Digitisations and Restorations (14) - Apu, Celine and Julie, Napoleon, Analogue, Proof at Randwick

Associate Editor (Restorations and Revivals) Simon Taaffe has come across the following screenings and other information. Click on the links for times etc where indicated.

BAMPFA is the visual arts center of the University of California, Berkeley and is presenting digital restorations of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy. Other trilogies by Krisztof Kieslowski and Marcel Pagnol are on the horizon

……..The first restoration of Jacques Rivette’s amazingly popular went out in various Paris and provincial art cinemas Celine and Julie Go Boating.

Celine and Julie Go Boating

……Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato has screenings of the restored Charles Laughton classic Night of the Hunter . Click on the link for the trailer

Cinecon is a seriously fine event showcasing restored Hollywood movies and screening in that great LA picture palace Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Many byways of Hollywood on display

The BFI is presenting screenings of yet another restoration of Abel Gance's Napoleon= The screenings, with live orchestra, precede Blu-ray release later this month

Abel Gance's Napoleon

…..The Vienna Film Museum has a remarkable event devoted to ‘analogue cinema’. Here is a taste from the introduction on the Museum website. “No activity can become an art until its proper epoch has ended and it has dwindled, as an aid of survival, into total obsolescence," Hollis Frampton states in an essay describing analogue film as the "Last Machine." While the idea that analogue film is obsolete and outdated is mostly recited in the context of today’s media industry, a kind of counter-movement has emerged in cinephile circles and within the art world: it seems many are only now rediscovering the singularity and beauty of this last mechanical art.

As part of the Vienna Art Week, the Film Museum will focus on three settings where celluloid is not considered obsolete and is instead very deliberately chosen as a medium: Vienna's Friedl Kubelka School for Independent Film, now celebrating its tenth anniversary, is a rare case of an analogue film-focused educational institution in the proper sense of the word. Its curriculum-based program stands in contrast to LaborBerlin, which functions as more of an independent film collective revolving around analogue film and, logically, an analogue film processing lab. The structure of the Berlin group echoes that of L'Abominable, a Paris workshop and artist collective that has been supporting, accompanying and helping develop analogue film projects for the past 20 years.

"The Last Machine" consists of three program strands, highlighting a representative selection of works that arose from these institutions. Through dialogue with protagonists from these three groups, it also gives insight into the circumstances and frameworks that allow film to live on despite its industrial supersession, helping it unleash its unruly forces into new orbits of our worldview.

…Meanwhile local activity is taking place tonight Wednesday 9 November at the beloved local Randwick Ritz with a screening of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s Proof. Margaret Pomeranz will be on hand to do a Q&A with star Hugo Weaving and Moorhouse. The event is described as an NFSA ‘Fundraiser’. The photocopied leaflet handout out at the Ritz didn’t mention prices, only that the No Free List was operating.