Film series: Restorations & Rediscoveries

A man in a white undershirt sits on the floor of a sparsely furnished room beside a large opening in the floor. A beverage can and scattered household objects are nearby.

Cornell Cinema has a long tradition of showcasing recent film restoration projects and rediscovered masterpieces in our “Restoration & Rediscoveries” series, which continues this fall.

For much of cinema history, movies were made on 16mm and 35mm film stocks, which are susceptible to damage from heat, moisture, light, general use, and neglect and exist in a finite number of copies. This material reality leaves many films at risk of being lost and makes film restoration an important part of collections care and cultural preservation.

Archivists and film preservation institutions around the world work to identify and preserve at-risk films, collaborating with filmmakers and combining surviving film materials with the latest digital technologies to restore the vibrancy, clarity, and depth of an original film print. Our ongoing Cornell Cinema series serves as a reminder of the complex, technological history of cinema and the degree to which film preservation is a vital—and often political—act.

This semester, we are excited to spotlight an eclectic mix of recent restoration projects. We will kick off the semester with a new 4K restoration of the iconic road movie Thelma & Louise (1991), starring Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, and a new digital restoration of Japanese auteur Satoshi Kon’s acclaimed anime Perfect Blue (1998).

Next, we will feature Days and Nights of the Forest (1970), a morally loaded buddy comedy by the legendary Indian filmmaker and author Satyajit Ray that was recently restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, and James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), which celebrates its 35th anniversary this year and feels strangely relevant in our contemporary moment.

Finally, we are pleased to bring to campus a newly struck 35mm print of Tsai Ming-Liang's The Hole (1999), an end-of-the-world romance that remains disarmingly funny and feels eerily prescient in our post-pandemic world, and a live score presentation of the Italian silent film Malombra (1917), which was rediscovered and restored by the Cineteca di Bologna.