The names associated with Sag Harbor Cinema's upcoming Festival of Preservation could have been lifted from the syllabus of a film history course: Edward G. Robinson, Mae West, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Vincent Price, Mervyn LeRoy, William Friedkin, and the presenter of the series, Martin Scorsese.
The East End's only festival dedicated to the preservation of film and its culture, this year's four-day lineup will launch on Friday, Nov. 17, at 6 p.m., with Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound" (1945) and "Destino," a seven-minute short from 2003 that began in the 1940s as a collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali.
"Creating a strong, original repertory program for the East End has always been an important component of the cinema’s mission," says Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan, the cinema's founding artistic director. "The Festival of Preservation, of course, in its free-form concept, is at the very heart of this effort. I am happy to say the slate this year is rich and adventurous as ever. And we have a great roster of guests."
One of those guests will be Kevin Schaeffer, director of restoration and library management at the Walt Disney Company, which restored "Spellbound" in association with the Film Foundation and the Academy Film Archive. The film is a classic Hitchcock psychological thriller starring Ingrid Bergman as a psychiatrist and Gregory Peck as a mysterious doctor who becomes the chief of staff at her institution.
Production on "Destino" was halted when the Walt Disney Studio encountered financial difficulties. Completed by Roy Disney in 2003, the film features the tragic love story of Chronos, the personification of time, and a mortal woman. It plays out across the surreal landscapes often used in Dali's paintings. Mr. Schaeffer will introduce the program.
A preservation panel featuring presentations and a discussion with archivists, historians, curators, and preservation experts will happen on Nov. 19 at 11 a.m. Speakers include Grover Crisp, executive vice president in charge of the Columbia and TriStar libraries at Sony Pictures; Scott McGee, TCM’s director of original productions; Terry Lawler, former executive director of New York Women in Film & Television and member of the Women’s Film Preservation Fund; Simon Lund, director of technical operations at Cineric, and Mr. Schaeffer.
The festival will also include an exhibition, in the building's third-floor gallery, of rare posters focused on the first 40 years of cinema. Drawn from the collection of Joe Lauro, an archivist, filmmaker, and musician, the display will remain on view through December.
Other film highlights include a screening of Friedkin's 1977 "Sorcerer,' which the director, who died in August, cited as the favorite of his films. An action-adventure film starring Roy Scheider, it will be introduced by Josh Safdie, the co-director with his brother of "Uncut Gems" and "Good Time."
The cinema will hold 35mm screenings of two classic 1930s films directed by Mervyn LeRoy, "Little Caesar" and "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang." Linda LeRoy Janklow, the daughter of the director, and Doris Warner will be on hand afterward to discuss how Warner Bros. pioneered the gangster genre and thought-provoking social dramas during the Great Depression.
A screening of William Castle's "The Tingler" (1959), a horror film starring Vincent Price as a pathologist whose experiments involve a parasitic creature attached to the spine, will bring to the cinema Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum's director of repertory programming, for a "live show" of the film. Details are scarce, but live special effects have been hinted.
"Touki Bouki," a 1973 Senegalese film by Djibril Diop Membety, mixed the surreal and naturalistic to create a portrait of that country in the early 1970s. Considered one of the most important African films ever made, it will be introduced via Zoom by Jonas Carpignano, an Italian-American filmmaker.
The complete schedule, with information on ticketing and passes, is available on the cinema's website.
