Quality Never Gets Old: TbtS presents “Lost & Found” Films This Weekend

One of the founding principles of the Telluride Film Festival, from it’s very inception, was to celebrate not just the hot new premieres, but to actively cultivate an appreciation for the wonderful classic films which may have been eclipsed in memory by giants like GONE WITH THE WIND or CASABLANCA.

A little fact, that TFF co-founder Bill Pence, whom you all know as The Music Hall’s chief film programmer and the reason we get to enjoy a little slice of Telluride here by the sea, regularly underplays (watch him do it yourself in this recent video) is that for many years he was vice president and part owner of a company called Janus Films.

Janus was an American distribution company which specialized in collecting and preserving prints of films that the U.S. population was highly unaware of. In a time when films were actually stored and disseminated on film – a heavy, cumbersome, highly flammable medium that lent itself mostly to getting destroyed by the very equipment that put it on screen – their library, made up of titles from directors like Fellini, Bergman, Eisenstein, and Antonioni (just to name a few), ranged in varying degrees of enigmatic and esoteric to downright impenetrable, was first made available mainly to University Film Studies Programs and later as a series of touring festivals though major cities and college towns across the nation. This collection, it’s worth noting, went on to become a driving force and main source for a little project you may have heard of called The Criterion Collection.

So it should come as no surprise to hear that Bill’s Film Festival would continue to honor the spirit of that early enterprise, and that he would share the chance with us this weekend to re-discover a few important titles that may have escaped us in the shadow of more contemporary – and heavily marketed – premieres.

Our “Lost and Found” series at The Loft, presents three works of enduring, if often neglected, consequence. PEOPLE ON SUNDAY (1930), a largely fluffy bit of late silent-era drama, marked not only the launching of a number of well revered Hollywood careers – including those of Robert Siodmak, Fred Zinnemann, and Billy Wilder – but could also arguably be held as the first-ever instance of what some 60 years later would come to be known as “Independent Cinema.” The lyrical, unabashed romance of I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING (1945) by British-based filmmaking partners Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is like wearing a kilt on a blustery day. Released on Christmas after the end of the Second World War, and is laced with refreshing doses of mystery, anticipation, and pure breezy hope. And finally, Victor Erice’s Spanish-language triumph SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (1973) stands simultaneously as a subtle statement of the stifling power of Franco regime oppression, a perceptive study in the horror of growing up as a human child, and a luminous visual poem, an ode to the creative power of imagination – and movies themselves.

I’m proud to have been invited to introduce you to these films this weekend, and to do some small part to continue the Telluride mission of celebrating all things cinema: new and old, whimsical and serious, light and shadow, lost and found.

I hope you’ll join me.