The NYFF’s 2024 Revivals

“Produced in Kazakhstan just as the Soviet Union was falling apart, the movie evidently broke a Soviet-era taboo on dramatizing Muslim history in evoking a thirteenth-century universe of visceral cruelty and inexplicable intrigue,” wrote J. Hoberman in the Village Voice in 2002. A Kipchak warrior warns his leader that the Mongols, encroaching from the east and led by Genghis Khan, pose a threat to be taken seriously. Not only is he blown off, he’s tortured as well. “Though informed by the lyrical, folkloric style of Sergei Parajanov,” wrote Dave Kehr in the New York Times, The Fall of Otrar “has an edge of cynicism and cruelty that just as often suggests the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone.”

When the new restoration of Bona (1980) arrived in Bologna from Cannes this past summer, Cecilia Cenciarelli, one of the artistic directors of Il Cinema Ritrovato, recalled something Lav Diaz once said: “To claim that Lino Brocka has influenced our cinema is not accurate. Lino Brocka is part of our DNA, part of our national psyche.” Nora Aunor, a superstar of Philippine cinema, produces and stars in Bona as a high-school student who falls for a narcissistic actor who treats her like dirt. “The chilling ferocity, vulnerability, and abandon exuded by Aunor’s performance is so indelibly inscribed on Bona’s face that she haunts every scene,” wrote Andréa Picard when Bona screened in Toronto a couple of weeks ago. “Shot in the densely populated slums of Manila with a dynamic mix of realist immediacy and color-soaked melodrama, Bona is an intoxicating social critique.”

Robert Bresson set Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), his loose adaptation of “White Nights,” Dostoevsky’s 1848 story of unrequited love, in post–May ’68 Paris and created “sequences of pure visual comedy that would have been at home in the silent era,” writes Chris Shields at Screen Slate. “While the film offers much more than laughs, the sense that the director is having a bit of fun with his mopey protagonist and his ‘far out’ milieu is apparent . . . And the narrative frame—with its dreamy, reflective quality—evokes a kind of uncertain poetry that is more human than sacred.”

Codirected with Paul Seban and starring Delphine Seyrig, Robert Hossein, and Julie Dassin, Marguerite Duras’s first feature, La musica (1966), is “a psychological three-hander that delicately dissects love after separation,” wrote Daniella Shreir when she programmed a comprehensive Duras retrospective in London this summer. “With exquisite staging and camerawork by Sacha Vierny, who had worked on Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad,” La musica is “a New Wave-adjacent primer to Duras’s filmic universe.”

A Saturday late-night screening of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987) wraps a big first day for the Revivals program. “Violence and sex are intimately linked in the horror genre, though Hellraiser takes this connection to a remarkably explicit level,” wrote Chuck Bowen for Slant in 2019. “Barker is in sync with a hunger that’s especially taboo now: the desire to be objectified and dominated,” and “what gives Hellraiser its graphic power are the visual metaphors that Barker fashions for the yearning of the annihilation of self.”

Sunday sees the first screening of one of two documentaries in the program, Raymond Depardon’s Reporters (1981). After documenting conflicts in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Lebanon as a photojournalist, Depardon cofounded a press agency, Gamma, in 1966, became its director in 1973, and then left it for Magnum Photos the following year. In Reporters, he turns his camera back on the agency to focus on the uneasy relationship between the paparazzi and a range of celebrities including Christina Onassis, Richard Gere, and Jean-Luc Godard. Anne Sharp of the Boston Phoenix found Depardon’s Reporters to be “a good-humored, gently satirical portrait of his fellow photojournalists as they bustle, bully, and yawn through a month’s worth of assignments.”

Frederick Wiseman’s Model, also from 1981, won’t screen until October 9, but it’d clearly fit neatly on a double bill with Reporters. “Like all of Wiseman’s work, Model is observational and rooted in the specificities of social codes,” wrote Abbey Bender for Hyperallergic in 2020. “Unlike most of his other films, it’s about people who go in front of cameras for a living.” And it “makes for more fascinating viewing than ever, particularly for those of us interested in the nuances of the fashion scene in a pre-influencer, pre-digital age.”

On October 2 and 5, Marva Nabili will discuss her first feature, The Sealed Soil (1977), the earliest surviving Iranian film directed by a woman. Flora Shabaviz, the wife of cinematographer Barbod Taheri, plays Roo-Bekheir, a young woman insisting on her independence in a small village just before the Islamic Revolution. “With its poetic tone, sparse dialogue, and focus on its heroine’s daily life, the film recalls Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975) but owes as much to Iranian director Sohrab Shahid Saless’s films,” observes Hossein Eidizadeh in Sight and Sound.

Directors John Hanson and Rob Nilsson and cast members Susan Lynch and Joe Spano will take part in Q&As following screenings of Northern Lights (1978), a slightly fictionalized account of the founding in the mid-1910s of the Nonpartisan League, which sought fair treatment for farmers in North Dakota. Hanson and Nilsson “never disguise their leftist, pro-worker sympathies or their personal connection to this subject matter,” noted Jordan Osterer in Film Comment in 2013. “Northern Lights evokes a tremendous sense of [a] town’s tight-knit community and their land’s sprawling, open vistas.”

Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow’s Camp de Thiaroye (1988) also dramatizes actual events, in this case, the lead-up to and the aftermath of the French military’s mass murder of West African troops in Dakar in 1944 following the soldiers’ demands that they be paid what they were owed. Camp de Thiaroye “presents a counter-discursive war history, interrogating the linkages between militarism, fascism, and anti-communism in its analysis of African political struggle,” writes Matene Toure for Verso Books. “Like most of [Sembène’s] films,” this winner of the Grand Jury Prize in Venice “was banned in both Senegal and France for ten years in an attempt to erase the tragedy from public memory.”

Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation (1999) is “one of the greatest American independent films ever made,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks play two Chicago couples whose stories—one set in the 1910s, the other in the 1990s—echo each other. “Cinematically,” writes Brody, “Davis rises to meet the challenge of portraying the metaphysical dimension of death in life with a lofty and lyrical sequence that brings African art and music into the practical struggles at hand. She doesn’t just add an expressly aesthetic history to the action; rather, she derives and extracts that aesthetic history from the action, like a creative unconscious.”

On October 8, Revivals will present the world premiere of a new restoration of Robina Rose’s Nightshift (1981). MoMA hosted the U.S. premiere in 1984: “Set in a small and none-too-elegant London hotel, Nightshift transforms mundane details into ghostlike apparitions, as seen through the eyes of a desk clerk who is by turns watchful and dreamy.” The clerk is played by Pamela Rooke, who was known at the time as Jordan, a model who worked with Vivienne Westwood and starred in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978). Jon Jost manned the camera during the five-night shoot and Simon Jeffes of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra composed the soundtrack.