Virginia Film Festival part I

Exposing the archive

Library of Congress series was Kielbasa’s pet 

By Matt Ashare 

Over a year ago, as the Virginia Film Festival was gearing up for what turned out to be the most successful run in its 24-year history, Jody Kielbasa was already looking ahead to 2011, with an ambitious plan for widening its scope. “One of the things the Festival had been doing in the years before I was brought on as director in 2008 was to screen a lot of classic films,” he said. “I wanted to shift the focus to more contemporary films. Basically, we were aiming to screen the latest and the best films in any given year. But, I also wanted to include classic films, only in a more focused way.”

PICTURE THIS: Restoring the classics in Culpeper

     By almost any standard, Kielbasa succeeded in the first part of his plan. Last year’s Festival opened with a sold out screening of one of 2010’s most talked about films, the Darren Aronofsky psychological thriller Black Swan, which went on to earn Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Director, and won Natalie Portman the Oscar for Best Actress. This year, on November 3, the 2011 VFF kicks off with another highly anticipated film, Oscar-winning screenwriter and director Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, his first since the widely acclaimed 2004 dramedy Sideways. 

But Kielbasa has also come up with a way to implement the other facet of his vision—namely, to create a coherent program of classic films. Under the banner of “Turner Classic Movies and The Library of Congress Celebrate The National Film Registry,” the Festival will feature screenings of Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973); the 1926 Buster Keaton silent The General; Robert Altman’s oft overlooked McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971); John Huston’s epic 1948 Humphrey Bogart drama The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; and, from 1944, the Oscar-winning National Velvet, starring Elizabeth Taylor as a 12-year-old steeplechase contender.

The title may be a mouthful, but the program’s premise is remarkably, if rather ingeniously, straightforward. The National Film Registry was created by Congress in 1988 as a means of preserving films that are “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” The Library of Congress selects 25 such works each year and stores them at the Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in Culpeper, just 45 minutes north of town. So Kielbasa was simply tapping into a nearby resource for some of the best films in the world.

“I went on a tour of the facility about a year and a half ago,” he said. “It’s built into the side of a mountain, and it used to be a bank vault where they stored gold bullion during the Cold War. If you can picture that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the ark is stored in that government warehouse, that’s kind of what this place is like. There’s also a preservation room where technicians restore damaged films, sometimes literally working with a scalpel on one frame. It’s a fascinating process, and you can see how it’s done on These Amazing Shadows, a new documentary about the Packard Campus that we’re also screening as part of the Festival.”

Festival director Jody Kielbasa.

Once Kielbasa had established a relationship with the Library of Congress, he approached the folks at Turner Classic Movies to help in the selection process. And TCM weekend host Ben Mankiewicz is coming all the way from Los Angeles to introduce each of the films. “It’s hard for me to turn down an opportunity like this,” Mankiewicz said. “It’s a job that’s hard to mess up. You’d have to be really inept to speak about any of these films and not have people want to see them.”

All five films were chosen with a specific purpose in mind. McCabe & Mrs. Miller is celebrating its 40th anniversary, and The General its 85th. National Velvet fit the bill for the Festival’s “Family Day,” and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was actually restored in-house at the Packard Campus. But with Badlands Kielbasa pulled off a major coup. The film’s star, Sissy Spacek, and her husband, longtime Malick art director Jack Fisk, live in the Charlottesville area, and both have agreed to be on hand for the screening.

“To the best of my knowledge, this is the only film festival program of its kind,” said Kielbasa, who’d clearly like to see it become a regular feature of the VFF. “I’ll give you a famous Bogart quote: ‘This could be the start of a beautiful relationship.’”

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