The nineteen restorations Venice unveiled this month read less like a museum wall than an argument about whose film history gets to survive.
Late last week Venice unveiled the nineteen restored features that will screen in its Classics strand at the 83rd Mostra (2–12 September). The headline names are the ones you would expect a festival to reach for: John Cassavetes' *Minnie and Moskowitz*, Roman Polanski's *Cul-de-sac*, Ernst Lubitsch's *To Be or Not to Be*, Luis Buñuel, Roberto Rossellini's *Journey to Italy*, Roger Corman. But run your finger further down the list and the shape of the thing changes. Flora Gomes' *The Blue Eyes of Yonta*, from Guinea-Bissau. Simón Feldman's *Those at Table 10*, from Argentina. Ann Hui's *The Story of Woo Viet* and Ning Ying's *On the Beat*, from Hong Kong and Beijing. Dev Benegal's *English, August*, from India. Shinji Sōmai's *The Catch*, from Japan. This is not a museum wall. It is an argument.
Restoration is a claim about who gets to survive
A festival's classics section looks like the least newsworthy thing it publishes — old films, dutifully cleaned up, screened for the faithful at nine in the morning. But restoration is never neutral, because film is a decaying medium and someone has to decide what is worth the money and the labour to save. Every title rescued from a fading negative is a title the future will be able to see; every one left in the vault quietly drops out of the story we tell about cinema. That makes a restoration list one of the most consequential documents a festival produces, and one of the least examined.
For decades the canon that survived was the one with the resources to preserve itself — largely American and Western European, the cinemas with archives, foundations and studio money behind them. The films that fell out of circulation first were the ones made where the infrastructure was thinnest: postcolonial Africa, Latin America, Asian industries working outside the export machine. Their absence from the canon was never a verdict on the films. It was a verdict on the accounting.
A restoration list is a festival deciding what the future will be allowed to remember. Venice has decided the future should remember more of the world than the canon did.
What Venice is doing by putting Gomes and Feldman on the same programme as Lubitsch and Cassavetes is refusing that accounting. It treats a film from Bissau as belonging to world cinema in exactly the sense a Rossellini does — not a regional curiosity, but part of the common inheritance. That the Best Restored Film prize will be judged by a jury of two dozen film students is the fitting last note: the people who will carry the canon forward are being handed a version of it that is wider than the one they inherited. The films screen in September. The decision about what counts has already been made.