Cohen Film Collection
Completes Restoration of Buñuel’s Tristana;
Controversial
Masterpiece to Open in NYC October 12
‘Quintessential
Buñuel Film of All Time’ Overcame Spain’s Censorship in 1970;
Catherine Deneuve and Fernando Rey Star
NEW
YORK CITY – September 20, 2012 – The Cohen Film Collection has completed the
restoration of Luis Buñuel’s late-period masterpiece, Tristana, and will debut the restored version, in high-resolution
2K DCP format, October 12 at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in Manhattan, where the controversial
and acclaimed work will have a theatrical run.
Tristana
stars Catherine Deneuve as an orphaned young woman who becomes the ward of a
nobleman who seduces her. She then leaves him for an artist, but returns to her
aging benefactor and calculatingly hastens his demise. Filmed in Toledo, Spain,
it was released in 1970 after protracted skirmishes with censors in
Generalissimo Franco’s government.
“The film portrays a shifting power
struggle in a destructive game of sexual sadism, in which she has the last word,
but at the cost of losing all innocence,” observes Timothy Lanza, archivist for
the Cohen Film Collection.
Tristana
received its American premiere at the New York Film Festival, and was
nominated for an Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film. Vincent Canby, in
his review for The New York Times, called it “nothing less than the
quintessential Buñuel film of all time.”
Of Ms. Deneuve
in her role as the naïve waif turned hardened cynic, he said: “…never before
has her beauty seemed more precise and enigmatic.”
The film also stars Fernando Rey as
the nobleman, and Italian heartthrob Franco Nero as the artist. At the time, much
in the way of gossip was written about Mr. Nero’s lateness on the set, apparently
a result of the presence of Vanessa Redgrave, with whom he was said to be
having an affair.
In
his review, Mr. Canby noted the film’s
“uncommonly handsome” color photography by José Aguayo. However, the remaining
known negative of Tristana had experienced
staining and color shifting over the years, giving the film a pinkish cast – “a
not uncommon problem with film stock used in the 1960s and ‘70s,” according to Mr.
Lanza.
The archivist says the original production
integrity of Tristana has been
restored by combining the negative with segments from a quality positive in a
high-res digital format, with the aid of DeLuxe Laboratories in New York and
Filmoteca Española in Madrid.
Tristana
is distributed by Cohen Media Group, a leading distributor of foreign-language
and independent English-language films in the U.S.
Luis Buñuel Portolés, born in Spain
in 1900, became a leader of the surrealist film movement as early as the silent
film era in the 1920s. In his six-decade career, he worked in Mexico,
Hollywood, France and Spain during various periods, making films known
especially for their criticism of bourgeois morals and what he regarded as the
hypocrisy of religion. With the release of his most widely acclaimed film, Viridiana, in 1961, he became a dominant
international figure in the movie industry.
Among Buñuel films best known in the
U.S. are Belle de Jour, which also
starred Catherine Deneuve, The Discreet
Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and his last movie, That Obscure Object of Desire. The director died in 1983.
Tristana
is the Cohen Film Collection’s second restored feature film to be re-released.
It follows the restoration of The Thief
of Bagdad, the classic silent Hollywood romantic adventure starring Douglas
Fairbanks, which debuted at the Turner Classic Movies Film Festival in Los
Angeles early this year.
The Cohen Film Collection – comprising
several hundred feature-length and short films dating from the silent film era
to the late 20th century, including many of the works of Buster Keaton, Harry
Langdon, D.W. Griffith and Douglas Fairbanks – encompasses the former
collection of Raymond Rohauer.
Both the Cohen Film Collection and
Cohen Media Group are owned by New York real estate executive Charles S. Cohen,
who has developed and owns some 12 million square feet of commercial property
in major cities around the nation.
Mr. Cohen was the lead executive
producer of the independent film Frozen
River, which won the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize in 2008 and
two Spirit Awards, and was nominated for two Academy Awards.
