Directed by P. White. US, 1976, 16mm, 8 min. Preserved with a National Film Preservation Foundation Grant.

Directed by Sandor Reich. US 1962, 16mm, b/w, 15 min. Digital restoration.

Starring Dominic Chianese in one of his earliest appearances, A Flower Out of Season was an NYU student project that features cinematography and editing by fellow classmate Nathaniel Dorsky. The film was digitally restored in 2021 using a 16mm optical sound print. Lab services provided by Gamma Ray.

16mm film-to-film preservation of five of Abigail Child's classic experimental films made possible through a grant from the Film Foundation administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation.

• Pacific Far East Line (1979)
• Peripeteia I (1977)
• Peripeteia II (1978)
• Prefaces (1981)
• Mutiny (1983)

16mm film-to-film preservation of several films by poet, painter, sculptor and pioneering multi-media artist Aldo Tambellini made possible through a grant from the Film Foundation administered by the National Film Preservation.

The Black Films:

• Black Is (1966)
• Black Plus X (1966)
• Black Trip #1 (1965)
• Black Trip #2 (1966)
• Black TV (1969)
• Blackout (1966)

Black projection performance films:

• Sunblack (ca. 1966)
• Black '67 (1967)
• Black Spiral (1969)

Directed by Ed Pincus. US 1982, 16mm, color, 200 min. Preserved in 2019 with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation.

By the early 1970s... [t]he women’s movement and the on-going struggle for black liberation were assuming that “the personal is the political,” and in an attempt to see if this held true for his own experience, Pincus began what would become his magnum opus: Diaries (1971-76). His plan: to cinematically investigate his own (open) marriage and family life during what was an experimental and turbulent time, to shoot footage for five years; then wait another five years before finally editing the footage into a finished film. This plan was adhered to, though Pincus’ willingness to share rushes and early rough cuts of passages of the material became a primary – perhaps the primary – instigation for what is now called the “personal documentary.” Diaries (1971-76) remains one of the masterworks of the genre, and Pincus’ breakthrough has contributed, directly or indirectly, to the films of Ross McElwee, Robb Moss, Miriam Weinstein, Nina Davenport, Jonathan Caouette, Lucia Small and many others. – Scott MacDonald

The HFA has preserved several films by prolific underground filmmaking phenomenon George Kuchar.

San Francisco Art Institute classroom collaborations:

• One Night a Week (1978)
• The Asphalt Ribbon (ca. 1978)
• The Power of the Press (1977)
• Motel Capri (1986)
• Club Vatican (1984)
• The Carnal Bipeds (1973)

Harvard Film Archive / Pacific Film Archive collaborations:

• I, an Actress (1977)
• A Wild Night in El Reno (1977)

Many films by Helen Hill—experimental animator, filmmaker, educator, artist, writer and social activist—have been preserved in collaboration with Colorlab and the Orphan Film Symposium:

• Raindance (1990)
• Vessel (1992)
• World's Smallest Fair (1995)
• Scratch and Crow (1995)
• Tunnel of Love (1996)
• Your New Pig is Down the Road (1999)
• Film for Rosie (2000)
• Mouseholes (1999)
• Madame Winger Makes a Film: A Survival Guide to the 21st Century (2001)
• Bohemian Town (2004)

Preserved in collaboration with Colorlab and the Center for Home Movies:

• Helen Hill's home movies

Directed by Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley. US 1982, 16mm and DCP, 91 min. Restored in 2023 from two 16mm UK television broadcast prints and a fullcoat magnetic soundtrack.

Filmmakers Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley follow James Baldwin on an overwhelming, epic journey through haunted spaces of the South where crucial events in the fight for civil rights took place. An astonishing array of civil rights activists, leaders and writers—including his brother David Baldwin, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Amiri Baraka, Chinua Achebe and David Dennis—join Baldwin at the sites of decisive and traumatic turning points. His stops include Atlanta, Birmingham, Selma, New Orleans and Philadelphia, Mississippi where activists Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were murdered. 

The restored film premiered at the HFA in October 2023 and is now distributed by The Film Desk. From the Dick Fontaine & Pat Hartley Collection.

Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler. US 1970, 16mm, color, 17 min.

Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler's educational film Library now exists in new film and digital versions. This charming short about New Jersey's Sussex County Library also features sound by Tony Conrad and narration by Beverly Conrad. The film was restored onto both 16mm film and DCP in 2021 using an 16mm optical sound print. Lab services provided by Colorlab and Gamma Ray.

Directed by Robert Flaherty. With Seáinín Tom Ó Dioráin, Maggie Dirrane, Michaeleen Dillane. Ireland 1935, 35mm, black & white, 12 min.
Gaelic with English subtitles. Preserved in collaboration with Harvard's Houghton Library and the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures.

A lost film until the 2013 discovery of a 35mm nitrate print at Harvard University, Robert Flaherty’s 1935 short film Oidhche Sheanchais offers a disarming and fascinating distillation of his ardent belief in cinema as a mythopoeic art and folkloric tradition. To record the soundtrack of Man of Aran Flaherty brought the principal members of his cast to London, inviting Colman “Tiger” King, Maggie Dirrane, Patch “Red Beard” Ruadh and young Michaeleen to retrospectively add dialogue, in English and in pre-Jean Rouch fashion, to select scenes of the film. During their extended stay in London Flaherty reassembled the nuclear family invented for Man of Aran for a second film commissioned by the Department of Education, gathering his four “actors” around a sound studio hearth, together with famed seanchai (story-teller) Seáinín Tom Ó Dioráin. In striking contrast to Man of Aran, the resultant film, Oidhche Sheanchais, was recorded entirely in the dialect of the Aran Islands and is, in fact, considered the first talkie in the Irish language. Speaking and singing in their native tongue, Dirrane, Ruadh and especially O’Diorain deliver beautifully animated performances that bring a rare intimacy to Oidhche Sheanchais, making clear Flaherty’s unique relationship to his actors and giving new human dimension to these now legendary men, woman and child of Aran. – Haden Guest

Directed by John Latouche & Harrison Starr. US, 1953, 16mm, b/w. Preserved with the assistance of Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room.

Rediscovered by John Ashbery’s biographer Karin Roffman and donated by the film's cinematographer Harrison Starr, Presenting Jane and its outtakes were preserved in 2014 after vanishing for over sixty years. The short, unfinished film features New York School poets John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler, along with their close friend and muse, painter Jane Freilicher, during a vacation to the Hamptons in the summer of 1952. The rough cut screened only once in Greenwich Village in 1953 with a live script reading by Schuyler. After the preservation in 2014, the Woodberry Poetry Room recorded a film commentary by Ashbery, Starr and Freilicher as they react to viewing the film decades after its creation.

Directed by Richard Rogers. US, 1970, 16mm, b/w, 12 min. Preserved in 2013 with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation.

This portrait of an abandoned quarry in Quincy, Massachusetts captures the striking natural beauty of the site as it explores the social rites of the young people who gather along its rugged shores to enjoy leisure in what was once a place of toil.

Directed by Caroline Leaf. US, 1968, 16mm, b/w, 10 min. Preserved in 2007 with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation.

Made while she was an undergraduate at Harvard, Leaf’s very first film Sand, or Peter and the Wolf immediately revealed her talent in “direct animation,” working without any kind of image background or structural armature but here instead “drawing” live by manipulating and sculpting sand on glass, a painstaking and elusive technique with truly magical results. Movement, character and environment are fused in a truly unique fashion in Leaf’s films, rendered with a startling immediate and intimate poetry. – Haden Guest

Two titles from this collection were preserved in 2016 with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation Federal Grant Program.

• Birth of a Painting: Kurt Seligmann (1950), documentation of the surrealist painter at work, filmed by Thomas Bouchard
• Fernand Léger in America: His New Realism (1945), Thomas Bouchard’s documentary on the Cubist artist’s last stateside visit

Directed by Norman Mailer. US, 1947, color & b/w, 9 min.

Shot and edited in the months leading up to the publication of his debut novel The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer's first foray into filmmaking, at age twenty-four, is a surprisingly assured, cinematically bold attempt at the surrealist-poetic cinema he became enamored with after the war. A regular through the 1950s at Amos and Marcia Vogel's Cinema 16, Mailer directed four features between the years 1967 and 1987, as well as having acted in films by Milos Forman, Jean-Luc Godard and Matthew Barney. The rediscovery and restoration of Mailer's first film starring the radiant Millicent Brower, a trained stage actress and one-time columnist for the Village Voice, helps shed new light on Mailer's cinematic ambition, clearly there from the start of his career, like some mercurial mistress to his literary muse. – Michael Chaiken

In collaboration with Ciné-Archives in Paris, the Harvard Film Archive oversaw the digital restoration of Med Hondo's West Indies (1979, 113 min) and Sarraounia (1986, 120 min) which were completed in 2021.

By all measures one of Med Hondo’s lasting masterpieces, West Indies is a visually and aurally stunning musical appropriately set on a giant slave ship symbolizing the relationship between Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. Hondo highlights the foundational role of the so-called triangular Atlantic slave trade in the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the emergence and rise to power of the bourgeoisie, massive urbanization, the appearance of modernity and the global spread of capitalism. Hondo explores an unbroken historical continuum between the forced migration of the Atlantic slave trade and the more recent migration of Afro-Caribbean subjects to former colonial metropoles.

By adapting Abdoulaye Mamani’s book Sarraounia, Med Hondo chose to make an epic of one page of the great encyclopedia of African resistance against colonialism. Headed for Lake Chad in Central Africa, the infamous and bloodthirsty Voulet-Chanoine French military expedition meets on its path the indomitable and incomparable strategist Queen Sarraounia of the Azna, who bravely resists their incursion. Shot in glorious Techniscope, with luxuriant colors and exquisitely staged action and battle scenes across multiple planes reminiscent of a Western, this rare jewel of a film also contributed to the reinsertion of Queen Sarraounia in African history books, consolidating Med Hondo’s status as a filmmaker-historian.

Adapted from text by Aboubakar Sanogo in the spring 2023 program Med Hondo and the Indocile Image which included the world premieres of these restored epics.