BFI Film on Film 2025

An extremely rare screening of one of the few dye transfer IB Technicolor prints of George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977)—struck for the first release in the UK—will ignite the festivities this evening. As James Bell, senior curator of fiction at BFI National Archive, explains to Hutchinson, most of the rest of the world first saw Eastmancolor prints. Those tend to fade, but not dye transfer Technicolor prints.

“The Rome and Los Angeles Technicolor labs had closed in the mid-’70s, but the London one just about remained open,” says Bell. “One of the very last films to be printed that way was Star Wars.” The print screening tonight “has some marks, it bears its life in terms of scratches and other wear, but in terms of the color, it’s glorious, it’s unfaded.”

Precautions will be taken when the BFI screens three features and two shorts from highly flammable 35 mm nitrate prints. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou (1929) and Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country—shot in 1936 but not completed and released until 1946—will screen on Saturday as a double bill. “Renoir looks back at the impressionist pastoral in a spirit both affectionate and critical, sunny and somber,” wrote the late Gilberto Perez.

Also screening from nitrate prints are Marc Allégret’s Technicolor melodrama Blanche Fury (1947); John Paddy Carstairs’s Dancing with Crime, starring Richard Attenborough and Sheila Sim as sleuthing newlyweds; and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), which the Master of Suspense remade himself in 1956. “There are some of us,” writes Farran Smith Nehme, “who stubbornly prefer the original, for its mordant wit, its overcast snowscapes and London nighttimes, its economy of plot and barreling momentum.” Besides, the 1934 version gives us “the great Peter Lorre demonstrating definitively how a Hitchcock heavy should be played: with a light touch.”

Bell will introduce the Saturday night presentation of two prints from Stanley Kubrick’s personal collection. The sixteen-minute Day of the Fight (1951) was Kubrick’s first film, while as Imogen Sara Smith writes, in The Killing (1956), “noir’s caustic vision of the war between the sexes is pushed to its most grotesque extreme in the hellish marriage of George and Sherry Peattie, played by two icons (Elisha Cook Jr. and Marie Windsor) who fearlessly grope into noir’s darkest, coldest, and grubbiest corners. The delusion that a big score will transform a dreary existence was never more obviously a bitter joke.”

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Miloš Forman’s Amadeus (1984), and Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987) will all be presented on 70 mm. This year’s lineup also offers newly struck 35 mm prints of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943), Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954), Vernon Sewell’s Strongroom (1962 and introduced by Edgar Wright), and Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983), which is “laugh-out-loud funny in its seemingly endless and effortless profusion of sight, sound, and dialogue gags,” writes Jonathan Murray. But Local Hero also “signs off with one of cinema’s saddest images of loneliness and longing.”

Three black-and-white films shot in CinemaScope will screen from 35 mm prints: Otto Preminger’s Advise & Consent (1962), Martin Ritt’s Hud (1963), and Miklós Jancsó’s The Round-Up (1966). There will be programs of experimental films, newsreels, and a few odd yet fascinating early sound experiments made before synchronization technologies took hold.

On Sunday night, Kyle MacLachlan will close out the festival when he takes part in a Q&A following a presentation of Mark Frost and David Lynch’s pilot episode of Twin Peaks projected from the actual 35 mm print used for the original BBC TV broadcast in October 1990. A few weeks before Twin Peaks returned with a third season in 2017, Noel Murray wrote in the New York Times: “If you haven’t watched the pilot in a while, know this: It’s still about as effective an opening salvo as TV has ever produced.”