A Month of Remarkable Movies in New York

NEw YorkSo a great deal is uncommitted to keep an eye on from the solace of the couch these years that it’s easy to forget just how much still isn’t. For every grisly, gawking true-crime special on Netflix there are a hundred films from decades past teetering on the brink of oblivion, reels rotting in a garage somewhere or hidden from the censors of a heavy-handed regime. Give thanks, then, for cinema’s rescue squad—those working to preserve and restore neglected movies, from total obscurities to films that are well-known but hard to find or exist only in versions reminiscent of a battered VHS tape. In New York, this month brings a wealth of opportunities to appreciate the fruits of these labors, principally at the Museum of Modern Art’s annual festival of film preservation, “To Save and Project.” Two restorations playing at the New York Jewish Film Festival, jointly presented by the Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center, make for a welcome bonus.MoMA’s programming got off to a fascinating start last week with a little-known treasure: “Rapt (The Kidnapping),” a 1934 feature directed by Dimitri Kirsanoff and starring Dita Parlo, of Jean Vigo’s “L’Atalante.” Set in the Alps, “Rapt” concerns the conflict between neighboring communities, with a French village on one side of a mountain and a German one on the other. When a Frenchman kidnaps a woman from the rival town, his mother and her fellow villagers react with outrage and indignation, less at the abduction itself than at his apparent interest in a German woman. The film boasts sensuous formal achievements, from the glorious alpine shots to the experimental sound design of a raging storm and the dizzying angles deployed by Kirsanoff, an Estonian Jew and Parisian avant-gardist. (He spent World War II in hiding, and died in 1957.) Yet for all his bravura style, he directs with a potent sense of drama—one scene is remarkable for its sustained, perfectly judged silence, as gripping as that storm. And the restoration is astonishing, the black-and-white photography rendered with a vivid immediacy that amplifies the film’s feverish, unnerving atmosphere. The festival’s opening night took a gleefully salacious turn with “Vixen!,” directed by Russ Meyer, aka “King of the Nudies.” (So says his tombstone.) The film, among the first to receive an X rating, was the subject of 23 prosecutions for obscenity, which didn’t get in the way of it becoming a breakout hit in 1968. At MoMA, which with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences inherited Meyer’s archives, it screened to a sold-out house. It’s an outlandish story of a bush pilot in Canada and his sexually insatiable wife, played by Erica Gavin, then about 20 years old, who appeared afterward for a discussion in which she offered fond memories of the production. The movie is not quite a masterpiece waiting for wider renown: Campy fornication meets outbursts of pointedly appalling racism and a plot that sees its pornographic obligations hijacked by an Irish communist aiming to get to Havana. But Meyer is a bawdy comedian and a canny provocateur, mashing together elements of sex, culture and politics for maximal reaction.The pairing of “Rapt” and “Vixen!” gives some sense of the festival’s vast range in terms of taste, place and time period. Jump to the Philippines circa 1988 for Lino Brocka’s “Macho Dancer,” which faced considerable censorship in its own country for depicting the lives of young men working to get by among the brothels and gay clubs of Manila. Yet it’s less an exercise in seedy miserabilism than a streetwise melodrama of sex, crime and corruption. Brocka, celebrated by the likes of Martin Scorsese for such earlier films as “Manila in the Claws of Light” and “Insiang,” here conjures an aesthetic suggestive of “Miami Vice” and/or a George Michael music video, its cheesy ’80s synths and gorgeous neon glow forming the alluring surface of a story of surprising tenderness and pathos. Lighter fare comes in the form of “For Love and Gold,” Mario Monicelli’s 1966 comedy of a medieval knight and his band of misfits. Beloved in Italy, it anticipates “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” though its sense of humor is broader and its budget evidently bigger, with bloodier battles and cinematography that approaches the picturesque. Vittorio Gassman is very funny as the pompous and perennially incapable knight, Brancaleone, making his way through a series of parodic encounters—with, among others, another knight, a ragged crew of crusaders, and a comely virgin who takes charge of her own sexuality.The rest of the lineup—some 75 films in all—ranges from G.W. Pabst’s “The Joyless Street” (1925) with Greta Garbo, a film that has existed in fragments for decades but is here showing in what the museum calls “the most complete version” reconstructed to date, to “Bloody Mama” (1970), directed by exploitation impresario Roger Corman and starring Robert De Niro, Bruce Dern and Shelley Winters. One gem of a short that shouldn’t be overlooked is “Porgy and Bess in Wien” (c. 1953), which follows a State Department-sponsored tour of the opera during its stop in Vienna. The cast includes William Warfield, Leontyne Price and Cab Calloway, who at one point is shown scat-singing in a Vienna tavern, a born entertainer caught in a wonderfully loose, lithe and swinging performance. And Warfield and Price’s rendition of “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” is downright transcendent, the music pouring out of Price in particular in a way that immediately makes sense of the legendary career that then lay before her. At 29 minutes, the film is pure pleasure, not to mention an essential artifact of American musical history. A more sorrowful sense of history hangs over the pair of restorations playing at the New York Jewish Film Festival, “I Have Sinned” (1936) and “Our Children” (1948). Both are Polish movies in Yiddish and feature the comic duo Shimon Dzigan and Israel Schumacher, though neither film could be called a comedy. The first begins as a familiar sort of love-in-wartime drama, with an illicit relationship between the daughter of a rabbi and a German Jewish officer. But a time jump, moving from a shtetl during World War I to 1930s Warsaw, pushes the film into more unexpected territory, as it encompasses issues of immigration, adoption and assimilation. “I Have Sinned” was the first Yiddish sound film made in Poland. It would be just a few years before the Nazis rolled in and ensured there would be scarcely any more, which makes “Our Children” all the more remarkable. Dzigan and Schumacher—who for most of the war were imprisoned by the Soviets—play versions of themselves in postwar Poland, performing a routine about life in the ghetto. Afterward, a group of children come to the dressing room, with a criticism: “In the ghetto, that’s not how it was,” says one. What follows is an extraordinary fusion of drama and documentary, in which the two entertainers travel to visit an orphanage where these children and others who survived the Holocaust live, talking to them about their experiences and encouraging the children to process them through storytelling and performance. At once visceral, sensitive and deeply moving, it directly confronts both the weight of historical trauma and the challenge of representing it.The movie, centered on the importance of remembrance, was itself in danger of being forgotten. Restored by the National Center for Jewish Film in 1991, it still deserves to be better known. Perhaps it’s apt that it’s showing at Lincoln Center on Martin Luther King Jr. Day—a time for commemoration and renewed commitment in the face of evil.To Save and ProjectMuseum of Modern Art, through Feb. 2New York Jewish Film FestivalFilm at Lincoln Center, through Jan. 28Mr. Barnes is the Journal’s assistant Arts in Review editor.