SIFF 2011: Raiders keep losing the Ark
Decades of attending film festivals bring a lot of memories. Obviously, it’s a thrill to encounter new films that go on to challenge or captivate audiences in general release. But there’s another kind of encounter that’s at least as exciting and valuable, and can leave as deep a mark: the festival showcasing of a vintage film that’s been lost, or lain neglected, or not made available in this country, or recently been restored to its original beauty and integrity.
I cherish a summer evening in 1983 when the Seattle International Film Festival projected the British Film Institute’s nitrate Technicolor print of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp—one of the first showings in America of that inimitable 1943 masterpiece uncut, with its wraparound time scheme intact. A few years later, SIFF opened a window on something even rarer, the moment at the dawn of the talkies when Hollywood flirted with widescreen photography. Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail—a 1930 epic Western for which its 22-year-old leading man was rechristened John Wayne—enchanted a full house at the Egyptian Theatre in the 1988 fest; the next year brought Roland West’s surreal haunted-house melodrama The Bat Whispers. Untoppable festival experiences.
Fellini's "La Dolce Vita": Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg
Recent SIFF seasons have vouchsafed few comparable archival opportunities. Closest to the mark have been some revelations from British cinema: the trenchant postwar film noir It Always Rains on Sunday and the late-silent A Cottage on Dartmoor. Which is not scorn things like last year’s slate of restorations from the Film Foundation—The River, Senso, Drums Along the Mohawk—but those films either were familiar from repertory and Turner Classic Movies showings, or about to be featured for home viewing as Criterion DVDs and Blu-rays. And however superb the restorations were, two of them looked “soft” as projected at SIFF.
Speaking of showmanship, I was appalled to learn that the Technicolor classic Black Narcissus was offered last Saturday not as a 35mm movie but as a projection from Blu-ray—and there were, as the delicate phrase goes, “digital issues” compromising the presentation. The Criterion Blu-ray is a thing of beauty (and I’m thrilled to own it), but if a film festival is going to present a landmark of cinematography, they damn well ought to show the film.
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Comment from Brian Edwards
Time May 26, 2011 at 11:45 am
Hello – I have been a longtime SIFF attendee. I wholeheartedly agree with what Richard has laid out in this article. I have been planning on both e-mailing and calling the SIFF admin office to voice my concerns about their anemic “Archival” offering for this year as well as the growing trend for screening DVDs.