Safeguarding Cinema’s Future: The Restoration of Mary Stephen’s “Shades of Silk”

When I’m looking at what’s on offer in the Revivals section of the New York Film Festival-and, for that matter, whenever I see a noteworthy retrospective coming to one of the city’s repertory houses-I think of these screenings not as conserving cinema’s past but, rather, as safeguarding its future. The vital thing about the history of this art form is its creative power, its ability to energize filmmakers of later generations and inspire movies to come. In that regard, one of the major events of this year’s festival is the world première of a restoration of Mary Stephen’s film “Ombres de Soie” (“Shades of Silk”), from 1978.

“Shades of Silk” was Stephen’s first feature, and it remains a tour de force of form, style, and historical imagination. In her mid-twenties when she made the film, Stephen was born in Hong Kong to a Chinese family who immigrated to Montreal in 1967. She made a few short films in Canada and then, in the mid-seventies, got a grant to study film in Paris, where she made “Shades.” The film was shot cheaply-in 16-mm., with a tiny crew and Stephen herself playing one of the main characters. But the result could not be further from the familiar rawness of independent filmmaking. In a spare sixty-two minutes of sinuously elegant images and alluring surfaces, it unfolds a narrative that spans continents and decades.

The story is one of impossible love, centering on two young Chinese women, high-school best friends in Shanghai in the nineteen-twenties whose relationship has an intense erotic current continuing into adulthood. In 1934, Lysanne (played by Alexandria Brouwer) is living in Paris and writes to her friend Marlène (played by Stephen), who’s studying at Wellesley, imploring her to transfer to a university in Paris. There are glimpses of the life they shared, but Lysanne’s pleas are in vain. Desperate for marlène, she has a nervous breakdown, and goes to stay with her mother, who now lives in the colony