Restorative Powers
Scorsese nonprofit teams with Mondo & Alamo for film series
By Kimberley Jones, 1:00PM, Wed. May 2, 2012
OPEN IMAGE GALLERY
Stick around long enough, and decay is inevitable. It's true for humans and for film stock: Half of all films made before 1950 are now lost forever. Preservation and restoration are the clarion calls of Martin Scorsese's nonprofit The Film Foundation; their cinematic saves are the focus of a new film series with Mondo and Alamo Drafthouse.
Kicking off this Monday with Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, the eight-film series will pair restored 35mm prints with original poster art from Mondo. Sneak-peeped here are the art contributions of Jeff Kleinsmith's The Unholy Three, Delicious Design League's Film, and Elvisdead's The Old Dark House; other artists featured in the series include Alan Hynes, Laurent Durieux, Jay Shaw, and the Phantom City Creative.
The series runs Monday nights at the Alamo Ritz. The lineup includes:
May 7: Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Joseph Cotten plays the suavest serial killer around in the thriller Hitchcock once pegged as his favorite from his filmography.
May 14: The Unholy Three (1925)
This is the original Tod Browning silent, starring Lon Chaney and screening here with a live score by Peter Stopschinski & Graham Reynolds. Also screening that night will be Alan Schneider's “Film” (1965), a silent short starring Buster Keaton and scripted by Samuel Beckett.
May 21: Rashomon (1950)
Kurosawa's international breakthrough is a masterstroke in unreliable narration. (See: "The Rashomon effect")
May 28: King Kong (1933)
"Throw your arms across your eyes and scream … scream for your life!"
June 4: Paths of Glory (1957)
An unflinching look at war and a meditation on what is bravery, this was Stanley Kubrick's first collaboration with future Spartacus Kirk Douglas.
June 11: The Old Dark House (1932)
"Dark house" horror from James Whale and a cast that can't be beat: Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton, Raymond Massey.
June 18: The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Charles Laughton moved behind the camera, his only whack at it, for this Southern gothic spine chiller. It's a good bookend to Shadow of a Doubt, though Cotten's Uncle Charlie's got nothing on Robert Mitchum's murderous con man with hate in his heart and hard-lettered in ink across his knuckles.
Tickets for series starter Shadow of a Doubt are on sale now; the remaining shows will go on sale soon.
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Film Foundation, Mondo, Alamo Drafthouse, Martin Scorsese, Shadow of a Doubt, The Unholy Three, Rashomon, Paths of Glory, The Old Dark House, Night of the Hunter, Elvisdead, Jay Shaw, Phantom City Creative, Delicious Design League, Jeff Kleinsmith
