Pablo Picasso’s black-and-white masterpiece “Guernica” may still be eye-catching on a computer screen at 11.57 megabytes, but can you really claim to have seen it that way?

Since the advent of home video, latter-day movie hounds have seemed willing to trade access for quality, accepting similar format compromises with nary a whimper. In cinema there’s a thin line between fish and fossil. VHS, DVD, and dully printed, poorly maintained 35 mm — or worse, 16 mm — release print will subtly but irreparably ossify even the most inspired filmmaking. Starting today, the Museum of Modern Art will host “Rialto Pictures: Reviving Classic Cinema,” a tribute to a locally based distributor that has in only 10 short years, made available and given the big-screen breath of life to some of film’s most revered yet under-seen treasures.

“This tribute at the museum is quite an honor,” said Rialto honcho Bruce Goldstein, who, with business partner Adrienne Halpern, has been responsible for making Rialto’s eclectic and high-caliber theatrical reissues (like last year’s hit “Army of Shadows”) into box office contenders. “I grew up on Long Island and came into the city to go to repertory theaters and seek out films in prints at the Thalia, the New Yorker, and the Museum of Modern Art.”

Mr. Goldstein parlayed his formative adventures as a patron into a series of programming gigs, including a stint in the 1980s at the fabled Upper West Side Thalia, an institution as important to New York City’s repertory renaissance as CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City were to the city’s contemporary music scene. The Rialto imprint grew from experiences as the curatorial creative force behind Film Forum II, a position he maintains today.

When he was hired in 1987 to program the newly expanded Film Forum’s third screen, “I wasn’t given a mandate to run a repertory house,” Mr. Goldstein said. At the time, the rise of home video and the booming real estate market were combining to shutter most of Manhattan’s second-run screens.

“It was just at the moment when home video was taking off,” Mr. Goldstein said. “I realized from the very beginning that the only way to keep repertory alive was to upgrade the quality of the prints, and I started a campaign to get new prints made.”

In the late ’80s, few of the major studios on either side of the Atlantic felt obligated to keep their back catalogs available for theatrical rental. But Mr. Goldstein, who also has a background in film publicity, made it worth their while. “We started showing films for a week at a time,” he said. “If I gave the film a one-week run and did the publicity, that gave distributors an incentive to make a new print. Rialto came out of that programming.”

As he midwifed some 700 new 35 mm prints to Film Forum’s third screen, Mr. Goldstein was surprised to discover that many of the core French, English, Japanese, and American films of his repertory youth weren’t available due to lapsed ownership rights or poor housekeeping on the part of their copyright custodians.

“The only way to get them was to actually license them,” he said. Rialto’s growth has helped jump start a consciousness that has encouraged studios and copyright owners to treat their back catalogs as assets rather than white elephants. In the late ’80s, Mr. Goldstein said, the labs charged with making new release prints “had forgotten how to do black-and-white.” The hypnotic, silvery white purity of Robert Bresson’s 1962 film “Mouchette,” now reissued by Rialto, wouldn’t have been attainable just two decades ago.

Mr. Goldstein’s supervision also extends into the re-subtitling of non-English language Rialto releases.

“When it says ‘subtitles,’ a lot of people think that’s a translation,” he said. “But translating and subtitling are two different things.” In collaboration with the Brooklyn-born Paris resident Lenny Borger on French titles, and in association with translators on Japanese films like the marvelous restoration of the original “Godzilla,” Mr. Goldstein has clarified the idiomatic dialogue that often used to get short shrift from old-guard American art film distributors.

“In the old days it was hit or miss,” he said. “You’d notice typos, mistimed titles, and bad translations after a print was engraved and it was too late. Now we can look at the whole thing on computer and fine-tune it.”

For Rialto, timing has been everything. Mr. Goldstein and Ms. Halpern have demonstrated remarkable skill in acquiring rights to such canonical cinema treasures as Carol Reade’s “The Third Man,” Fellini’s “Nights of Cabiria,” Jean Luc Godard’s “Masculine, Feminine,” and Robert Bresson’s “Au Hasard Balthazar” and “Mouchette.” Upcoming releases include Alain Resnais’s “Last Year at Marienbad.”

While America’s first-run multiplexes offer more sizzle than steak, Rialto Pictures, through a national distribution network of art houses, museum screens and, yes, home video issues, continues to ensure that film’s past is its future.

Through August 10 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).