“My wife Amy says the restoration is my work. I maintain we did it together. It’s the rare time in the history of our marriage that I’m right.” Thus spoke Dennis Doros while introducing the pre-opening event of Venice 2025, a special screening that, as per tradition, occurred the night before the official start of proceedings. For this 82nd edition of the world’s oldest film festival, the appetizer, so to speak, was a blast from the past in more ways than one: Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly.
Originally shot in 1928, the movie was never completed due to a falling out between star/producer Gloria Swanson and Stroheim, whose ambitions clashed with hers (he was fired with only about half the script actually filmed). She eventually tried to salvage the already shot material and, thanks to a reshot ending, managed to have the film distributed in Europe and South America in 1932. Eighteen years later, a clip from Queen Kelly was featured in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, to represent the silent era career of Norma Desmond, played by Swanson (while Stroheim was cast as Norma’s director and husband turned butler).
An early attempt to reconstruct the version Stroheim intended to release was made in 1985, and Dennis Doros supervised that work, which screened at Venice that year. 40 years later, a new 4K version, with the final stretch recreated via photos and outtakes, with the original script as a reference. This material also led to the writing of new intertitles, clearly marked as such – the logo of the distributor Milestone Films appears at the bottom of the screen – to distinguish them from the original texts.
“Ironically, a film that was never finished marked the beginning of my career,” said Doros in front of the Sala Darsena screen, while also pointing out the festival said “yes” to the proposal of screening the new cut of Queen Kelly about ten minutes after he’d sent the email. It’s a bit of a swansong for him, as he’s about to retire and entrust Milestone, the company he founded with his wife Amy Heller, to Maya Cade, the creator of the great curatorial resource that is the Black Film Archive.
And what a swansong it was, with spectacular live music accompaniment by the Venetian group Syntax Ensemble, who performed the brand new score composed by Eli Denson. “We are tremendously grateful to Venice for this opportunity,” Doros told TFV via email ahead of the screening. “It’s a chance for cinephiles (including a number of important filmmakers) to again see the genius of Erich von Stroheim and Gloria Swanson. [It] is also a chance to see the future by introducing the world to the brilliant young composer Eli Denson.” Indeed, there were at least two major directors among the attendees: jury president Alexander Payne, who will be spending his downtime watching rediscovered gems, and Francis Ford Coppola, who arrived in Venice to present the honorary Golden Lion to Werner Herzog.
Doros also talked to us about the person to whom the reconstruction pays tribute in the credits: “This 2025 version of Queen Kelly is dedicated to Donald Krim, my former boss at Kino International, because he was the one who introduced the film to me in 1984. He took a huge financial and artistic risk to give his 27-year-old nontheatrical salesman the chance to put together the great unfinished film. And without Queen Kelly, I would not have been able to go on and restore the works of Charles Burnett, Kathleen Collins, Lois Weber, Shirley Clarke, Mikhail Kalatozov, etc. I was the pebble Don threw in the pond and the ripples continue to this day.”
The magnitude of such an event also speaks to the importance of Venice Classics, the section Alberto Barbera inaugurated in 2012, replacing the more traditional themed retrospectives. Inspired by the work his peer and friend Thierry Frémaux who did the equivalent programming strand in Cannes, Barbera devised Venice Classics to be a showcase for new restorations of films both celebrated and obscure, as well as documentaries about cinema (like last year’s Chain Reactions, which won one of the section’s two prizes).
Such is its significance that, when the 2020 edition had to deal with Covid restrictions, the festival came up with an ingenious plan to salvage the lineup. Due to reduced capacity in the theaters, every film in the Official Selection had more screenings than usual (generally up to five, not including the last day reruns for award winners). To accommodate those extra screenings, the Classics selection was exceptionally hosted by Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, which had moved its dates from the end of June to right before Venice.
Things have since returned to normal, and in addition to the various world premieres in competition and in the other sections, Venice attendees can also enjoy new versions of films by the likes of Manoel de Oliveira, Stanley Kubrick, Marcel Carné and Pedro Almodóvar, as well as documentaries on topics ranging from the oeuvre of Guillermo del Toro to the mad undertaking that was John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic.
As such, The Film Verdict would also like to take the opportunity to say that, after our Cannes Classics write-up in May, this intends to be a further example of how we aim to expand our festival coverage going forward, making room for retrospectives and archival work, at regular events as well as those who specialize in restorations and rediscoveries. We hope you will be along for the ride.
