A dozen rediscovered gems, an advanced projector system and proof that Hollywood’s most overlooked era still has something to say will give cinephiles plenty of reason to visit the Ojai Art Center this spring and summer.
For most of their existence, the 12 works screened during the Ojai Art Center’s “Shadows & Secrets: A Film Noir Series,” taking place May 3 through July 26, have been ghosts — circulating in damaged prints, buried in archives, unknown to all but a handful of specialists. Now they’ve been restored, scanned from archival materials at high resolution and digitally cleaned of decades of scratches and deterioration. They are now ready to be projected through a state-of-the-art 4K digital projector, acquired by the art center last year, onto an equally impressive 16-foot screen. In most cases, these films will look better at the Ojai Art Center than they did when they first played in theaters in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
That’s the practical argument for Shadows & Secrets. A more critical one: American film noir produced some of the greatest movies ever made, and the ones everyone knows represent only a fraction of what the era actually achieved. In curating the series, organizers found that the films that fell through the cracks are sometimes the most interesting ones…