Premieres of New Prints and Digital Restorations

September 5 to October 5, 2024

We begin a new season by showcasing a small selection of recent highlights that have enriched our collection in the past year – titles that you will, hopefully, see again and again in our Invisible Cinema over the next sixty years. The scope is vast. You will see brand-new 35mm prints of bona fide classics, struck especially for us under the supervision of leading international experts: the newly restored longer cut of Erich von Stroheim's Foolish Wives (1922) and Věra Chytilová's Sedmikrásky (Daises, 1965). You will also see well-preserved 35mm prints of delicacies acquired from, deposited, or donated by private film collectors: Robert Aldrich's Emperor of the North Pole (1973), Hou Hsiao-hsien's Ximeng rensheng (The Puppetmaster, 1993), Sergei Parajanov's Tini zabutykh predkiv (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 1965), and Chuen Jik Sat Sau (Fulltime Killer, 2011) by Johnnie To Kei-fung.

Finally, you will also see a series of new digital restorations: Michael Haneke's two-part Lemminge (1979) and his Ingeborg Bachmann adaptation Drei Wege zum See (1976), and the one-of-a-kind comedy Der Einzug des Rokoko ins Inselreich der Huzzis (1989) by Andreas Karner, Mara Mattuschka, and Hans Werner Poschauko. We collect films with a growing passion and you will see more in the months to come.
 
This cross section should also serve as a reminder of how the nature of film collections in cinematheques has changed over the decades. The early film collections that served as foundations for the world's first film museums, archives, and cinematheques were more often than not reflections of the deeply personal passions and desires of men and women who founded or first ran these institutions. The Cinémathèque française's Henri Langlois and the George Eastman Museum's James Card were both smitten by Louise Brooks. Thanks to their adolescent obsession, her films – directed by such luminaries as Howard Hawks, William A. Wellman, and G.W. Pabst – were among the first to be canonized, collected, and preserved. Iris Barry, the first head of MoMA's film department, had decidedly more highbrow tastes and admired cinema for its potential as an art form; she was the first to collect works by D.W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, and Sergei Eisenstein.
 
Later on, when nation states began recognizing cinema as a form of cultural heritage and mechanisms like the mandatory depositing of domestic productions, theatrical releases, etc. came into place, idiosyncratic curatorial sentiments were overshadowed by a more diverse inflow of new materials, gradually making film collections all over the world larger and larger...until about a decade ago the nearly complete shift to digital film production and distribution radically altered the archival film landscape.
 
Today, non-profit film archives rightfully refuse to collect encrypted DCPs (digital cinema packages), so contemporary, digital-born studio productions are no longer safeguarded by the international network of film archives that has already more than once proved instrumental in protecting early film history from the negligence of those same studios. Striking a new print of an analogue-born work to enrich one's film collection used to be an enterprise logistically similar to booking a print, albeit a bit more expensive. Today, when the global number of still operating film labs (professional and artist-run) amounts to only a few dozen, striking a new print is an event as rare as a lunar eclipse.
 
Film archives all over the world – the Austrian Film Museum included – nevertheless continue to expand their collections through various means and with a heightened awareness of just how important – and unique – each film print is today. We invite you to enjoy this new selection. (Jurij Meden)