It’s been a fine year for film history rediscovered—and rendered newly accessible.
We live in a culture with unprecedented access to movies—through DVD and Blu-ray, streaming subscription services, and SVOD. And it’s not just new and recent films and TV programming; classic Hollywood films, international movies, documentaries, experimental film, and even hundreds of silents, many of them in restored and remastered editions, are available through physical purchase or streaming rental. The inevitable trade-off is the loss of a lively repertory culture of theatrical film revivals.
The good news is that revivals and restorations can still be big-screen events—just look at the attention that Dekalog and Chimes at Midnight and One-Eyed Jacks received when they returned to the big screen—and dedicated home-video distributors continue to make these newly restored editions accessible on disc and various streaming services for anyone out of reach of a cinematheque or a dedicated film festival.
Now here’s my list of the archival events of 2016—the debuts and rediscoveries of classic films and cinema landmarks, the restorations of great films, and the revivals of previously unavailable or inaccessible movies. I confess to my biases up front: This selection focuses on restorations available to American audiences in 2016 regardless of where they live (thus King of Jazz, which only played a few cities, is not in contention), favors films previously inaccessible to audiences, and reflects my own subjective historical and aesthetic inclinations. Your mileage may vary. If you bristle at the idea of the “best,” think of this of a survey of the breadth of restorations and rediscoveries that film lovers now have a chance to see, regardless of where they live, as long as they have a web connection and a Blu-ray player.
1. Chimes at Midnight (Janus Films theatrical, Criterion Blu-ray and DVD)
The film that Orson Welles proclaimed his favorite (“If I wanted to get into Heaven on the basis of one movie, that’s the one I would offer up”) suffered a fitful American release 1965, decades of legal limbo that effectively kept it off screens and home video, and a legacy of battle-scarred prints with murky soundtracks for those few special event screenings. After years of negotiating the tangled rights and gathering materials, the film was restored in 2015 and, on New Year’s Day 2016, given its first official American theatrical showings since the 1960s. It is magnificent and nothing short of a revelation. Chimes at Midnight is one of Welles’ unqualified masterpieces, his greatest film according to many critics, and a personal project that took decades to finally bring to the screen, and for many Americans this was the first opportunity to see it. The restoration produced by Spain’s Filmoteca Española was created from the original negative, and the American release given additional digital restoration. For those not fortunate enough to have a theatrical screening handy, Criterion gave the restoration a worthy special edition on Blu-ray and DVD.