Scorsese’s Film Foundation Presents Free Screenings

The program has been put together by Scorsese and Kent Jones, a filmmaker (Hitchcock/Truffaut, Diane), renowned critic, and former director of the New York Film Festival. Gina Telaroli, a filmmaker and programmer who has been working on the project, notes that each presentation will “feature wonderful supplemental materials to accompany the main event, including introductions, interviews, archival materials, and links to a plethora of online resources.” Scorsese himself will introduce I Know Where I’m Going!, which novelist Jonathan Lethem calls Powell and Pressburger’s “most enchanted and fresh film, storm-tossed and full of gothic romance.”

Wendy Hiller plays an Englishwoman who sets out for a remote Scottish island where she plans to marry a rich lord. A ferocious storm derails her journey, and she falls in with a naval officer played by Roger Livesey. Copresented with the BFI National Archive, Janus Films, ITV, and Park Circus, the Foundation’s event will feature interviews with Thelma Schoonmaker, who married Powell in 1984—he passed away in 1990—and has been working closely with Scorsese as his editor for more than fifty years; Tilda Swinton, who has been living in Scotland for the past two decades; Scottish director Kevin Macdonald; and Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir).

Heading next to the Restoration Screening Room in June is Federico Fellini’s La strada (1954). “A film of despair and optimism, cruelty and salvation, and its own clandestine sense of humor, La strada contains philosophical and spiritual dimensions, and a unified visual poetry, that qualify it as Fellini’s first masterpiece,” writes Christina Newland.

The program then features Govindan Aravindan’s magical realist Kummatty (1979); a noir double feature, Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945) and Arthur Ripley’s The Chase (1946); Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972), which Screen Slate’s Jon Dieringer calls “a landmark of militant Third World liberation cinema”; One-Eyed Jacks (1961), the only film that Marlon Brando directed; John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (1952), starring José Ferrer and Zsa Zsa Gabor; and Jonas Mekas’s Lost Lost Lost (1976), a diary-like collage of footage shot over a period of fourteen years. “The earliest scenes, taken in the immigrant enclave Williamsburg of cobbled streets, trolley tracks, and hand-lettered storefronts, echo the European art film of montage,” writes Ed Halter in the Village Voice, “while later moments shot in Manhattan and upstate sing with the expressive handheld camerawork of the New American Cinema.”