Jane Fonda, Alexander Payne joined Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Film Foundation, Institut Lumière at HFPA Film Restoration Summit

Summit highlighted cultural importance of preserving art of cinema with special screening of restored classic film ‘A Fistful of Dollars’

Jane Fonda (three-time Golden Globe Award-winner), Thierry Frémaux (director, Institut Lumiere), Alexander Payne (two-time Golden Globe Award-winner, board of directors at The Film Foundation), Jan-Christopher Horak (director, UCLA Film & Television Achieves), and Grover Crisp (EVP, asset management, film restoration and digital mastery, Sony Picture Entertainment) joined the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), The Film Foundation and Institut Lumière, at the HFPA Film Restoration Summit held at the Theatre at Ace Hotel in Los Angeles.

The special program was moderated by Sandra Schulberg (president, IndieCollect) and included a panel discussion highlighting the cultural importance of preserving the art of cinema and what new generations of filmmakers can learn through the experience of watching restored classics and important independent films. The night concluded with a screening of “A Fistful of Dollars,” a film restored with support from the HFPA.

Highlights from the night include:

•HFPA President Meher Tatna kicked off the event, stating, “It is imperative, as film lovers and journalists, for us to help preserve our cinematic heritage, which documents the way we lived, shows us the way we felt, captures the dreams we dreamed, and helps us understand the experiences of times different from ours, so future filmmakers can be inspired to add to that heritage.”

•Fonda passionately spoke about the importance of film restoration, noting, “If we allow these documents of our past to disappear, we end up with a narrow and shallow knowledge of how change happens, how problems can be solved, and how we gauge people and cultures not like ours. We can’t know where we’re going if we don’t know where we’ve been.”

•Frémaux gave a special presentation on the Lumière brothers restoration project, showcasing a selection of restored silent films, including their first film, “La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon” (“Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory”). He remarked on how extraordinary it was that 1,717 of the 1,722 films made by the Lumière brothers had been preserved.

•The audience was “blown away” by Crisp’s showcase of film clips before and after restoration that highlighted the intricate details brought to life by the process.

•Payne recalled his last phone conversation with film preservationist David Shepard before his passing where Shepard told him, “Always do everything you can to preserve silent film.”

•Toward the end of the panel, Frémaux made a rousing call to restore the 1978 classic “Coming Home,” for which Fonda won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress In A Motion Picture – Drama.

The HFPA Film Restoration Summit was established following a donation of more than $200,000 made by the HFPA to Festival Lumière to support the second phase of the restoration of the Lumière brothers’ one-minute films. To date, the HFPA, in partnership with The Film Foundation, has helped fund the restoration of over 90 classic feature films.

Previous classics that were restored by HFPA grants include Elia Kazan’s “A Face in the Crowd”; the Powell-Pressburger masterpiece, “The Red Shoes”; Robert Altman’s “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean”; the first film version of “Death of a Salesman”; and Indian director Satyajit Ray’s acclaimed “Apu Trilogy”.

Since 2013, the HFPA has awarded $200,000 to the Film Noir Foundation for five 35mm restorations of classic noirs; and since 2005, another $365,000 to the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project for 26 films preserving lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender moving images. It recently provided a grant to IndieCollect to restore several significant LGBT+ films, including Jan Oxenberg’s “A Comedy in Six Unnatural Acts.”

Each year, the HFPA holds the third-most-watched awards show on television, the Golden Globe Awards, which has enabled the organization to donate more than $33 million to 80 entertainment-related charities, film restoration, scholarship programs and humanitarian efforts.