The Ninth MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation Kicks Off 10/14

The Museum of Modern Art will present To Save and Project: The Ninth MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation, the annual festival of preserved and restored films from archives, studios, and distributors around the world, from October 14 through November 19, 2011. This year's festival comprises over 35 films from 14 countries, virtually all of them having their New York premieres, and some shown in versions never before seen in the United States. Complementing the annual festival is a retrospective devoted to filmmaker Jack Smith, featuring 11 newly struck prints acquired for MoMA's collection and introduced on November 13 by Mario Montez, star of Smith's Flaming Creatures (1962-63) and Normal Love (1963-65). To Save and Project is organized by Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

Opening this year's festival is Joe Dante's digital preservation of The Movie Orgy (1968). Dante, who created some of the best genre-bending movies of the past 40 years, including Piranha, The Howling, Gremlins, and Matinee, will introduce a rare screening of The Movie Orgy on October 14. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he and Jon Davidson traveled to college campuses across America to screen this 4½ hour, politically edged extravaganza composed of Saturday matinee B-movie trailers, commercials, army training films, sex hygiene films, newscasts, music clips, and Christian kiddie programs. On October 15, Dante will also introduce his episode "It's a Good Life" from Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), and Roger Corman's The Intruder (1962), starring William Shatner as a white supremacist who foments racial violence in the deep South.

On November 7, Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker will introduce Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1942), newly restored by the Academy Film Archive in association with the BFI, ITV Studios Global Entertainment Ltd., and The Film Foundation. On November 11, the hand-painted color version of Georges Méliès' Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902), unseen for 109 years until its glorious new restoration by Lobster Films, Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema and Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage, is presented together with the world premiere of Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange's documentary The Extraordinary Voyage (2011). A special evening dedicated to Saul Bass, presented by MoMA and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on November 14, will feature some of the designer's iconic title sequences and commercials, as well as the New York premiere of his Academy Award-winning short Why Man Creates (1968), newly preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

For more info visit: http://www.moma.org/