There is a current passion for reviving early touring films and The Yellow Cruise may be the pièce de résistance of the genre. Directed by André Sauvage, whose extraordinary Etudes sur Paris we showed this year, it is a document of the Third Citroen Automotive Expedition from Beirut to Peking led by Georges-Marie Haardt. At the 1989 Telluride Film Festival, where this preserved print premiered, it was called "a dreamlike and obsessive story of futile adventure. At its heart, this is an expedition of the absurd. Could it be that the purpose is to drive a car from Beirut to Peking? Perhaps, but these weird half-track vehicles barely even make it over the Himalayas. Could it be ethnographic? Maybe, but their concerns are never scholarly and almost always bizarre. This is a movie where everything is doubly removed in time and place: it focuses on that incredible distance between us and antiquity but also between us and a bygone era of impassioned exploration and derring-do, making it a movie story of romantic innocents."