Cinema Revival Festival Celebrates Film History and the Art of Restoration
The Wexner Center for the Arts is hosting its 12th annual Cinema Revival: A Festival of Film Restoration, running from February 26 to March 2. The festival highlights the importance of film restoration and its role in preserving cultural history, ensuring that cinematic works aren’t lost to time.
The Importance of Film Restoration
Dave Filipi, head of film at the Wexner Center for the Arts, emphasizes the critical question: “If an audience doesn’t get to observe a film, does it really exist?” He argues that films sitting unseen in archives lose their cultural impact. The Cinema Revival festival aims to address this by showcasing recently restored films spanning from the earliest days of cinema through the 1980s.
Festival Highlights
This year’s festival features a diverse lineup, including:
- Restored short films by Auguste and Louis Lumière, dating back over 120 years.
- Animated films from the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
- The world premiere of a novel restoration of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’s 3D film, Money From Home.
- A high-definition 70-millimeter restored print of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
The restoration of Money From Home was particularly challenging, as it was filmed using a three-strip Technicolor process with two cameras to create the 3D effect. This required restoring six separate negatives and aligning them to achieve the correct visual presentation.
Beyond Preservation: Reinterpreting Film
Filipi notes that restoring films allows contemporary audiences to view them with fresh perspectives. Films capture the context of their time, but when reintroduced to modern audiences, they can acquire new meaning and relevance.
Dave Filipi’s Operate at the Wexner Center
Dave Filipi has been with the Wexner Center for the Arts since 1994, becoming Director of Film/Video in 2010. He has curated hundreds of film events, including retrospectives and visits from prominent filmmakers such as Richard Linklater, Milos Forman, and Pedro Costa. He also organized the publication of Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes: On Brazil and Global Cinema in 2018.