NEW YORK, NY.- Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton put their marital demons on film in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966). But neither they nor their director, Mike Nichols, can take credit for being the first to try to bring Edward Albee’s 1962 play to the screen, or even for being the first movie couple to draw on their own real-life discord in that context.

In April 1965, Andy Warhol shot what writer Sheldon Renan described as a “remake” of Albee’s drama, according to the Whitney Museum’s catalog of Warhol’s early film work. The stars were married artists — underground filmmakers Marie Menken and Willard Maas — and the concept was consistent with some Warhol films of the period: Set the camera in a fixed position; shoot two reels of 16 mm stock as the personalities in the frame engage in a mix of self-dramatizing and simply being; then let those two reels, totaling about 66 minutes, run unedited.

The result was titled “Bitch,” and it will receive what is probably its first public presentation Saturday as part of “To Save and Project: The 20th Museum of Modern Art International Festival of Film Preservation.”

Warhol never made a print of the movie, Greg Pierce, director of film and video at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, said in a phone interview. “There is a hierarchy to Warhol’s films,” he explained. There are those in the canon that were printed and shown — the titles that Warhol stood by, including “Empire” and “Chelsea Girls.” But there are dozens of others that Warhol felt didn’t work; in those cases, he simply moved on.

Yet, he also didn’t discard those failures. “There is very little footage that is quote-unquote ‘lost,’” Pierce said. “Warhol saved everything.” And before his death in 1987, he gave all his physical film material to MoMA, where “Bitch,” in a new digital scan, will screen on a double bill with Nichols’ drama.

Between the screenings, Pierce will appear for a conversation with Warhol collaborator Gerard Malanga; Nichols biographer Mark Harris; and Philip Gefter, a former picture editor for The New York Times and a photography critic who is the author of the forthcoming book “Cocktails With George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’”

In a phone interview, Gefter noted that Menken had suggested that she and Maas, whom Albee knew socially and professionally, were inspirations for the play’s George and Martha. Gefter said Menken and Maas were notorious for drunkenly arguing in front of guests at their parties. And although Gefter said that Albee had been reticent to reveal any models for his warring protagonists — and that Albee’s academic colleagues at Wagner College had tended to see themselves in the couple — he did find one conversation in which Albee obliquely referenced Menken and Maas.

The link between Warhol’s film and Albee isn’t airtight. (Ronald Tavel, Warhol’s scenarist, didn’t mention “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in his written recollections of the shoot.) But the movie stands as a record of the artist’s radically spare filmmaking methods: In this case, as Pierce put it, get two people on camera who may or may not generate fireworks and “let ’em drink for a while, and if nothing’s happening, start to send new people on.”

Shortly after the 20-minute mark, arrivals begin to disrupt their inscrutable banter, and the film becomes almost comical as a parade of the couple’s and Warhol’s associates, including Malanga and Tavel, gradually crowd into the frame. The movie is also a major Warhol milestone: It is his first picture with Edie Sedgwick, the Factory fixture who would soon appear in the artist’s “Poor Little Rich Girl” and “Vinyl.”

The Warhol movie is hardly the only title at this year’s “To Save and Project” that has been rescued from obscurity or that will be shown in a long-unseen form.

Menelik Shabazz’s “Burning an Illusion” (1981) is available to stream, but it was never formally released in New York. A contemporaneous record of the same milieu Steve McQueen depicted in “Lovers Rock,” it even features Janet Kay (the singer of “Silly Games”) in a brief appearance. It follows a Black couple in London, Pat (Cassie McFarlane) and Del (Victor Romero), through the ups and downs of their relationship, as social forces — unemployment, incarceration — steer them toward more-active political lives.

The festival’s feature on opening night (which was Thursday) and to be repeated Wednesday is a restoration of “The Black Pirate” (1926), a swashbuckler that represented a major advance in the history of color film. “The Black Pirate” wasn’t the first feature to be shot in two-color Technicolor, but it was, as James Layton and David Pierce write in their exhaustive history, “The Dawn of Technicolor,” notable as a success story in which color had been planned from the beginning of the production.

The authors explain how the star, Douglas Fairbanks, was instrumental in ensuring a color scheme that would not be a distraction for audiences: The palette favored greens and browns and was designed to resemble illustrations in children’s books or Dutch masters’ paintings. It is this muted look that the new digital version, made from the original negatives, brings back.

Until now, “Arrowsmith,” John Ford’s 1931 adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel, was a film you were more likely to encounter in a censored version. Ronald Colman plays the title character, a doctor who aspires to make great advances in medical research. The restoration, by the Library of Congress and the Film Foundation from Colman’s personal nitrate print, would be worth seeing simply for the poetry in Ford’s use of light and shadow, which is greatly diminished in streaming versions.

But it also includes a scene omitted from the 1944 rerelease, said Heather Linville, supervisor at the library’s film preservation laboratory. In the scene, Myrna Loy’s character confesses her love to the married Arrowsmith. His equivocation in response (“you make my life suddenly very empty — but terribly exciting”) probably didn’t please the Production Code Administration, which was empowered a few years after the 1931 opening.

On the subject of adultery, the silent feature “Man, Woman and Sin” (1927), headlined by two ill-fated stars of the era, John Gilbert and Jeanne Eagels, owes its resurrection in part to its entry into the public domain a year ago. It tells the story of a young, naive Washington, D.C., newspaperman (Gilbert) who becomes smitten with a society editor (Eagels) who happens to be having an affair with his boss.

In 1970, an influential book put out by MoMA, “Lost Films,” identified “Man, Woman and Sin” as not having survived in any copies. But MGM had one even then, said David Stenn, a screenwriter and the author of authoritative biographies of Clara Bow and Jean Harlow. In 1971, after “Lost Films” drew attention to “Man, Woman and Sin,” the studio made a print for what is now the George Eastman Museum to store in Rochester, New York.

But there was a catch, Stenn said. The director, Monta Bell, remade the film in 1931 at Universal as “Up for Murder,” and the rights deal stipulated that the original could not be shown. Although there have been rare, noncommercial screenings over the years, the expiration of the copyright is what allowed Stenn to finance a restoration with the original tints.

Even when no prints are known to survive, there is always hope. Stenn mentioned that a collector recently contacted him about a lost 1923 Clara Bow film that appears to have surfaced in Omaha, Nebraska, in film cans being auctioned from a camera supply store. Stenn is reluctant to reveal more for now. But, he said, “these things can still happen.”

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‘To Save and Project: The 20th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation’

The festival runs through Feb. 4. For more details, see moma.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.