Porgy and Bess in Wien. c. 1953. USA. Produced by the United States Information Service. With William Warfield, Leontyne Price, Cab Calloway, John McCurry, Helen Colbert. World preservation premiere. DCP. 29 min.
Featuring the opera star Leontyne Price, the concert baritone William Warfield, and the irrepressible jazz bandleader Cab Calloway, this virtually unknown short film documents the first stop on what would become a four-year US State Department–sponsored tour of the Everyman Opera Company's production of the Gershwin-Heyward opera Porgy and Bess. One of the most ambitious efforts at cultural diplomacy in the early years of the Cold War, the tour was intended by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to expand American influence around the world, particularly in nonaligned nations or in countries beginning to enter postcolonial rule, and as a counter to a Soviet propaganda campaign criticizing race relations in the US. After sightseeing around Vienna, the performers rehearse in preparation for opening night on September 9, 1952. Cab Calloway then leads the audience at Vienna City Hall’s cellar tavern in a rousing rendition of “Minnie the Moocher.” The stagings in Vienna and Berlin proved to be a success, with the New York Times declaring that the effort “was worth several divisions of troops in the Cold War.” And while the State Department declined to fund the culminating performances in the Soviet Union (paradoxically, the Kremlin footed most of the bill), Washington supported weeks-long tours in Europe, the Middle East, and Central and South America to an estimated tune of $800,000 in direct assistance, making it one of the most heavily state-funded works of the 1950s.
4K preservation of a unique 35mm print by the Ohio State University Libraries Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute in collaboration with MediaPreserve. Special thanks to the George and Ira Gershwin Families and the DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund.
Mazurka. 1935. Germany. Directed by Willi Forst. Screenplay by Forst, Hans Rameau. With Pola Negri, Albrecht Schoenhals, Paul Hartmann, Ingeborg Theek, Inge List. World restoration premiere. DCP courtesy Beta Film. 93 min.
Willi Forst had something of the Lubitsch touch in his flair for urbane and screwball comedies (Maskerade is a wonderful example of Viennese Film, a popular genre of the 1930s) and Mitteleuropean melodrama (his Gentle My Songs Entreat, with the 19th-century German composer Franz Schubert mixed up in a love triangle, was a favorite of Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirō Ozu). Forst cries out for a full-blown retrospective, but until then, To Save and Project presents the world premiere digital restoration of Mazurka, starring Polish silent cinema legend Pola Negri as Vera, a singer who is raped by the famous composer Grigorij Michailow (Albrecht Schoenhals) and must protect her estranged daughter (Ingeborg Theek) from the same fate. One of the few international successes of the Nazi era, Mazurka would be remade in Hollywood, almost shot for shot, by Joe May in the 1937 Confession, starring Kay Francis. Historian Lukas Foerster writes that “when Grigorij tells Vera that it is the ‘deepest desire of every melody to pursue unity,’ this is both a perfect description of Forst’s symphonic approach to filmmaking, and a sexual threat.”
4K digital restoration by DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum in cooperation with the Bundesarchiv; funding by the Förderprogramm Filmerbe.