Online with SFFP—Discussing the Work of Lewis Milestone

Lewis Milestone with Joan Crawford during the shooting of Rain (1932)

On Thursday, June 5, SFFP Board President Rob Byrne will be joined by Ehsan Khoshbakht to discuss Lewis Milestone’s incredible body of work, including—of course—The Garden of Eden, which SFFP restored!

This event is free and open to everyone. Simply register below to attend.

Lewis Milestone Retrospective at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2025

Milestone (left) on the set of Rain with Joan Crawford

Lewis Milestone: Of Wars and Men

A milestone of visual flair and virtuosity in American cinema, the career of Lewis Milestone – a Russian Jewish émigré – bridged silent cinema and the 70mm spectacles of the 1960s. Renowned for having one of the most distinctive and eclectic styles of his generation, his popular and dazzlingly original work ranged from the anti-war magnum opus All Quiet on the Western Front to the popular-front musical Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!. As dense, dark, and daunting as his films could get, they were often laced with wit, camaraderie, and bravery amid mass atrocities. Yet, he barely survived the Hollywood blacklist, which forced him to drift into mediocre assignments. This programme, covering his silent films up until the blacklist, features new restorations and archive prints, aiming to recover the artistry of a man who fought many battles of humanity in the 20th century with a sense of wisdom and poetry that can still shake us.

Notebook's Fantasy Double Feature of 2010

NEW: Certified Copy [Copie conforme] (Abbas Kiarostami, Italy/France)
OLD: Hallelujah I’m a Bum (Lewis Milestone, 1933)

WHY: It’s true that my guilty conscious had some effect on picking Copie conforme, though it was an outstanding film itself, needless of any guilty conscious to be the criteria of a choice. I had some rough, and probably unfair, judgments on Kiarostami’s films, after The Wind Will Carry Us, and in the shadow of post-June-2009 happenings in Iran these judgments became harsher. But now, I can read the filmmaker’s thoughts more clearly, because I know if he had made any film the way that people of his country wanted he would now have his own share of 26 years. Of course,  the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has considered Copie unscreenable in Iran. But that doesn’t affect Kiarostami’s reputation, in or out of his homeland. Inside, the usual bunch of opponents call him a coward and a fake, and on the other side, many more find him one of the few who can give them back a part of the lost honor of a nation. He has his followers and protégés; not so strangely, none of them working in Iran anymore, and of course some of them, like Jafar Panahi, do not and will not work at all. But Kiarostami continues his cinematic journey, this time in Italy, and makes organic films like they are part of a change of the weather or any other natural occurrence. He is coming from a country full of frustration, a country facing its biggest troubles ever, but he is still focused on details (a kid’s notebook, a hobo’s marriage proposition after a demolishing earthquake, drivers driving Tehran street without showing any real life on those streets), details that are not related clearly and directly to the problems. Does he have any message for his own people?  The answer is hardly a yes, but maybe his continuity is the message. Wouldn’t he be forgotten, like many filmmakers with clear telegram-like messages before and after the 1979 revolution, if he had stopped being Kiarostami?
To fill the gap, to have another perspective rather than pleasant landscape of Tuscany, to remember people are losing jobs, and to not forget that not very far from now, after recent political/economical changes in Kiarostami’s homeland, a new wave of poverty will sweep up the nation, let’s watch Lewis Milestone’s masterpiece of the American left, Hallelujah I'm a Bum, about central park hobos and their hopes and dreams during the big depression; a Milestone that shows us (and Kiarostami) how can fantasy explain bitter reality. Juliette Binoche is much like Al Jolson. In the end, they both are left alone with undying hopes in hand, and tears in their eyes. Binoche and Jolson are the integral of people in Iran, today.