This short week will be a quick slide into the Thanksgiving holidays, and when we return, awards season—the first draft of the history of the year in movies—will begin in earnest. The Gothams will kick off the week on Monday, followed by the New York Film Critics Circle winners on Tuesday, the nominations for the Film Independent Spirit Awards on Wednesday, and so on. The Contenders, MoMA’s series of “influential, innovative films made in the past twelve months that we believe will stand the test of time,” is well underway and running through January 8, and Curators’ Choice 2024: The First Batch, the monthlong series at the Museum of the Moving Image, opens on Sunday with four powerful documentaries: Intercepted, No Other Land, Black Box Diaries, and Union.
Starting this Wednesday, the Cinematheque française will celebrate the year in new restorations with a five-day program of standards and obscurities looking better than they ever have before. Restaurations et raretés, Best of 2024 offers twenty-six restored features recently premiered in the Classics programs at Cannes or Venice, Il Cinema Ritrovato, MoMA’s To Save and Project, and beyond, plus five rare and original 35 mm Technicolor prints from the Cinematheque’s archive, including John Ford’s first feature in color, Drums Along the Mohawk (1939).
The series opens with Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946), featuring Rita Hayworth’s “greatest entrance, in her greatest film,” as Pamela Hutchinson puts it. Parisians can spend all of Saturday in the Salle Henri Langlois, where Frédéric Bonnaud will introduce both parts of Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (1927). “Gance swoons unabashedly over the eagle-eyed emperor (Albert Dieudonné), contriving artful coincidences to foreshadow his destiny and sublime set pieces to illustrate his heroism,” wrote Imogen Sara Smith when she caught the first part in Bologna this summer. “Applause and shouts of rapture broke out after some of the most electrifying scenes, like the first singing of the Marseillaise, or a hell-for-leather moonlit chase on horseback captured in a hurtling traveling shot.”
Further highlights include Frank Borzage’s The Lady (1925), Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le moko (1937), Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1940), Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter (1966), Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), Satyajit Ray’s The Home and the World (1984), Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 (2003), and the sixtieth anniversary restoration of Jacques Demy’s beloved musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg that opens at Film Forum in New York on December 6.
Demy was “a lyrical, dream-oriented, bitterly hopeful chronicler of mid-century melancholy, both personal and political,” writes Carlos Valladares in an unabashed ode to Cherbourg in the Brooklyn Rail. “The product of unexpected strains in French cinema, Demy is what would have developed if the dream-obsessed, poetic, and excess-intrigued Jean Cocteau had conceived a child with the ruthless, sharp master of ellipsis and suggestion, Robert Bresson. It is in Cherbourg, Demy’s most ‘perfectly’ realized masterpiece in a career full of them, that his peculiar worldview found its popular apotheosis.”
Valladares tells us that he’s seen Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) and Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve) fall in love and drift apart sixty-five times, and he’s looking forward to his sixty-sixth viewing: “Maybe you will react to it just as Kurt Vonnegut reacted when he first saw it on September 27, 1965 at an Iowa cinema: ‘I saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which I took very hard. To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That’s all right. I like to have my heart broken.’”
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