Sometimes, the movie gods part the clouds and shine light down upon us. This is one of those moments as news breaks that a complete, undamaged 35mm print of the original Italian cut of Dario Argento’s SUSPIRIA has been discovered. The Chicago Cinema Society has obtained the print and will be doing a small tour of the film later this year.
Here is the complete Press Release from the Chicago Cinema Society:
The Chicago Cinema Society is excited to announce that we have discovered an uncut Italian 35mm print of SUSPIRIA. The print was rescued from an Italian cinema that had closed down and the print had gone untouched in their storage area since 1977/78. After a brief inspection to assess the overall condition of the print, it appears as if it had only been screened a handful of times at most. The print is in excellent physical condition with no substantial wear, uncut heads and tails, minimal fading and no vinegar syndrome. Once we had the print in our film archive, we then made a very careful inspection to determine which version of SUSPIRIA we had obtained. We were stunned to find that the print is a completely uncut 6-reel print with a run time of 98 minutes in Italian language. We then privately screened the print and recorded excerpts, which can be found on our YouTube channel, to give people a better sense of what the print actually looks like. Here a clip which includes one of the more notorious cut scenes (pun intended) that does not exist in 1977 US release prints:
We reached out to Don May at Synapse Films to see if they would be in need of our print for restoration purposes. He noted to us that they have all of the film elements that they need for their upcoming digital restoration. We then shared information on our discovery with a number of film programmers across the country, many of whom had become very interested in screening the print. Since preservation elements for SUSPIRIA exist, we arranged a tour for our print to start late this summer. More venues have reached out to us with interest in screening our print so follow Chicago Cinema Society on Facebook and check in at our website for updates and the additions of any other screening dates. Do not miss out on this opportunity to see SUSPIRIA in the way that it was intended to be seen! As of this moment, our print of SUSPIRIA is scheduled to screen, with projected subtitles (soft-subbing), at the following venues:
7/28: The Metrograph, New York City, NY
9/16: The Belcourt Theatre, Nashville, TN
Early Fall: Venue confirmed and TBA, Los Angeles, CA
10/14: Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, MA
10/26+27: Northwest Film Forum, Seattle, WA
Late Fall: Music Box Theatre, Chicago, IL
The Chicago Cinema Society
Website: http://chicagocinemasociety.org/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chicagocinemasociety
Twitter: @CCinemaSociety
While there has been a very lovely 35mm print of the American cut of SUSPIRIA that has been shown in theaters for about ten years now, that version runs six minutes shorter than Argento’s Italian cut, losing several of the more extreme moments in the process.
If you can make it to one of the screenings of this print, you owe it to yourself to do so. Do not ignore gifts from the movie gods.
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