MoMA will screen a new restoration of G.W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street

The Museum of Modern Art will screen a new restoration of G.W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street as part of its To Save and Project series; the film is one Michael Mann has often cited as the moment he decided to become a director, recalling in 2016 that it struck him on “a freezing, crystal-clear night.” The Weimar-era drama, starring Greta Garbo, is notorious for the many ways it has been cut since its 1925 premiere.

This centennial restoration is the fourth major attempt by the Munich Filmmuseum to reconstitute Pabst’s vision, after efforts in 1989, the 1990s and 2009, and the new version runs 155 minutes at 19 frames per second compared with American release prints that have run as short as 75 minutes at 17 frames per second.

Restorers drew on material from prints in multiple cities and used digital tools to integrate and stabilise fragments, a two-year effort that the museum’s Stefan Drössler said included frame-by-frame repairs and small editing recoveries. He and others involved have described subjective choices in past reconstructions — including additions from a Russian print in 1989 and detailed narrative work by Jan-Christopher Horak — and Drössler called the film “maybe the worst-butchered German silent film of the time.” The MoMA screenings are scheduled for Jan.

19 and 22, and To Save and Project runs through Feb. 2.

Key Topics

Culture, Moma, G.w. Pabst, Greta Garbo, Munich Filmmuseum, Michael Mann