New York Film Festival Unveils Revivals Lineup: Ken Russell's Restored "The Devils" Leads 12 Classics
Ken Russell's 1971 film The Devils, newly restored with originally censored material reinstated, will screen at the 64th New York Film Festival as part of a revivals lineup announced on 18 August (Deadline). The festival runs from 25 September through 12 October at Film at Lincoln Center and venues across New York City.
Clockwork, Warner Bros.'s boutique label, will then release The Devils in cinemas on 16 October — the first time Russell's complete version has played theatres. The film, long a cause for restoration advocates, was flagged six years ago by Film at Lincoln Center as a title urgently needing preservation work (Film at Lincoln Center). The version screening at NYFF64 is the result.
The revivals slate comprises twelve feature films and two programs of shorts. Among them is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1950 Technicolor film Gone to Earth, restored in a version overseen by Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker — the long-standing editor-director partnership behind countless Scorsese projects, here applied to the archive of Powell, whom Scorsese has championed for decades.
Three restoration world premieres fill out the lineup: Allen Fong's Just Like Weather, Barbara Hammer's Nitrate Kisses, and Fred Camper's Suicide Note. The 1980s are represented by rediscoveries from India and Hong Kong — John Abraham's Report to Mother, Pradip Krishen's In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, and Fong's Just Like Weather — films that circulated on the festival circuit in their day but have been hard to see since.
Three 1960s titles were restored from their original 35mm camera negatives, the highest-quality source material available: Paula Delsol's The Drift, Yuri Ilyenko's A Well for the Thirsty, and Alexander Kluge's Yesterday Girl. The revivals also include a near-complete retrospective of Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian, split across two programs.
The revivals section is one strand of a sprawling festival. The Main Slate features new work from James Gray, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Ava DuVernay, and Tom McCarthy (Time Out; Gold Derby). The Spotlight section includes Takashi Yamazaki's Godzilla Minus Zero, Werner Herzog's Bucking Fastard, and Jordan Firstman's Club Kid (Film at Lincoln Center). The Currents section, focused on experimental and avant-garde work, is led by the world premiere of Bardi and includes a Laura Poitras short about ICE-Minneapolis (Hollywood Reporter). Kleber Mendonça Filho's South of Tehran will world premiere as the inaugural film of a new section called Encounters.
Tickets go on sale to the general public on 15 September. Pass holders and Film at Lincoln Center members receive pre-sale access and waived single-ticket fees; an FLC Membership purchased by 28 August secures those benefits. The official festival poster was designed by artist Marcel Dzama, and Film at Lincoln Center has launched an online archive covering every NYFF edition since 1963 — lineups, unpublished photographs, and official posters included.
For a festival that has always treated cinema history as a living thing rather than a closed book, the revivals section is where that conviction is loudest. The Devils alone is the kind of restoration that turns a festival slot into an event: a film audiences have read about for decades, finally visible in the form its director intended.
