Full Cinema Rediscovered programme revealed

During a fascinating restoration featurette on the blu-ray of Jaws, Steven Spielberg enthuses: “Nothing materially has changed about the film, but the image on a really, really good HD TV screen looks better than the film looked when first projected in 1975.”

“There’s a big world of restorations now, which was partly sparked by Scorsese and Spielberg,” says Watershed cinema curator Mark Cosgrove, who’s also behind July’s inaugural multi-venue Cinema Rediscovered archive film event. “When they went to have a look at the films they made in the seventies and early eighties, they realised that these had all gone magenta as the celluloid deteriorated. So they started giving serious consideration to how you archive your work and get the best quality prints.”

Mark’s been attending Bologna’s internationally renowned Il Cinema Ritrovato archive film festival for six years now and has seen for himself the booming interest in restored classics among audiences of all ages. That’s also been reflected in attendances at the Watershed’s Sunday brunch seasons. “We recently showed John Carpenter’s The Thing and got more 100 people for a screening on a sunny Sunday afternoon. And that’s not just been happening recently. We did a spaghetti western season in the brunch slot and got huge audiences for films like Once Upon a Time in the West. What I think is going on is that audiences want to see these films in their original form and setting. Digital allows people to watch anything, anywhere on any device, but there’s a fundamental difference when you watch a film in the cinema. To me, it’s like treating them with respect again.”

In addition to showcasing meticulous restorations of classic movies, Cinema Rediscovered highlights the importance of film preservation, permitting modern audiences to enjoy rarely screened titles. Alongside this comes welcome critical reappraisal. Every cinephile should own an old Halliwell or copy of the Time Out Film Guide to be reminded of how frequently contemporary critics got it horribly wrong. Cinema Rediscovered is showing a reissue of Kubrick’s Thackeray adaptation Barry Lyndon, which was slaughtered by reviewers on release in 1975 but is now rightly recognised as one of the director’s finest works. “The same thing happened with The Thing,” adds Mark. “It was completely slated when it came out, but later took on a cult following. Then it had a critical reappraisal, as indeed did all John Carpenter’s work. So people now see it as a modern masterpiece.”

Cinema Rediscovered is organised in partnership with Twentieth Century Flicks, South West Silents, the Independent Cinema Office and, appropriately enough, Clevedon’s historic Curzon cinema. It includes two premieres of new restorations: the 1968 British historical drama The Lion in Winter, with Peter O’Toole as Henry II and Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine, and gritty proto-kitchen sink drama Room at the Top. Throughout July, there’s also a focus on Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky and a retrospective of the work of The Lion in Winter cinematographer Douglas Slocome, who died in February at the ripe old age of 103. His credits range from Ealing classics (It Always Rains on Sunday, The Titfield Thunderbolt, The Smallest Show on Earth, etc) to Joseph Losey’s The Servant, Rollerball, The Italian Job and the first three Indiana Jones movies.

Musical enthusiasts and friends of Dorothy can enjoy The Wizard of Oz in both 2D and 3D. But archive film isn’t just about blockbusters. One of the more fascinating low-key events is Home Movies from the British Empire, which draws on amateur films from Bristol Record Office’s British Empire and Commonwealth collections to present rare personal perspectives of life in the British colonies.

A collaboration with Autograph ABP brings a strand of rarely seen African-American films programmed by Karen Alexander under the Black Atlantic Cinema Club banner. The highlight of these is a showing of forgotten Blacula-style Blaxploitation horror, Ganja & Hess, which was the only American film selected for Critics’ Week at Cannes back in 1973. This is being screened from a 35mm print, courtesy of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation has recognised film preservation’s global dimension with its restorations of such titles as the Senegalese drama Touki Bouki. At Cinema Rediscovered, this work is underlined with a screening of the award-winning A Flickering Truth. Pietra Brettkelly’s documentary follows dedicated Ibrahim Arify as he sets out to restore 8,000 hours of film from the Afghan film archive in Kabul, which was destroyed by the Taliban in a fundamentalist frenzy.

On a jollier note, arguably the weekend highlight is a day trip to Clevedon. For a mere £20/£18 (concessions), you’ll be whisked from the Watershed by historic charabanc (oh, OK, a coach) to the splendid Curzon for a guided tour, demonstration of the vintage Christie organ, light lunch, and a screening of John Schlesinger’s directorial debut, A Kind of Loving, which was released in 1962 – a mere half century after this grand picture palace first threw open its doors to the public. As Mark Cosgrove contends, coming over all sound-bitey: “The past is the future of cinema.”

Full details of all Cinema Rediscovered screenings can be found in our detailed daily film listings starting here.