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Anti-Nazi Films at To Save and Project Festival

A film festival that includes a pair of Weimar-influenced pre-code Hollywood musicals, three classic cartoons by John and Faith Hubley and a 1936 docudrama in which an American re-enacts her imprisonment in Nazi Germany might fairly be called eclectic. Or it might be called To Save and Project, as the Museum of Modern Art titles its annual survey of recently restored movies, which returned this week for its 11th edition. Organized by Joshua Siegel, an associate curator in the museum’s film department, the festival has a sweeping nature that suggests how much work is being done to reclaim film history — and how much more needs to be done. This year’s program contains some 75 feature films and shorts from archives around the world.

Two of the most fascinating films in this year’s program, for example, had slipped into all but complete obscurity before an intrepid scholar tracked them down. To be screened Oct. 26 and Oct. 28, “Hitler’s Reign of Terror” (1934) and “I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany” (1936) represent seemingly the only English-language American films to take a stand against the growing menace of German fascism before Warner Brothers broke the major studios’ unseemly silence on the subject in 1939 with “Confessions of a Nazi Spy.”

Read entire article at New York Times