NEW YORK: A dependable highlight of the Museum of Modern Art's film programming, "To Save and Project: The Sixth MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation" (October 24–November 16) opens with Melvin Van Peebles's 1971 Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Other seldom-seen, painstakingly restored and preserved items on the menu include Marco Ferreri's scandalous Dillinger Is Dead (1969); Ernst Lubitsch's 1025 version of Lady Windermere's Fan; the 1934 James Cagney-Bette Davis vehicle Jimmy the Gent; D. W. Griffith's Hearts of the World; Anthony Mann's Korean War classic Men in War, and the 1947 musical That Man of Mine, "featuring a young Ruby Dee, who will appear after the screening in a discussion with historian Pearl Bowser." All in all, "baadasssss" is putting it mildly.
BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives pays tribute to one of the lesser known fixtures of the "Fifth Generation" of Chinese filmmakers, serving this fall as artist in residence at PFA, with "I Love Beijing: The Films of Ning Ying" (October 23, 2008 - October 27). Educated in Italy and employed by Bernardo Bertolucci as his assistant director on The Last Emperor, Ning began her own directing career in 1992 with For Fun, which, along with On the Beat (1993) and I Love Beijing (2000), form her "Beijing trilogy", films in which she considers the current state of her native country with an informed, ironic sensibility and great affection. The PFA will be showing all these films, as well as Ning's most recent feature, Perpetual Motion (2005) and her documentary Railroad of Hope (2001), with the director in attendance.