The Brooklyn Rail

Editor’s Note:

In 2022 we published “The Greatest Films You’ll Never See,” a selection of excerpts on films lost or widely unknown for various reasons. Our goal was to raise awareness about the material and the ephemeral nature of cinema, thus bringing attention to the need of film preservation. We learned about films rarely seen, films hard to find, and films forgotten. We again reached out to our contributors and other film experts and have a growing list of films we want to share with you, though you’ll probably never see them. Whether locked and lost in the archives, hidden from the public for political reasons, or partially (and entirely) nonexistent, the films mentioned below carry cultural resonances important to the historicity of global cinema. We are lucky to be amidst a wave of growing care toward film restoration, as some of our selections are becoming available to new audiences.

As we’ve stated before, many outlets want to tell you about the best movies, sometimes the worst. We want to give you the worst FOMO of your lives and tell you what you won’t see, can’t see, or may never get more than one chance in your life to see (streaming subscriptions be damned). With advice from our contributors, we present to you Volume II of “The Greatest Films You’ll Never See.”

—Edward Charles Mendez and Laura Jane Valenza, film section editors

Goncharov (1973, dir. Martin Scorsese)
By Elliot Yu

Hailed as the “greatest mafia movie ever made,” Scorsese’s Goncharov is a love letter to the genre, both tragically gruesome and surprisingly tender, and yet, has never been seen by any audience anywhere. The film is set in Naples and follows a Russian hitman, Goncharov, after the fall of the Soviet Union, but beyond these few details, there is little known about the plot. It seems like a troubled production is to blame for both inconsistently reported details and the near complete loss of the film. Or at least that is how the legend goes. In truth, the mystery surrounding Goncharov is even stranger than that of lost history, because, despite all the stills online, the posters, the quotes, and even Scorsese himself acknowledging it, Goncharov doesn't actually exist. It is the collective fictional project of a dedicated community on Tumblr, who, encouraged by a fake poster inspired by a meme, have made everything from fanart and fanfiction to critical reviews and analyses. Goncharov, while not a real film, has nonetheless uncovered a very real film experience, inviting people to share theories, mourn characters, and engage in a collective appreciation for the art of filmmaking.

Miss Butterfly (Fräulein Schmetterling, 1965–66/2020, dir. Kurt Barthel)
By Savannah Champion

With a script from the great East German author Christa Wolf (and Gerhard Wolf) and daring cinematography inspired by the Czech New Wave, Miss Butterfly was poised to introduce experimental filmmaking to the East German public in 1965. Director Kurt Barthel interpolated fantastical daydream sequences with documentary footage filmed on the streets of East Berlin to narrate this socialist coming-of-age fairytale. But the brief cinematic détente of the mid-1960s that had allowed young filmmakers to raise critical questions about East German society came to a close when the ruling party set a new policy demanding “cleanliness in film production” from the state-run DEFA studios in late 1965. Miss Butterfly was one of twelve DEFA films that were banned, canceled, or partially destroyed in the Kahlschlag (literally “clear-cutting”) that followed. Production was halted and the rough cut of the film was shelved.

The dream of Miss Butterfly finding an audience lay dormant until this century, when the DEFA Foundation in Berlin discovered that most of the original footage from 1965 was intact, though much of the audio was missing or unusable. In 2019, the DEFA Foundation assigned a team of editors the task of reconstructing this material into a cinematic product that would honor the original vision of the director, who passed away in 2014. These editors followed Barthel’s copy of the script to assemble the material into a film according to his vision, digitizing film negatives in 4K and recording the audio. The result is as dazzling as Barthel and Wolf had envisioned it: seventeen-year-old Helene Raupe and her younger sister are orphans united by a rich world of imagination in their old tenement building in East Berlin. The story flits between Helene’s daydreams and her struggle to find a place for herself in the socialist society as she attempts to assert an adult identity that can marry the two. Fantasy and documentary realism are masterfully combined to bring Helene’s world to life and tell a story of subjective authenticity.

SN (1976–1984, dir. Fred Camper)
By Troy Sherman

Fred Camper, a critic of art and film, described to me his original plan for SN as “completely insane.” The Super-8 film was to be made up of eighteen sections, the selection of which when shown would be randomly determined according to a set of rules. Any one four-hour screening would be essentially unique, and experiencing the whole work in all of its iterations would be essentially impossible, like the impossibility of experiencing anything at all as a totality. Time and poverty kept Camper from executing the project according to these mammoth specs, but a smaller (still stochastic) work came out of his prep towards the more insane thing. This surviving version of SN runs close to two hours and comprises studies of places and things, mostly in New York. It has been described by one person who’s seen it as “a bittersweet, twelve-tone love song for the cinema … a beautiful film,” but this viewer is among only dozens ever. SN has been screened thrice, and it exists as a single copy. While Camper’s five earlier films were recently restored by the Chicago Film Society, this one has, as yet, been passed over. Anyone invested in the history of the avant-garde should hope that this changes before it’s too late.

The Passion of Remembrance (1986, dir. Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien)
By Edward Frumkin

Responding to Britain’s social unrest in the 1980s, college graduates Isaac Julien, Maureen Blackwood, and Nadine Marsh-Edwards, among others, formed the Sankofa Film and Video Collective. Their first feature-length production was The Passion of Remembrance. Co-directed by Blackwood and Julien, it is a dual-thread tale where a man and woman discuss how London treats Black people, and fictional filmmaker Maggie Baptiste makes a documentary that follows the Black British plight. Melding conventional narrative beats and documentary-style cinematography, it was unavailable for the masses because Sankofa deployed myriad avant-garde techniques that weren’t viable in the commercial film market. Audiences were not adjusted to witnessing queer and feminist depictions of a Black experience at that time; the film features the first known same-sex kiss between two Black men in cinema history. The BFI National Archive recently restored The Passion of Remembrance in 4K, and it played at the 2022 BlackStar, NYFF, and London Film festivals. Previously available on a DVD from Women Make Movies and at select educational institutions, the 4K remaster will make its streaming premiere on the Criterion Channel in March where American audiences can see the multiplicities of Blackness represented in the highest image quality.

Aloïse (1975, dir. Liliane de Kermadec)
By Nat Hartman

Depicting the troubled life of the Swiss outsider artist Aloïse Corbaz, this ambitious period piece stars two actresses well-versed in the art of playing understated, volatile women. A baby-faced Isabelle Huppert plays Aloïse in her younger years, as she dreams of becoming a singer; Delphine Seyrig assumes the role during Aloïse’s stint as a governess in Germany and as she lives out the rest of her life making operatic, libidinal paintings in a mental institution. In its unflinching exploration of female hysteria and sensitivity as two sides of the same coin, the story curiously slips between sensory realism and unconcealed artifice. Though little-known as a director in her own right, French-Polish filmmaker Liliane de Kermadec was a set photographer for Agnès Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) and a producer of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman (1975). I was fortunate to catch a very rare screening of Aloïse at Metrograph back in September. Since then, the gorgeous 4K restoration I saw seems to have slipped into oblivion—but given the sheer appeal of a Huppert–Seyrig period piece, I’m clinging onto hope that it will find its way back out.

Mapantsula (1988, dir. Oliver Schmitz)
By akané okoshi

Oliver Schmitz’s debut film, Mapantsula (1988), is one of South Africa’s first authentic anti-apartheid feature films. Part of a current of anti-apartheid South African cinema that emerged in the 1980s, the feature was co-written by Schmitz and the lead actor Thomas Mogotlane. Mapantsula was initially registered with the apartheid regime censorship board as an apolitical gangster movie in order to circumvent restrictions. It chronicles the story of Panic, a petty gangster confronted with choosing between individual gain and the communal struggle against apartheid. The censorship board demanded seventeen cuts, subsequently banning its circulation in South Africa. However, Mapantsula went on to screen at Cannes’s Un Certain Regard section and is hailed as one of the most influential films of African cinema. The feature was shot in Soweto with discretion, capturing gripping scenes of protests, police brutality, and toyi-toyi, a South African political protest dance, scored to Township Jive. Mapantsula was restored to 4K from the original 35mm negative and screened at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival.

New York Ninja (1984 & 2021, dir. John Liu and re-dir. Kurtis M. Spieler)
By Justin Reichard

New York Ninja is a film that did not exist. Instead, it sat unfinished and unedited with its audio and script lost to time, left to gather dust for thirty-five years. Vinegar Syndrome, a restoration and distribution company specializing in genre film, found the footage after acquiring the catalog of 21st Century Distribution, a company that had gone bankrupt in the eighties. Low-budget horror filmmaker and Vinegar Syndrome employee Kurtis M. Spieler scanned and restored the 35mm tape; edited the footage together; and hired voice actors, musicians, and audio engineers to “complete” it. Shaped before “so bad they’re good” cult classics were popularly recognized—and long after ninja flicks and roaming New York City gangs were a staple of drive-ins and video store shelves—New York Ninja stands alone as a piece of film art which, through time, has been transformed from its original vision into something new and, in the process, was saved from being completely lost forever. We will never know the film’s lead and original director John Liu’s version of the film: would it have become a cult classic? Or would it be relegated to the budget bin of history? What we have instead is Kurtis Spieler’s loving, schlocky interpretation of what this movie could have been.

Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb (Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito, 1980, dir. Paul Leduc)
By Alonso Aguilar

Roque Dalton’s Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito is one of the most evocative poetic texts in Central America’s literary history, a lyrical collage that explores El Salvador’s historical timeline through a revolutionary lens. In 1980, legendary militant Mexican filmmaker Paul Leduc worked alongside the Faribundo Martí National Liberation Front to create a cinematic spiritual successor to Dalton’s anthology. The film intertwines vivid and empathetic footage of the daily fight against the Central American nation’s military regime in the late 1970s, with expressive voice-overs, devastating testimonies, and inspired montage sequences, putting forward a direct aesthetic for dissent and mobilization. The film’s original 140-minute version was first screened in Mexico City in 1980 and seems to have disappeared over time. Almost forty years later, the film was finally shown in El Salvador, but as a new eighty-minute version, which is the only one currently available online at the Archivo Mesoamericano’s Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, an audiovisual repository of militant and ethnographical audiovisual works from the region.