what seems almost a parody of poverty, they live in a brick box with a table, two stools, and some reed mats for beds. Later, there’s a dialectical argument between a store owner and a handsome government worker over whether rebellious campesinos are misunderstood or criminal.
Two things save La Paga from the doctrinaire. The minor element is the extraordinary pessimism in which our lead worker (Alberto Alvarez) makes poor decisions and retreats into mildly surreal dreams and fantasies, for the progressive government man helps nobody. No glimmer of hope is offered, neither through revolution nor organization nor the political system. The major element is the gorgeous black-and-white compositions of photographer Raul Delgado, especially in the wavering streets of the mountain town.
Rapt (1934) Directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff
It all starts with a dog. Firmin (Geymond Vital) starts rough-housing with a fellow by a mountain stream, and Firmin’s dog starts chasing a sheep. The dog gets killed when a shepherd hits it with a rock, and the angry Firmin retaliates by kidnapping the shepherd’s girlfriend Elsi (Dita Parlo, who gets a startling nude scene).
The dog may be an excuse because Firmin’s really just taken a liking to her. He locks her away in a room in his village house, to the concern of his old mother (Jeanne Marie-Lamont) and his supposed fiancée (Nadia Sibirskaia). Two stunningly beautiful women, fully made up, are living as mountain peasants–that’s where cinema comes in.
Neither Firmin nor Elsi realizes that her little brother (Hans Kaspar Ilg) has also suffered a mishap. From this fraught situation is spun inevitable tragedy, and it only remains to be seen how extreme it will be. Will it involve the peg-legged peddler (Auguste Bovério) or the mute village idiot (Lucas Gridoux)?
The Swiss Rapt (or The Kidnapping) is the first talkie by Dimitri Kirsanoff, a self-taught experimental filmmaker of the silent era, and his final film in a series of collaborations with actress-partner Sibirskaia. We receive the distinct impression that he’d rather still be making silents. Despite bits of dialogue here and there, the story and emotions are conveyed by the glorious pictorial lyricism of the imagery, as shot by Viktor Gluck and Nikolai Toporkoff, and the literal lyricism of the score by Arthur Honegger and Arthur Hoérée.
The music makes heavy use of a soprano voice (Regine de Lormov) and the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument that sounds like a soprano. The musician playing it is Ginette Martenot, sister of its inventor Maurice Martenot.
Kirsanoff’s source for the story of Rapt is a 1922 novel by Swiss novelist Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, La Séparation des races, whose title refers to the Swiss mountains that separate communities into isolated, clannish, mutually suspicious spheres. Scriptwriter Benjamin Fondane died in Auschwitz.
Billed as the film’s “artistic supervisor” is Dr. Stefan Markus, the producer who founded the company to make Swiss films from novels. Rapt was the company’s sole venture but Markus had a lengthy career in production before and after and deserves more investigation.
The Valley of the Bees/Údolí včel – (1967) Written and directed by František Vláčil
František Vláčil’s follow-up to his dizzying historical epic Marketa Lazarová (1967), a milestone of the Czech New Wave, is also set in the 13th Century. Although paced and filmed in a relatively stately manner, The Valley of the Bees is marked by extreme events and ill-advised behavior by all.
In a Bohemian castle, young Ondrej plays a malicious trick on his father’s new bride, and the upshot of this upheaval is that Ondrej (played as an adult by Petr Čepek) gets pledged to the religious order of the Teutonic Knights, who are also trained soldiers. His fellow knight, Armin (Jan Kačer), demonstrates their allegedly chaste and holy love by bathing naked together in the Baltic while clasping each other’s shoulders.
A new series of unfortunate events leads Ondrej to go AWOL to return home, pursued by Armin. A lot more happens upon Ondrej’s return to the family castle, and it’s safe to say that viewers are apprehensive, to say the least.
Thematically, the subjects of zealous, violent loyalty to a cause that brooks no dissent and wields great power probably had application in modern Czechoslovakia, and we might assume that’s what Vláčil and co-writer Vladimír Körner had in mind with The Valley of the Bees. In a reversal of the normal order of things, Körner turned the film into a novel years later.
The visual aesthetic is marked by widescreen black-and-white photography in majestic, foreboding modes, shot by František Uldrich. The wonderful composer Zdeněk Liška contributes a distinctive score marked by flute, percussion, and chorus.
Zohra (1921) Directed by Albert Samama Chikly
An important attempt at reconstruction is Zohra, seemingly the first fiction film shot on the African continent. Its maker, Albert Samama Chikly, was a Tunisian Jew who shot the earliest known African documentary footage as early as 1896. His daughter, Haydée Chikly, wrote Zohra and plays the title character.
Zohra is the daughter of French parents heading for Tunisia. She survives a shipwreck and stays for a while with Bedouins who find her on the shore and decide to call her Zohra. There’s much quasi-documentary footage of their customs before the story takes a few turns involving a caravan set upon by bandits and rescue by an aviator.
Sadly, most of Zohra is lost. The existing footage is fleshed out with title cards describing the missing footage and illustrated with many stills. Although the film was never very long, it’s even shorter now at about 16 minutes. Even so, this is a fascinating glimpse of film history and even real history. The world of pioneer filming, especially in areas of the globe far from Hollywood, is populated by a wide variety of people and covers a wide variety of subjects.
Zohra not only demonstrates this truth but illustrates the difficulty of rescuing early cinema, what heroic efforts can sometimes make possible, and what they can’t. In that sense, Zohra illustrates what MoMA’s festival is all about.
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