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Dec 30, 2013 Web Exclusive By John Oursler

In addition to being a prolific and lauded filmmaker, Martin Scorsese spends much of his free time (who knows when that is) as a film preservationist. Since 1990 he has headed the World Cinema Foundation (WCF), whose stated mission to find, save, and restore classics of world cinema (usually, though not exclusively, from Asia and Africa) has been an unassailable success, bringing films to Western audiences in an attempt to globalize cinema’s reach. Many of the films WCF unearths never opened in America or Europe despite stellar reviews and successful festival runs.

The exhaustive process of finding and restoring these films largely hinges Scorsese’s name, the recognition of which clearly brings with it a significant amount of clout and donor appeal, as evidenced by WCF’s lux title sponsors Cartier and Giorgio Armani. When you’re Martin Scorsese, you can get international luminaries Wong kar-wai, Wim Wenders, Abbas Kiarostami, and Guillermo del Toro, among many others, to be on your board of directors.

In all, WCF has restored 21 films from nearly as many countries, therein facilitating a crucial dialogue about world cinema often relegated to cinephiliac enclaves. For example, this year WCF’s highly anticipated restorations included Filipino master Lino Brocka’s 1975 Nicholas Ray-inspired melodrama Manila in the Claws of Neon, and Cannes award-winning Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s debut Mysterious Object at Noon.

Criterion’s recently released Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project is the box set of the year, showcasing digitally preserved restorations of six films on Blu-ray for the first time: Touki Bouki (Senegal); Redes (Mexico); A River Called Titas (India and Bangladesh; Dry Summer (Turkey); Trances (Morocco); The Housemaid (South Korea). Spanning six countries and three continents, this box set presents an essential entrée into world cinema, specifically that from Africa, a region from which filmmaking is rarely seen or produced.

Some highlights:

Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1973 youth-on-the-run homage to French New Wave, Touki Bouki, is a standout in the collection, mixing Godardian formal invention with indigenously ritualistic narrative. The familiar story of aspirational youth aggrieved by tradition and cultural confines, Bouki focuses on a young couple, Anta and Mory, who dream of leaving Senegal’s destitute isolation in exchange for the endless opportunity offered by Paris. In his feature length narrative debut, Mambéty’s feature length narrative debut is confident and innovative in its approach, capturing the energy and ambivalence of youth through an impressive marriage of surrealistic editing, conventional narrative approach, and a kitschy pop soundtrack. Cinephiles will hail Touki Bouki as one of the year’s rediscovered gems, which is the exalted category in which the film deserves to be placed.

Kim Ki-Young’s 1960 ode to terrorizing home life, The Housemaid, is still one of Korea’s most popular films. Its focus on domesticity and interiority horrors neatly contextualizes it as a descendant of the ‘women’s pictures’ of the ‘40s and ‘50s, though nothing this twisted came from the traditionalism of Ophüls or Sirk. Ki-young’s hyper-aestheticism complements an absurdist plot in which a piano teacher’s student becomes his housemaid, insidiously fixating herself within the familial dynamic and, in the process, inflicting ruinous physical and physiological destruction. Ki-young utilizes the confined dwelling of the home and the virgin/whore dichotomy shown in the sexually liberated villainess and the martyred wife/mother to speak, as Sirk’s and Ophüls’s films did, on gender politics and social hierarchies.

Redes is an ahead-of-its-time piece of docu-fiction addressing Mexican labor rights and the plight of the working man. It’s a curious film in that it was co-directed in 1936 by Emilio Gómez Muriel, a prolific Mexican filmmaker, and Austrian Fred Zinneman, before his successful Hollywood career directing Oscar-winning films like High Noon, Julia, and From Here to Eternity, among others. The film bristles with life even as it exposes the exploitative conditions under which most laborers are kept. Silvestre Revueltas’s accompanying score punctuates the action by drawing attention to the joys that reside between the sorrows. (www.criterion.com)

Author rating: 10/10