Since its founding in 1990 by Martin Scorsese, the Film Foundation has helped to restore over 925 films. "All of this painstaking work and this artistry, this development of the art form, it's all in danger," says Mr. Scorsese in a video on the foundation's website. "Film stocks are fragile. So they need to be preserved and protected."
The efforts of the foundation, as well as those of the Museum of Modern Art, Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging, Universal Pictures, Criterion, and many others, can be seen in the Sag Harbor Cinema's second annual Festival of Preservation, which will launch on Friday and continue through Monday.
"This special program speaks to the heart of the Sag Harbor Cinema's mission to engage our audience with the past, the present, and the future of film, to connect it to different strands of cinema, and to celebrate the legacy and the power of the art form," said Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan, the cinema's artistic director.
Fittingly, the series will kick off with "Film, the Living Record of Our Memory," a documentary by Ines Toharia, in which archivists, curators, technicians, and filmmakers from around the world explain what film preservation is and why it is necessary.
Also screening tomorrow is "The Runner," a 1984 film by Amir Naderi, a pioneer of the Iranian New Wave, that follows an illiterate 11-year-old scavenger struggling to survive in an Iranian port city. After its recent release at Film Forum in Manhattan, J. Hoberman of The New York Times wrote, "Crisply restored with improved subtitles, it is no less timeless and elemental" than when it premiered in the United States in 1991.
After tomorrow's 6 p.m. screening, Mr. Naderi will be present in person, for a conversation with the lead actor, Madjid Niroumand, who will appear virtually.
The Film Foundation and Warner Bros. restored the epic 1956 western "Giant," which starred Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean, in Dean's last film role as a leading actor. George Stevens won the Academy Award for best director, and the film garnered nine other nominations, including one for Dean.
The earliest film in the series is Ernst Lubitsch's "Rosita" (1923), a costume romance set in a mythical Spain and starring Mary Pickford in her first adult role. The music accompanying the silent film was recorded live at the premiere of MoMA's restoration of the film at the 2017 Venice Film Festival. Dave Kehr, MoMA's curator of film, will introduce the screening.
Speaking of Lubitsch, the phrase "squirrels to the nuts," which was uttered in that director's 1946 film "Cluny Brown," was adopted by the director Peter Bogdanovich as the title of his final dramatic feature.
First released in 2014 as "She's Funny That Way," the screwball comedy sank like a stone after being mangled by the producers. However, two years ago, a videotape of Bogdanovich's own cut of the film, under the title "Squirrels to the Nuts," was discovered on eBay by James Kenney, a film scholar, and was prepared for release by Bogdanovich himself and restored to its original dimensions before his death in January. Mr. Kenney will introduce the film at its 9 p.m. showing on Saturday.
Other festival films include "La Perla," Emilio Fernandez's 1947 film about a poor fisherman who discovers a beautiful pearl in the sea and thinks his family's fortunes will improve. With a script by John Steinbeck, the film will be shown in both its Spanish and English versions. Mr. Kehr will introduce Sunday's showing of the Spanish version, which will have English subtitles.
Alexandre Philippe, a filmmaker and essayist, will introduce Sunday's screening of "The Wizard of Oz," which has been restored by Warner Bros., while Bob Rubin, a collector and film scholar, will host a discussion after the showing of Jacques Tourneur's western "Canyon Passage," which was shown last month at the New York Film Festival.
Bill Morrison, whose "Dawson City: Frozen Time" has been shown at the cinema, will return with "The Great Flood," a cinematic exploration of one of the worst natural disasters in American history, the 1927 Mississippi River flood.
David Lynch supervised and approved of the 4K digital restoration of his 1997 film "Lost Highway." Starring Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette, the restored version of the neo-noir film was called by The New Yorker's Richard Brody "the director's purest exercise of style."
"Vaudeville 101: A Night at the Palace," set for Sunday at 2:45 p.m., is a live program presented by Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum's director of repertory programming. Mr. Goldstein's talk will include rare film footage from the late 1920s and early '30s, much of it recently discovered and restored, that features such performers as George Burns and Gracie Allen, W.C. Fields, and Ethel Merman.
The festival will conclude on Monday with "Cavalcade," Frank Lloyd's 1933 Oscar-winning adaptation of Noel Coward's London stage success. Anticipating "Upstairs, Downstairs" and "Downton Abbey," "Cavalcade" follows the lives of a wealthy English family and their servants from New Year's Eve 1899 to 1933.
A panel discussion on preservation, featuring experts in the field, will take place on Saturday morning at 11. Details will be posted on the cinema's website.
