The annual Martin Scorsese Presents: The Sag Harbor Cinema Festival of Preservation, dedicated to keeping film alive in all of its forms, is returning Friday for its fifth year with a remarkably eclectic program of more than 20 films. It will run through Tuesday.
Also opening tomorrow, in the cinema's third-floor gallery, is "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered: Bruce Weber Films Chet Baker and Robert Mitchum," featuring collaged film journals from Mr. Weber's documentaries about those icons. It will remain on view through January.
"I love the variety of the lineup this year -- not only in terms of the scope of the films, but also because it engages with several notions of preservation itself," said Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan, the cinema's founding artistic director. "Keeping our films, their artistry, and their idea(l)s alive and relevant is also a collective effort, in which the audience plays a very important part. That sense of shared passion, enjoyment, and aesthetic experience is the ultimate meaning of a special weekend like this one."
Tomorrow's programs reflect the diversity of the festival as a whole. Kleber Mendonca Filho's "Pictures of Ghosts" (2023) will launch the festival at 3 p.m. A meditation on how cinema shapes our sense of place, it explores Recife, Brazil, through its once-vibrant movie theaters, blending archival documentary, film excerpts, mystery, and personal recollections.
A move from Brazil to Harlem comes tomorrow at 5:30 with Francis Ford Coppola's "The Cotton Club Encore" (1984), which restores to the original film over 20 minutes of additional footage and never-before-seen dance sequences previously cut through studio interference. The cast includes Gregory Hines, Lonette McKee, Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Nicholas Cage, Bob Hoskins, and Laurence Fishburne. James Mockoski, the restoration supervisor at American Zoetrope, will introduce the film.
Next stop is Newport, R.I., the setting for "High Society" (1956), some of whose source material was "The Philadelphia Story" (1940). Directed by Charles Walters, the film stars Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and John Lund, with music by Cole Porter. Louis Armstrong and his orchestra appear as themselves. The screening, set for tomorrow at 8:45, will be introduced via Zoom by George Feltenstein, historian of the Warner Bros. Discovery Library.
On Saturday at 3 p.m., the cinema will show Mr. Weber's "Nice Girls Don't Stay for Breakfast" (2018), his documentary portrait of Mitchum, Hollywood's quintessential tough guy. The film is a nuanced portrait of the actor, who is seen hanging out with friends in hotel rooms and restaurants, singing before a microphone at Capital Records, and recording standards for an album.itchum died in 1957; years later, Mr. Weber picked up his camera again to film interviews with family members and some of the stars who knew him or admired his work, among them Clint Eastwood, Benicio Del Toro, and Johnny Depp. Mr. Weber and Carrie Mitchum, the actor's granddaughter, will take part in a discussion after the screening.
Sometimes preservation follows the recovery of lost footage, as was the case with Sara Driver's 1981 film "You Are Not I," her N.Y.U. thesis film adapted from a Paul Bowles short story. Shot in six days for $12,000, it played at international festivals before a leak in a warehouse destroyed the negative, leaving only an unprojectable copy.
In 2008, a 16-millimeter print was discovered among Bowles's holdings in Tangier. A time capsule of downtown Manhattan's avant-garde art scene, it was filmed by and co-written with Jim Jarmusch and stars Suzanne Fletcher, Lucy Sante, and Nan Goldin. "You Are Not I" is about a disturbed woman (Ms. Fletcher) who has escaped from an asylum. Ms. Driver will take questions after the screening, which will be preceded by "Ghost of the Past" (2025), a short by Bill Morrison, whose films often combine rare archival material with contemporary music.
The filmmakers Brady Corbet ("The Brutalist") and Mona Fastvold ("The Testament of Ann Lee") will introduce "The Lovers on the Bridge" (1991), Leos Carax's film about a passionate relationship between a homeless artist (Juliette Binoche) and an alcoholic street performer (Denis Lavant). It will be preceded by a short by Stan Brakhage, widely considered one of the most important experimental filmmakers of the 20th century.
"Betty Boop's Rise to Fame," a 1934 short from Fleischer Studios Cartoons, will be followed by "Artists and Models" (1955), a musical comedy by Frank Tashlin, who had been an animator for Warner Bros. and was described as "the original Pop artist" by the critic J. Hoberman. The film stars Jerry Lewis as a comic book-obsessed children's author and Dean Martin as a struggling artist. Shirley MacLaine and Dorothy Malone round out the cast of this satire of mid-'50s pop culture.
Speaking of musicals, what would a festival be without "Footlight Parade," Lloyd Bacon's 1933 film starring Jimmy Cagney as a Broadway director and Joan Blondell as his secretary, with choreography by the one-and-only Busby Berkeley? Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum's founding repertory director, will introduce it.
The Western is represented by King Vidor's "Duel in the Sun" (1946), a noir melodrama that became a profound influence on the visual style of Martin Scorsese, who saw it as a child, and by Richard Brooks's "The Professionals" (1966), in which Woody Strode, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, and Lee Marvin are hired to rescue a young woman (Claudia Cardinale) who has been kidnapped by a Mexican revolutionary (Jack Palance).
Another Brakhage short will precede "Thief" (1981), the first feature film by Michael Mann. James Caan stars as a professional thief planning to retire after one last score. The film, which also stars Willie Nelson, Jim Belushi, and Dennis Farina, was called "one of the most intelligent thrillers I've seen" by Roger Ebert.
"Black Girl" (1972), the third feature directed by Ossie Davis, was adapted from a popular Off Broadway play by J.E. Franklin. It stars Peggy Pettitt as a misunderstood young Black woman trying to build a new life as a dancer. The portrait of four generations of Black women in early '70s Los Angeles also stars Claudia McNeil, Brock Peters, and Ruby Dee. The film will be introduced by Ms. Franklin.
On Sunday, the annual Preservation Panel, followed by a brunch on the third floor, will include presentations and a discussion with archivists, historians, curators, and preservation experts. Participants are Skyler Reid, great-grandson of Max Fleischer, who will discuss the restoration of Fleischer Studio cartoons; Grover Crisp, executive vice president of film restoration at Sony; Kevin Schaeffer, director of restoration and library management at Walt Disney and Margaret Bodde, executive director of the Film Foundation, who will discuss their collaboration; Mr. Mockoski of American Zoetrope, and Mr. Morrison.
The cinema's website is the source for the festival's full schedule, which also includes films by Lowell Sherman, Howard Hawks, Hugo Fregonese, Sergei Parajanov, Frank Borzage, and Joe Lauro.
Festival of Preservation passes, which give full access to all the screenings and special events, as well as the preservation party on Saturday night, are on sale at the box office or on the cinema's website for $95, $55 for members of the cinema. The website is also the source for individual tickets.
