Sight & Sound, the British Film Institute's savvy monthly magazine, polls critics and filmmakers every 10 years to determine the most influential films of all time. Cornell Cinema launches its fall 2003 program with a selection of several of the films from the 2002 poll, many of which are being shown in newly struck or recently restored prints.
Highlights include a recent restoration of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" (No. 6 on the critics' poll), a 40th anniversary print of David Lean's masterful epic "Lawrence of Arabia" (No. 4 on the directors' poll), and audience members can look forward to the 50th anniversary print of Stanley Donen's and Gene Kelly's "Singin' in the Rain" (No. 10 on the critics' poll) later in the fall.
Also featured is a restored print of one of the most beautiful films ever made, F.W. Murnau's "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans" (No. 8 on the critics' poll). Archivists discovered in the mid-1990s that the circulating prints of "Sunrise" not only were poor quality but that the 1936 print from which all existing prints were struck was, in fact, a rather impoverished copy itself.
A team of researchers and preservationists then spent nearly 10 years traveling across the Atlantic, scavenging labs, consulting scholars and evaluating nitrate negatives to restore the film to its original glory. If some of the greatest cinematographers and directors living today cited "Sunrise" as a sublime and influential work of art based on the decrepit version, the restored version will be a revelation.
Ticket prices for these shows are: $6 general; $5 students and seniors; and $4 for Cornell graduate students and kids 12 and under. New students get in for free Aug. 24-28 and for just $3 Aug. 29-30. For more information on these and other fall programs, call 255-3522 or visit http://cinema.cornell.edu.
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