Saluting Those Who Live in the Past
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Repertory Events
In a middling year for new releases, New York’s hard-working repertory houses became a refuge, reminding us that no Gotham moviegoer is ever really at a loss for something worth watching: monumental masterpieces, old reliables, eye-opening rarities, assorted must-sees — the whole range from comfort food to haute cuisine. Selecting the best of these repertory offerings is a bit of a mug’s game, since the vast output makes authoritative viewing incompatible with bathing or interacting with other humans. This list is not intended to rank by scholarly significance, but rather strike an avowedly personal balance between the edifying and the entertaining.
10. JUDY HOLLIDAY: THE SMART DUMB BLONDE
Film Society of Lincoln Center
A case in point for the aforementioned caveats. This weeklong series at the end of August screamed schedule filler, but Ms. Holliday is still hilarious. I laughed at “Born Yesterday” to bust a gut, harder than at Will Ferrell’s freak-outs or Borat’s masterly baiting. Holliday’s sustained control, her fine-tuned vocal comedy, her timing all remain rarely matched marvels, and “Full of Life” and “The Marrying Kind,” also screened here, brought her warm charisma to bear on drama.
9 ARMY OF SHADOWS
Film Forum
You may be feeling deja vu: This 1969 film also graces many top-10 lists for 2006, because this year’s theatrical run was in fact the American premiere of Jean-Pierre Melville’s grim Resistance thriller. Distributor Rialto Pictures, responsible for the release of “The Battle of Algiers”in 2004 and other must-see reissues, performed another well-tuned excavation. Restoring a genuine masterpiece by Mr. Melville (“Bob le Flambeur,” “Le Samourai”) to wider audiences is impressive enough, but “Army” also entered a dour cultural twilight predisposed to its fateful story of wartime struggle and agonizing betrayal.
8. LUC MOULLET: UNKNOWN GENIUS OF THE FRENCH NEW WAVE
Anthology Film Archives
Godard. Truffaut. Chabrol. Moullet. Moullet? Anthology’s quixotic mini-retro called to mind the filmmaker himself, the orphan of the French New Wave: Many attendees might happily return his deadpan no-fi films to footnote status. But there’s something vital about Mr. Moullet’s go-it-alone pioneering and his Godardian flair for jerry-rigged innovation (which comes leavened with selfdeprecation). In this sampling, the director’s first rambunctious homemade whatzits, “Brigitte and Brigitte” and “Une Aventure de Billy le Kid,” led into the grueling come-down of “Anatomy of a Relationship.”
7. NATIONAL SURVEYS
Film Society of Lincoln Center
If it’s May, this must be Syria. The Walter Reade Theater’s collected national surveys do the work of multiple embassies and film studies textbooks with their selective tours through underexposed cinemas past and present: Syrian, Catalan, Hungarian, and more. It’s always hard to know where to begin, but even a single screening like Bigas Lunas’s meta-horror flick “Anguish” (from the Catalan series) opened up parallel universes of style and sensibility. Special Stakhanovite mention goes to the various Soviet series: the sublime, exhausting Larisa Shepitko and Elem Klimov, the sci-fi fantasias of “From the Tsars to the Stars,” and the staccato rhythms of the Kaufman Brothers (one of whom is better known as Dziga Vertov).
6. JACQUES RIVETTE
Museum of the Moving Image/ Anthology
Only two of Jacques Rivette’s 20 films have found American distribution, so the French New-Waver remains a fascinating and beguiling filmmaker mainly in theory. To paraphrase Voltaire, I may not always finish his multihour epics about skulking around Paris, but I’ll defend to the death his right to make them. The Museum of the Moving Image undeniably pulled off one showstopper of a series, unspooling the first complete retrospective of the director in this country. On top of that, they made a sold-out, box-lunch event out of the biblically long “Out: 1,” to be reprised this spring. Anthology helped pave the way in April with its own Rivette quartet, which featured his dialogues with Jean Renoir.
5. REDISCOVERING ROSCOE: THE CAREERS OF “FATTY” ARBUCKLE
Museum of Modern Art
The retro so nice they actually ran it twice — or perhaps more naughty than nice, but let me explain. The big man’s comic talents and uncanny physical grace, on exhaustive display here in this meticulously curated series, were eclipsed for years by a scandalous accusation that left him banished from the screen. The Museum’s program notes took pains to remind us that he was eventually found innocent — which makes one wonder what macabre joker illustrated the write-up with a still photo credited to the 1916 one-reeler, “He Did and He Didn’t.”
4. FRANK BORZAGE: HOLLYWOOD ROMANTIC
Museum of the Moving Image
An oasis of romanticism this summer, this retro brought to light some masterful silents so rarely screened as not to exist. Mr. Borzage’s career had its ups and downs, perhaps too faithfully rendered here (and limited by print availability), but the series captured the private worlds and heartbreaking intimacy across his films—a good reminder that “melodrama” need not be treated like a four-letter-word attached to “drama.”
3. ROBERTO ROSSELLINI
Museum of Modern Art
For the centennial of the filmmaker’s birth, the Museum of Modern Art mounted a prodigious accounting of his efforts, on beyond Neorealism and even before. For a seminal director whose name is a byword for fundamental tenets of cinema realism, this was the kind of exhibitionlike effort that saves an artist from history’s simplifications. So many students and lovers of film know Mr. Rossellini metonymically, through individual masterpieces like “Rome Open City,””Germany Year Zero,” or “Voyage in Italy.” It’s almost disorienting to watch the historical critique of “The Rise of Louis XIV” or the roving cameras of “The Messiah” (his last feature, in 1976) and appreciate his continuing ambitions and rigor to the end.
2. THE VISION THAT CHANGED CINEMA: MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI
Brooklyn Academy of Music
For a few cinephiles I’ve quizzed over the years, the answer to “What do you want for Christmas, retrospectively speaking?” has been modernist master Michelangelo Antonioni. Brooklyn’s cinema beacon obliged, working again with Cinecitta for an expansive survey that brought to mind (but exceeded) their 2004 retro of Luschino Visconti. Featuring everything from early shorts and established classics to the unicorn that is his rarely screened documentary about Maoist China, the series was required viewing for novices and Antonionites alike.
1. B-NOIR
Film Forum
Pure bliss, this never-ending series always had one more shadowy conceit to draw a curtain on (or say “curtains” to) each day. The concentration of thrills and scrappily carpentered filmmaking made contemporary American output feel gaunt from hunger. There’s an unspoken challenge here, a cinematic throwing of the gauntlet: What today fills the duties of these reliable B-movie workhorses? (Times change: Even when these babies flopped, they cost a pittance to make.) Some griped about the motley crew gathered under the sacrosanct “noir” banner, but the rest of us were holding on to our ticket stubs for the double- or triple-bill. My revelation was “Shakedown,” starring Howard Duff as a breathtakingly soulless photographer (one year before the raffish cynicism of “Ace in the Hole”). Coming up at Film Forum in the spring: B-musicals…