To Save and Project 2025

Nehme notes that F. W. Murnau arrived at William Fox’s studio as Borzage was preparing 7th Heaven, and for a brief while, Gaynor was spending her days on the set of Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) and her nights working with Borzage. In a 2008 piece for Moving Image Source, Michael Atkinson suggested that Borzage “took the dreamy, multilayered Sunrise palette and infused it with human complexity and romantic seriousness.” Gaynor’s “huge eyes are the obvious trump card here, enabling her to register a Streepian cascade of visible reactions and ideas almost without moving a muscle,” wrote Atkinson. “Farrell is just as much a surprise, however, and may be the most underrated, and under-remembered, leading man in Hollywood history.”

This evening, a freshly upgraded restoration of 7th Heaven will open To Save and Project, the Museum of Modern Art’s festival of film preservation. The twenty-first edition will wrap on January 30 with the world premiere of MoMA’s reconstruction of the original 1918 version of Charlie Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms, a WWI comedy screening with Chaplin’s newly restored short The Bond (1918).

Film historian Kathryn Fuller-Seeley is currently working on a biography of Francis Ford, a movie director and star probably best known for giving his younger brother John his first breaks in Hollywood. The brothers worked together on The Craving (1918), starring Francis as a chemist struggling with alcoholism. Fuller-Seeley will introduce The Craving as well as The Post Telegrapher, a two-reeler Francis Ford directed in 1912. Further silent-era highlights include Maurice Tourneur’s melodrama The White Heather (1919), Robert Wiene’s Dostoyevsky adaptation Raskolnikow (1923), and Yevgeni Cherviakov’s My Son (1928), starring Anna Sten.

While Carl Laemmle Jr. was head of production at Universal, he invested heavily in Paul Fejos’s early sound feature Broadway (1929). As Graham Petrie has noted, much of the budget went into “the construction of a spectacularly elaborate nightclub set” and “the invention and equally spectacular use of a huge camera crane that prowled through and swooped over the set to astonishing creative effect. At a time when nascent sound-recording technology was inhibiting the expansive camera movement that had marked the finest late silent movies, Fejos deserves as much credit as Lubitsch and Rouben Mamoulian for helping to set the camera free.”

Three Broadway Girls is the title Lowell Sherman’s pre-Code comedy The Greeks Had a Word for Them (1932) was known by for decades. Wearing costumes designed by Coco Chanel, Joan Blondell, Madge Evans, and Ina Claire play former showgirls who rent out an apartment with the aim of luring in wealthy beaus. Director Herman E. Webber and his team skirted the constraints of the Production Code by presenting The Wages of Sin (1938) as an educational film. Steven K. Hill, a curator for the UCLA Film & Television Archive, notes that The Wages of Sin “falls into the ‘wayward woman’ classification of the exploitation genre, with a little striptease and murder thrown in for good measure.”

This year’s program offers two exemplary films from the golden age of Mexican cinema, Emilio Fernández’s María Candelaria (1943) and Roberto Gavaldón’s Adventures of Casanova (1948). Following a twenty-year stint in Hollywood, Dolores del Río returned to Mexico to play María, a humble Indigenous woman in love with a vegetable seller (Pedro Armendáriz). Both are shunned by their community and harassed by a shopkeeper (Miguel Inclán) who wants María for himself. In Cannes, María Candelaria won the Palme d’Or and a Best Cinematography award for Gabriel Figueroa. Arturo de Córdova stars in Gavaldón’s film as Jacques Casanova, a Sicilian freedom fighter warding off Austrian invaders.

Anthony Mann’s westerns with James Stewart are “mysterious, attractively confounding, in their psychology, and satisfyingly brutal,” writes K. Austin Collins. “These movies make you wince. In Bend of the River (1952), the Stewart hero is betrayed by a friend (played by Arthur Kennedy) and, badly beaten, is isolated in his rage, with the vast landscapes beyond Mount Hood serving as a capacious backdrop for an anger that seems fit to swallow up the world.” When Phil Karlson’s Gunman’s Walk (1958) screened in Locarno, Imogen Sara Smith, writing for the Notebook, picked up on “echoes of Anthony Mann’s The Man from Laramie (1955) in the tortured father-son and fraternal conflicts, and of Delmer Daves’s 3:10 to Yuma (1957) in the humane rejection of violence; to these it adds a scathing critique of racism and western machismo.”

Last month we celebrated the restoration of Alberto Cavalcanti’s Brazilian comedy A Real Woman (1954). MoMA is presenting the North American premiere of Rosaura at 10 O’Clock (1958), Mario Soffici’s adaptation of Marco Denevi’s first novel, noting that Soffici, “who had helped establish Argentina’s studio system in the 1930s, brings his classical visual precision to bear on Denevi’s postmodern narrative games, creating a work that simultaneously honors and transcends its popular genre origins.” And Paul Carpita’s Rendez-vous of the Docks (1955) “emerges both as a vital document of postwar French social consciousness and a precious record of working-class life in midcentury Marseille.”

The sixties bleed into the seventies with a double bill that opens with Dutchman (1966), an adaptation of Amiri Baraka’s controversial one-act play about a white woman (Shirley Knight) who comes on to a Black man (Al Freeman Jr.) in a subway car in New York. Written by Baraka and directed in London by Anthony Harvey (The Lion in Winter), Dutchman screened in competition in Venice and, with the help of Grove Press, saw a limited release in the U.S. Billy Jackson’s We Are Universal (1971), a survey of the Black arts scene, features commentary from Jesse Jackson, Quincy Jones, and Nikki Giovanni.

James Bidgood spent seven years shooting Pink Narcissus (1971) on 8 mm in his Hell’s Kitchen apartment, but then, after clashing with his backers, demanded that it be released anonymously. The film is a series of fantasies sprung from the mind of a call boy (Bobby Kendall) in which he becomes a matador, a Roman slave, or a harem master. As Oliver Basciano wrote in the Guardian days after Bidgood passed away in 2022, “the sensuality of these scenes comes from the washes of scenographic color: the bullfighter pulls up his high boots amid a variety of purple hues; the cottaging spot is a monochrome of black and grey; Narcissus is shown in a boudoir of burning pink. The climax comes when the sex worker—a mop of dark curly hair, high cheek bones—plays both a Middle Eastern potentate and his catamite, entertained by an increasingly energetic male belly dancer, the latter’s erection barely covered in a sheer veil.”

MoMA has paired two films from 1974, A Circle in the Fire, Victor Nunez’s adaptation of a story by Flannery O’Connor about a standoff between a woman who owns a farm and three teenage boys, and Elijah Pierce: Woodcarver, a portrait of the artist by Carolyn Jones. And Vichit Kounavudhi’s My Dear Wife (1978) is a “sophisticated, Sirkian entry in Thailand’s domestic melodrama tradition.”

In Jessie Maple’s Will (1981), one of this year’s additions to the National Film Registry, Obaka Adedunyo plays a former basketball star who aims to overcome his addiction and mentor young players. When Will screened last fall at the Block, the museum noted that the film “showcases Maple’s commitments to self-determination and collective uplift through a tough but tender narrative about recovery, mentorship, and second chances.”

In Věra Chytilová’s Calamity (1982), a student with zero qualifications takes a job as a train conductor less than a decade before the dissolution of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. “When an actual catastrophe ensues, Chytilová antically dramatizes, in a scathing set piece, the system’s disregard for human life and the desperate cheer of its would-be victims,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody.

To Save and Project programmers Dave Kehr and Cindi Rowell clearly do not want New Yorkers to overlook the opportunity to see Nirad Mohapatra’s Maya Miriga (1984), “one of the masterpieces of Indian regional cinema.” Three generations of a middle-class family live under the same roof: “We are not far from the world of Satyajit Ray, or from the atmosphere of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons.” And in Stars in Broad Daylight (1988), Ossama Mohammed “uses the microcosm of a rural Syrian family to explore the psychology of life under dictatorship.”

When he was fifteen, André Bonzel, codirector of Man Bites Dog (1992), began collecting amateur films, and working with two editors, he’s pieced together a whimsical narrative loosely tracking the story of his family and his own obsessions. Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By (2021) screens Saturday and Monday. On January 27, Heather McAdams will present restorations of films she made in the 1980s. MoMA points out that her work “was once hailed by B. Ruby Rich in the Chicago Reader as combining ‘the collage finesse of a Bruce Conner with the crude campiness of the Kuchar brothers.’”