Annual Museum Of Modern Art International Festival of Film

Our annual To Save and Project festival returns in 2025 with a rich selection of newly restored treasures from archives around the world. This year's program spans nearly a century of cinema, from pioneering German Expressionist works like Robert Wiene's Raskolnikow (1923) to groundbreaking independent films of the 1970s like James Bidgood's Pink Narcissus (1971). Films from Argentina, Thailand, India, Syria, the Czech Republic, and beyond highlight cinema's global diversity and the work of film preservation institutions worldwide.

Highlights include the rediscovery of Yevgeni Cherviakov's forgotten Soviet masterpiece My Son (1928), found in Argentina and restored by GEM; the racy pre-Code Hollywood comedy The Greeks Had a Word for Them (1932) from the Library of Congress; and Andre Bonzel's Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By, a powerful repurposing of home movies from Janus Films. The program features restorations by major archives and funders, including The Film Foundation, UCLA Film and Television Archive, the Cinemathèque française, and Filmmuseum München.

The series opens on January 9 with the world premiere of MoMA's newly upgraded restoration of Frank Borzage's transcendent romance 7th Heaven (1927), and concludes on January 30 with the world premiere of MoMA's new reconstruction of the long unseen, original 1918 version of Charles Chaplin's World War I comedy Shoulder Arms.

Schedule of Events:

4:30 pm: A Circle in the Fire. 1974.Directed by Victor Nunez Elijah Pierce: Woodcarver. 1974. - Directed by Carolyn Jones

A Circle in the Fire. 1974. USA. Directed by Victor Nunez. Screenplay by Nunez, based on the short story by Flannery O'Connor. With Betty Miller, Ingrid Schweska, Katherine Miller. World premiere. 50 min.

Digital restoration by the filmmaker using IndieCollect's 5K scan of the original camera reversal.

Elijah Pierce: Woodcarver. 1974. USA. Directed by Carolyn Jones. With Elijah Pierce. World premiere. 18 min.

Digital restoration by Colorlab in conjunction with the Ohio State University Libraries Preservation and Digitization Lab, with funding provided by the National Film Preservation Foundation.

An early work by one of American independent cinema's most distinctive regional voices, Victor Nunez's 50-minute adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's haunting short story marks the transition between his UCLA student shorts and the sublime series of features he began with Gal Young Un in 1979. The story follows Mrs. Cope (Betty Miller), a proud farm owner whose carefully ordered world is disrupted by three teenage boys, led by the son of a former worker. Their unwanted presence escalates from nuisance to threat, culminating in an act of biblical proportions that eerily echoes the Book of Daniel's fiery furnace. Unlike John Huston in his O'Connor adaptation Wise Blood, Nunez refuses wide-angle close-ups and eccentric performances, finding his Southern gothic instead in the experience and perspective of his very human characters.

Elijah Pierce: Woodcarver is an 18-minute documentary from 1974 that explores the life and artistry of Elijah Pierce, a self-trained African American woodcarver whose sculptures explore historical, Biblical, and personal themes. The film traces his journey from Baldwin, Mississippi, where he was born to formerly enslaved parents, to Columbus, Ohio, where he worked as a barber, turning his shop into a gallery and community center.

7:00 pm: Shoulder Arms. 1918. Written and directed by Charles Chaplin The Bond. 1918. Written and directed by Charles Chaplin

Shoulder Arms. 1918. USA. Written and directed by Charles Chaplin. With Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Sydney Chaplin. Silent. 46 min.

The Bond. 1918. USA. Written and directed by Charles Chaplin. With Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Albert Austin. World premiere. Silent. 11 min.

Charles Chaplin's World War I comedy Shoulder Arms was released at the height of the 1918 influenza pandemic. So powerful was Chaplin's appeal to his public, the film still played to packed houses. But when Chaplin went to release it for use by the US Army during WWII he found that the original negative had been damaged beyond repair, and he asked his longtime cameraman Rollie Totheroh to reconstruct it using outtakes and alternate footage. (The reconstructed version was released theatrically in 1959 as part of The Chaplin Revue, a compilation that also included A Dog's Life and The Pilgrim.)

This presentation is a work in progress from MoMA's Department of Film that attempts to recreate the 1918 release using what footage does survive from the original prints, gathered from archives around the world. Though the anarchic spirit remains the same in both versions, there are significant differences between the original and the reissue. Some scenes were removed entirely, and the entire film was subjected to the process of "stretch-printing," a not-very-satisfying way of forcing modern sound projectors to imitate the slower frame rate of many silent films.

Shoulder Arms will be accompanied by MoMA's new digital restoration of The Bond, a seldom seen propaganda short produced by Chaplin for the 1918 Liberty Loan drive. On a stylized set, Chaplin demonstrates the various sorts of bonds-friendship, marriage, Liberty-culminating in an encounter with the Kaiser. (Spoiler alert: a giant mallet is involved.) This restoration is based on a 35mm reissue print held by MoMA, with the titles revised to reflect the 1918 version distributed by First National.

Digital restorations by The Museum of Modern Art. Funding provided by the Lillian Gish Fund for Preservation.