The Film Society of Lincoln Center will host a special screening of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory’s Howards End, presented in a new restoration with Ivory in person for a Q&A. The screening will take place Monday, July 25, at 7:30pm in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. Tickets go on sale Thursday, July 7.
Rarely has a screen adaptation of a work of classic literature been pulled off with as much intelligence, power, and artistry as James Ivory and Ismail Merchant’s film of E. M. Forster’s Howards End. In her star-making, Oscar-winning performance, an effulgent Emma Thompson plays Margaret Schlegel, a liberal-minded, middle-class Londoner in Edwardian England whose fate becomes intertwined with the upper-crust Wilcoxes, Henry and Ruth (Anthony Hopkins and Vanessa Redgrave), as well as the working-class Leonard Bast (Samuel West), both due to dalliances of her free-spirited sister, Helen (Helena Bonham Carter). The Merchant-Ivory team’s renowned attention to detail and emotion is here put in the service of a complex and penetrating study of irreconcilable class issues, in which a story of inheritance—of Ruth’s splendid country home, Howards End—comes to stand in for the future of an entire country.
On the heels of its premiere in this year’s Cannes Classics section, the Film Society is pleased to present this three-time Oscar winner in a beautiful restoration. Commemorating the upcoming 25th anniversary of the film’s original release, the 4K restoration was assembled from the George Eastman Museum archive’s original camera negative and magnetic soundtrack, a 5.1 audio track restoration by Audio Mechanics, and color grading by Deluxe Restoration under the supervision of Ivory and cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts. The digital restoration was completed by Cineric Portugal. Charles Cohen, Chairman of Cohen Media Group, acquired Howards End last fall among 30 Merchant-Ivory Productions titles added to the Cohen Film Collection. The film will open August 26 at Film Forum and the Paris Theatre.
