Martin Scorsese Instagram – Repost from @thefilmfoundation_official • Elia Kazan was so mighty a force in American theatre, acting and cinema that it’s possible to feel and benefit from the effects of his work and his practice without even realizing it. He’s also known for his second appearance before the terror-inducing House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951, when he named the names of many of his fellow Group Theatre members. Any attempt to reduce or simplify the relationship between Kazan’s art and this action is ultimately doomed to failure, no matter what the intention or political motivation. It’s incontestable that the power of Kazan’s artistry and the thematic scope of his work intensified after his second HUAC appearance. But what seems truly remarkable now is the way that, in film after film and in a variety of forms, he meticulously and painstakingly dramatized the gut-wrenching feeling of being torn in two directions—as Kazan put it in his autobiography, “That’s what a difficult decision means: either way you go, you lose.” Wild River, with Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick and Jo Van Fleet, is not one of Kazan’s best-known movies, but it is one of his greatest, and it was beautifully restored by the team at Fox led by Schawn Belston—if you care about film restoration, you probably know his name already, and if you don’t, you need to. The outline of the film’s narrative is, at this moment, painfully relevant. Clift is the progressive government official who arrives in the rural south in the mid-1930s to remove people from land that has been in their family for generations, in order to complete the TVA dam project—he and his agency destroy ways of life in order to save actual lives from the slow-motion catastrophe of further flooding. There’s a special lyricism to Wild River that feels almost otherworldly, and it has some of the most emotionally and visually exquisite passages in all American cinema. And I think that Kazan achieved something absolutely unique: he gave dramatic and cinematic form to ambivalence, right up his film’s final heartbreaking image. By Kent Jones @ethandre #eliakazan #filmrestoration #movies #film #cinema