Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024

Six years ago, I walked onto a building site underneath Piazza Maggiore in Bologna and tried to imagine what the cinema planned for this cavernous space would look like. The Cinema Modernissimo – which opened to the public in November 2023 and became a core venue in this year's Il Cinema Ritrovato – exceeded my wildest expectations. It's a gorgeous space to watch a movie in, inviting you to walk past posters and memorabilia from film history as you make your way into the 350-seat auditorium, with its beautifully decorated balcony and comfortable red seats, many of which are emblazoned with the name of a cinema luminary. I was delighted to find that my front-row ticket for the first festival screening placed me in the Martin Scorsese seat, and I later got to witness first-hand Alexander Payne's surprise and delight when he found his name on a seat in row B.

When I’d finished gawping at the surroundings and had settled into Marty’s chair, my first screening of Il Cinema Ritrovato got underway. It was a trio of shorts from 1924 presented on 35mm – Dziga Vertov’s Kino Pravda No. 18, Abel Gance’s Au secours! and Ballet Mécanique, created by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy – and each was an example of a filmmaker testing the boundaries of what was possible in cinema at that time. I was particularly surprised by Au secours!, which was directed by Gance between the monumental projects of La Roue and Napoléon. This Max Linder short about a man attempting to win a bet by staying in a haunted castle until midnight is very silly – it essentially plays as an Abel Gance-directed Scooby Doo episode – but it gives Gance plenty of license to experiment, distorting the image in a variety of ways to express his protagonist’s mounting confusion and fear. Valentina Magaletti’s drum-heavy accompaniment didn’t quite align with this film’s comic tone, but it certainly chimed with the dazzling Ballet Mécanique in an exhilarating way, and there was something apt about beginning my festival experience in this brand-new cinema watching century-old films that felt so thrillingly modern.

These films were part of the festival’s 100 Years Ago strand alongside such pleasures as the fine Czech film Bílý ráj on the carbon arc projector and The Avenger of Davos, which boasted some superb location footage shot around that year’s Winter Olympics. Il Cinema Ritrovato contains a couple of regular strands that never fail to serve up surprises and discoveries, and in recent years the Japanese focus programmed by Alexander Jacoby and Johan Nordström has been an invaluable resource, often showcasing films that have never been seen outside Japan. This year’s director in focus was Kōzaburō Yoshimura, a filmmaker unknown to me aside from his 1951 film Clothes of Deception, which I saw in the BFI’s Women in Japanese Melodrama season in 2017. One of the films selected for the Bologna retrospective was called A Woman's Uphill Slope, and that could have been a fitting title for the whole strand.

He certainly had a way with actresses, and the great Machiko Kyô gives a magnificent performance in The Naked Face of Night. Written by Yoshimura’s longtime collaborator Kaneto Shindo, the film follows the template of All About Eve, with Akemi (Kyô) as the determined and cunning young dancer who supplants her mentor and becomes a star, only to find young disciple Hisako (Ayako Wakao) following the same path in this endless cycle of ambition and treachery. Shot in widescreen and in a combination of colour and black-and-white (a sudden unexpected shift to monochrome halfway through leads to one of the most haunting scenes), The Naked Face of Night is a brilliantly crafted melodrama, but it’s also fascinating as a social drama, with its depiction of geisha culture and dance exploring the clash between tradition and modernity in postwar Japan.

The Naked Face of Night builds to a cynical and bleak denouement, but then Yoshimura and Shindo didn’t have a lot of use for happy endings. The other great film I saw in this strand was Sisters of Nishijin, which centred on a family being torn apart by financial pressures – a common theme in these pictures. As this family attempts to keep their textile business afloat following the suicide of the debt-ridden patriarch, Yoshimura and Shindo tease us for a while with the possibility that they will manage to turn things around, and a few moments of compassion and generosity are deeply moving, but then they start turning the screw. External pressures chip away at this family’s sense of dignity and hope, and creditors and loan sharks start lining up to claim their share of what’s left. By the end of the film, the house this family has always lived in is literally being pulled apart around them as their mother breathes her last. It’s a shattering film.

As well as the regular focus on a Japanese filmmaker, Il Cinema Ritrovato regularly hosts a retrospective for a director who worked in the Hollywood studio system; the kind of filmmakers who moved across projects and genres and were rarely regarded as auteurs. In recent years we have enjoyed rediscovering directors like Henry King, Hugo Fregonese and Rouben Mamoulian in this strand, and if this year’s focus on Anatole Litvak didn’t quite excite me in the same way, a couple of his films were revelatory. The 1932 film Cœur de lilas shows off his direction at its most fluid and dynamic, from the imaginative opening sequences onwards. It’s the story of an undercover cop who falls for the woman he’s investigating, and in the climactic twenty minutes Litvak uses the camera and editing to express his characters’ tortured emotions in a vivid way. A young Jean Gabin steals scenes with his unmistakable swagger, but I was captivated by Marcelle Romée as Lilas and convinced that an actress with such a striking presence must have further work to explore. Alas, Romée committed suicide in the year of this film’s release, leaving behind just four screen roles. She was 29 years old.

Following his success in France, Litvak moved to Hollywood and signed for Warner Brothers, where he made a number of successful pictures, but none that I’ve seen so far come close to City for Conquest. Given the fact that this is a New York-set boxing movie starring James Cagney and shot by James Wong Howe, it seemed inexplicable to me that I had never even heard of it. The film sounded right up my street, and so it proved. It’s a superb portrait of dreamers having to sell a part of themselves to make the big time, and when tragedy strikes in the film’s second half, the way Cagney plays it – never succumbing to sentimentality – makes it even more wrenching. The brilliant ensemble features Ann Sheridan, Anthony Quinn, Donald Crisp and even Elisa Kazan, and every performance hits the mark. It’s a severely underrated melodrama that deserves to be mentioned alongside other great boxing movies from the era, such as Body and Soul or The Set-Up.

It's not uncommon for films that were popular in their day to slip into obscurity, but some films don’t even get the chance to reach an audience before disappearing. After debuting at the 1999 Toronto Film Festival, Charles Burnett’s The Annihilation of Fish promptly vanished, with a negative review in Variety apparently being enough for the distributor to drop the film. This was a grievous injustice, as Burnett’s film offered one of the most charming and hilarious experiences at the festival. It’s an oddball romance starring James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave; he is beset by invisible demons, with whom he periodically wrestles, while she believes she is in a relationship with the late Giacomo Puccini. Burnett mines some comic gold out of these eccentricities and the story keeps zig-zagging in unexpected directions, but at heart there is a real tenderness to this film, which explores the complications of finding love late in life when we are carrying too much baggage. The film is a treat and I am so glad it is finally seeing the light of day. It's a long-overdue validation for Burnett, whose entire career has been a series of battles to get his films seen.

One of the great joys of Il Cinema Ritrovato is seeing a restored film being shared with an audience after long being thought lost, and on one particularly memorable afternoon I witnessed two such resurrections. Ossama Mohammed had given up hope of ever seeing his 1988 film Stars in Broad Daylight again, with the Syrian authorities even denying the existence of the film made by this exiled director. After attempts to source prints in Spain failed, Mohammed’s recollection that the film had once played on German TV led Cecilia Cenciarelli to trawl through six years’ worth of German TV guides, and finally a pristine 35mm print was found in a TV archive to serve as the basis for this restoration. Shot through with a streak of black, satirical humour and an energetic spirit that recalls Kusturica, this was terrific discovery, and it was also the most visually exciting film I saw at the festival, with Mohammed finding imaginative and potent compositions in almost every scene.

Sadly, Nirad Mohapatra did not live to see the rebirth of his only feature film Māyā Miriga, as he passed away in 2015, but his son Sandeep Mohapatra was present alongside Shivendra Singh Dungarpur (whose ongoing work to restore and celebrate Indian cinema is indescribably important) to share the story of this project. Having discovered the 16mm negatives languishing in a dire state in an abandoned warehouse, the quality of this restoration is truly remarkable, and the film is a quietly mesmerising drama. Mohapatra follows a middle-class family over the course of many months, with the family patriarch determined that his children must succeed at their exams, obtain respectable jobs and marry well, regardless of how their own desires align with these ideals. This generational tension is intelligently captured by Mohapatra, as the dynamics between characters shift in subtle ways, and he always knows where to place his camera to maximise the spaces within the house wherein the story takes place. Māyā Miriga is a small-scale, independently financed film that seemed lost to us, but this screening revealed its universal resonance and humanity, and we should be immensely grateful that it will now be available for audiences to discover for years to come. In his introduction, Sandeep Mohapatra quoted his father as saying, "We all die. The goal isn't to live forever. The goal is to create something that will." He has now achieved that feat.

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2023

Ever since I started attending Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, June has been the month I’ve looked forward to more than any other. This year, I had an extra reason to eagerly anticipate it. A few weeks before my regular Italian jaunt this summer, the BFI hosted the inaugural Film on Film Festival; a four-day celebration of celluloid projection in all its forms. Expertly curated by James Bell and Robin Baker, this programme caught the imagination of audiences and generated a buzz that I had never experienced on the South Bank. It was the closest thing to Bologna that I have ever felt in London, and it was a reminder of how special and singular the act of film projection remains in our increasingly digital and disconnected world.

This short festival also acted as a handy teaser for Il Cinema Ritrovato. One of the most exciting events was an ultra-rare screening of Rouben Mamoulian’s Blood and Sand on a nitrate print, which showed off the film's ravishing use of colour to eye-popping effect, and Mamoulian was undoubtedly the star of this year’s Bologna programme. Il Cinema Ritrovato has a history of celebrating studio directors who hopped from genre to genre and adapted to the changing fashions in careers that spanned decades, and through a selection of these features we can see the artistry and thematic consistency that defined these filmmakers.
The Mamoulian strand contained a number of his most celebrated works – including Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Love Me Tonight and Queen Christina – but I was excited to discover some of the less familiar titles. It was particularly interesting to see how Mamoulian’s style could elevate generic material in the pre-Code City Streets. It’s easy to imagine the mundane crime picture this could have become in the hands of many directors – there’s nothing new in its tale of a racketeer’s daughter (Sylvia Sidney) and her boyfriend (Gray Cooper) getting mixed up in bootlegging – but Mamoulian finds something interesting to look at in almost every scene. Consider the way he uses a burning cigar, or films two men walking down a corridor with one represented as a shadow, or shoots an expositional conversation between two characters by focusing on the cat statues that happen to be in the room.

His elegant direction similarly lit up one of the very best films I saw in Bologna, even though it’s a film that appears to have a poor critical reputation compared to Mamoulian’s other works. We Live Again is an adaptation of Tolstoy's novel Resurrection, and in its opening scenes I felt like I was about to understand why this picture hasn’t received widespread acclaim; the picturesque depiction of 19th century Russian life feels hokey and the dialogue given to Fredric March’s prince as he espouses his socialist ideals is blunt. But as the film progresses, it delves into much more complex emotional territory. After seducing the peasant girl Katusha (Anna Sten), March’s character rises through the ranks and forgets his earlier principles, while Katusha gives birth to a stillborn child and is cast out into the streets. The film becomes a story of a man realising that he has lost something valuable and striving for atonement, and much of this conflict plays out on March’s face, with the actor expressing his inner anguish in a few intense and nuanced close-ups. With sharp script contributions from Preston Sturges and gorgeous cinematography from Gregg Toland, this is a handsome and absorbing production, but what really sets it apart is its subtle approach to character, its frank take on sex (the ‘morning after’ scene made our audience gasp) and its sincere spirituality. It’s the ultimate example of what curator Ehsan Khoshbakht wryly described as Mamoulian’s ongoing fascination with “the holy and the horny.”

The other director receiving the retrospective treatment in Bologna this year was Teinosuke Kinugasa, whose work beyond A Page of Madness and Gate of Hell has rarely been seen outside of Japan. The selection presented here was a mixed bag, but there’s no doubting Kinugasa’s eye for a striking composition, even in a film as severely compromised as his 1935 version of An Actor’s Revenge, which was hacked down from its original five-hour running time and is now barely comprehensible. Kinugasa’s vision aligned most beautifully with the material in the epic drama Dedication of the Great Buddha, which details the creation of a Buddha statue in 8th century Japan. This is a film about the creative process, artistic jealousy and political machinations, as the humble sculptor (Kazuo Hasegawa) enlisted for the project has to face myriad rivals and antagonists who threaten to sabotage him. Kinugasa brilliantly creates an imposing sense of scale and the scenes of construction are worthy of comparison with the bell-casting in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. It’s an astonishing film that poignantly expresses the toll that this arduous project took on the men who did it: "My life...for this."

The Kinugasa selection in Bologna was a mere fraction of this extraordinarily prolific director’s body of work. Others had a much more complete showing. Michael Roemer has had two theatrically released feature films, Nothing But a Man and The Plot Against Harry, but the second of these was barely released at all. This drily comic portrait of a Jewish gangster emerging from jail to find his personal and professional lives in turmoil was shelved by its distributor for not being funny enough, and it wasn’t released until 1989, when it was widely acclaimed and nominated for six Independent Spirit Awards. What impact might it have had in 1971, when it predated Mean Streets, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and the rise of Woody Allen? It’s a tragedy that Martin Priest and Ben Lang (both nominees in 1990) didn’t receive the recognition and career boost they deserved for their wonderful work here. Perhaps it’s easy to see why The Plot Against Harry was considered a hard sell – it’s a determinedly low-key picture, with the narrative essentially consisting of things just happening to Harry as tries to do deals and mend broken families ties, while simultaneously trying to avoid the stress that might afflict his enlarged heart – but I loved the film’s off-kilter sense of humour and its fascinating depiction of New York at a particular point in time. It deserves to be more widely celebrated.

These discoveries are what Il Cinema Ritrovato is all about. I love taking a chance on a film I’ve heard nothing about and leaving the cinema enraptured by the greatness I have just experienced. My knowledge of Syrian cinema is non-existent, but I’m so glad I caught Mohammad Malas’ Dreams of the City. Based on the director’s own childhood, this film centres on Dib (Bassel Abiad), who moves with his younger brother and widowed mother to Damascus, where they are forced to live with his taciturn and abusive grandfather. Set against the backdrop of Syria’s tumultuous political landscape in the 1950s, this is one of the great coming-of-age films, with Malas capturing such raw emotion in the relationship between Dib and his violent grandfather and heartbroken mother, and between the other characters we meet, who are turned against each other by the political climate. The film also gives us an invaluable look at the lost city of Damascus, beautifully photographed by Ordijan Anjin and splendidly presented on this excellent 35mm archive print. My only regret is that I didn’t see the other Syrian film in the programme, Tewfik Saleh’s The Dupes, which everyone I spoke to raved about, but such missed opportunities are par for the course here.

Not every print was a pleasure at this year’s festival, though. A number of 16mm screenings were programmed in that format’s centenary year, but these fragile prints often struggled to get through the projector. William Klein’s Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther broke twice during the screening, while the presentations of 1960s Italian music videos and a screening of Lucretia Lombard had to be abandoned. The latter was particularly frustrating, as the first couple of minutes of Jack Conway’s film had shown promise and the print failed just as Norma Shearer had made her first appearance. We did get to enjoy some other gems from 1923, though. Jean Epstein made his first solo effort as a director this year with L'Auberge rouge, and it was thrilling to see him pushing his technique in so many areas, with a boldly roving camera and some particularly potent point-of-view shots. I was also impressed by the visual imagination on display in Arthur Robison’s Schatten, which eschews intertitles and makes ingenious use of shadows as its characters are lulled into a dream state where their deepest desires are revealed. If Robison had known when to quit – ideally after the genuinely shocking climax – then I might be hailing this as one of the greats, but even if its impact is diluted slightly by the extended epilogue, it’s still a remarkable picture.

The most astonishing film from the 1923 strand came from a most unlikely source, however. I've enjoyed watching Ivan Mosjoukine in Bologna a number of times, and his performance in Le Brasier ardent is typically charismatic, lively and unpredictable; his introduction, where it is revealed that he’s been hidden in plain sight throughout the whole scene we’ve just watched, is a delight. But the revelation here is that Mosjoukine also directed Le Brasier ardent, and he proves himself to be an extraordinary talent on that side of the camera too. The film knocked me back in my seat in its opening few minutes, with an extraordinarily visceral, surreal and unsettling nightmare sequence, and throughout the movie Mosjoukine creates incredibly imaginative scenes, full of bizarre images and crazy production design. This film changed the course of Jean Renoir's life (“I decided to abandon my profession, which was ceramics, and to set about making films,” he wrote) but its poor reception at the box office sad killed a potentially thrilling directorial career.

I may go to Bologna primarily to venture into the unknown and unearth these hidden gems, but it would be remiss of me not to mention one of the most glorious experiences I had this year, with a film I have watched countless times. Black Narcissus played in Piazza Maggiore on a brand-new 35mm print, which brought an overwhelming clarity and vibrancy to The Archers’ awe-inspiring use of colour and ingenious art direction. The shot of Deborah Kerr standing in the lake during the flashback in Ireland, with the sunlight glistening on the water around her, was so dazzling on that huge screen it took my breath away. If the BFI led us into Il Cinema Ritrovato this year, then Bologna returned the favour with this screening, as this splendid new print is one of a few that have been struck for the BFI’s major Powell and Pressburger celebration later this year. I already can’t wait to see it again.

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2022

Pier Paolo Pasolini was born on via Borgonuovo, Bologna, on March 5th, 1922. One hundred years on, his centenary is being marked by an exhibition that explores multiple facets of his work and looks at the artistic influences on his filmmaking, but the celebration doesn’t end there. As soon as I arrived in Bologna, I saw Pasolini’s face staring back at me from posters all around the city, and every bookshop I passed had an extensive display of Pasolini-related writing in prime position in its window. One night after my arrival, a new restoration of Pasolini’s La ricotta (1963) was presented on the huge screen in Piazza Maggiore, and this screening was preceded by a live concert dedicated to Pasolini’s longtime friend and collaborator Laura Betti. This performance was presented for free, for anyone in the city who wanted to experience it.

Aside from how incongruous it feels to a visitor from Britain for a city to widely celebrate an artist like Pasolini in this way (as a friend observed, could you imagine Liverpool doing the same for Terence Davies?), witnessing it all days before Il Cinema Ritrovato began made me instantly feel that I had arrived in a place with a deep love and respect for cinema. As you walk through the streets of Bologna, posters featuring iconic film stars are pasted up everywhere: Sophia Loren, Buster Keaton, James Dean, Anna Magnani. The implacable gaze of Peter Lorre met me every evening as I returned to my hotel, which was particularly unnerving when I had just attended a 35mm screening of Fritz Lang’s M (1931) in Piazza Maggiore.

I only dipped into the Peter Lorre strand during the festival itself. I enjoyed his increasingly unhinged turn in The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), which offers some extremely witty and inventive sequences in the second half that make up for how long it takes to get going. I also loved Lorre's delicious comic double-act with Erich von Stroheim in I Was an Adventuress (1940), although quite why the filmmakers decided the dull romantic pairing of ballet dancer Zorina and the bland Richard Greene deserved the lion’s share of screen time is beyond me. The rest of the strand contained several films I had seen before, however, and I decided instead to venture into uncharted territory, which is where I was introduced to the work of Hugo Fregonese.
 
I had seen one Fregonese-directed film before the festival – his tight, small-scale western Apache Drums (1951) – but as much as I enjoyed that film, it didn’t prepare me for how fascinating I would find his body of work over the course of the following week. Looking at his career – which took him from his native Argentina to the US, Spain, Italy, the UK and West Germany – it might be easy to peg Fregonese as a peripatetic gun for hire, but this programme revealed a thoughtful auteur who elevated films that could have easily been nondescript genre fare in lesser hands. In one of his introductions, curator Ehsan Khoshbakht said that he had considered titling this strand “Under the Hangman’s Noose,” which would have highlighted the strong streak of fatalism that pervades these films. In both Hardly a Criminal (1949) and One Way Street (1950) his protagonists proceed with a confident arrogance, certain that they have beaten the system and will ultimately get away clean and rich. James Mason, as a doctor who steals money from the mob in One Way Street, keeps telling himself and others that his “number’s not up,” but in Hugo Fregonese’s films, your number’s always up eventually.

The darkest of Fregonese’s pictures was undoubtedly the riveting Black Tuesday (1954), a low-budget independent production that boasts a monstrous performance from Edward G. Robinson as a callous mob boss who hatches a plot to escape from Death Row and won’t let anyone stand in his way. The film was striking for the offhand brutality with which it despatched its characters, and the deep shadows that Stanley Cortez coated the increasingly claustrophobic drama in. It’s a blunt, acerbic noir that takes on a on increasing moral complexity as the characters weighs up the value of human life.
 
The gravity of what it means to take a life is often at the forefront in Fregonese’s pictures – consider the impact a stray Nazi bullet has in the superb Seven Thunders (1957) – and the director’s films place their characters in a moral grey area, allowing our perception and loyalties to shift over the course of the movie. In The Raid (1954), Van Heflin leads a troupe of Confederate soldiers in an assault on a defenceless Vermont town, which they plan to loot and then burn to the ground. It's easy to view this as an outrageous war crime, but Sydney Boehm’s excellent screenplay depicts it as an act of retaliation for the destruction of Sherman’s March, and it encourages us to understand the conviction of these men, which is then shaken by the relationships that develop as they stake out their target. This is a truly extraordinary film about heroism, cowardice, redemption and the self-defeating futility of warfare, and it is filled with nuanced character details that gradually draw us into the riveting and poignant drama. The Raid appears to be mostly unknown today but I think it should be regarded as one of the great American Civil War films.

This taster of Hugo Fregonese’s films left me yearning for more, but many of his pictures are frustratingly unavailable, and I doubt I’ll ever see them looking as good as they did on these stellar 35mm prints (The Raid print was particularly ravishing). The Il Cinema Ritrovato programmers always dig up plenty of rarely screened prints from archives around the world, and in some cases they are prints that haven’t seen the light of day in decades. After premiering at Venice in 1962, Franco Rossi’s Smog (1962) completely disappeared from view thanks to the financial troubles faced by its distributor Titanus Films, which would be bankrupt within a few years. Smog is set entirely in Los Angeles, but this is an Italian movie through-and-through, with Enrico Maria Salerno playing a lawyer exploring LA during a 48-hour stopover. He doesn’t speak the language and he finds his way to a community of Italian immigrants, who offer him a different perspective on the city.

Rossi’s film was shot entirely on location and the way he uses the city’s architecture is brilliantly imaginative and evocative, with some of Ted McCord’s cinematography recalling Antonioni’s La Notte (1961), which was released the previous year. Smog is an alternately amusing and melancholy reflection on identity and assimilation, and it’s a fascinating time-capsule portrait of LA in the early ‘60s, with the protagonist traversing different social strata – from a bowling alley and housewives learning Italian to a dinner with one of the city’s richest families – with the Chet Baker score adding to its unique flavour. This screening also offered one of the most unusual projectionist screw-ups I’ve ever experienced, with one reel ending and a completely different movie beginning to play on screen. Thankfully, it didn't hurt my enjoyment of this fascinating oddity.

I saw the reel that abruptly interrupted Smog in its proper context the following day, when I caught Arby Ovanessian’s Cheshmeh (1972) on 35mm. This screening was another real rarity, in fact the print we saw is the only one that exists, having been thankfully archived by Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque Française shortly after the film first screened in France. Ovanessian mentioned this fact in his introduction, and he also talked about the importance of establishing a specifically Iranian tempo in his first feature at a time when most Iranian cinema was following the rhythm of the commercial cinema from America, France or Russia. He and his inexperienced crew followed this intention to create an enigmatic, poetic, dreamlike picture that slowly and steadily cast me under its spell. With its deliberate movement and gestures, repetitive rhythms and cryptic conversations, the film it most reminded me of was Last Year at Marienbad (1961), while the luminous cinematography by Ne’mat Haghighi put me in mind of Subrata Mitra's work. The film is full of beautiful frames and bold cuts. It's mysterious and often elusive, but I found the experience of watching it to be completely hypnotic and following the resurrection of Chess of the Wind at this festival in 2020, it's another reminder of how ripe for rediscovery this era in Iranian cinema is.

Could this era in Finnish television be similarly littered with gems? I doubt much made for the small screen in Finland in the ‘70s could match Mikko Niskanen’s Eight Deadly Shots (1972), which doesn’t really feel like television at all. Although it is presented in four episodes, the credits just feel like they’ve been inserted at arbitrary points near the 80-minute mark, and it’s easy to imagine this story unfolding seamlessly without interruption. Eights Deadly Shots was subsequently edited into a 145-minute movie by Niskanen’s contemporary Jörn Donner, but in Bologna we were treated to a single presentation of the full 316-minute version, and I think you need this time for the story’s slow accumulation of incident to have the desired impact. Although it was based on a real-life incident, Mikko Niskanen makes it clear in his opening statement that he has poured much first-hand experience into this story with the line "Booze was the root of all evil in our family," and in taking the lead role of Pasi, the alcoholic farmer Niskanen who shot four policemen in a drunken rage, Niskanen is so authentic he appears to be living the experience rather than acting it.

That sense of authenticity is integral to Eight Deadly Shots. Niskanen immerses us into the everyday reality of this family and community, allowing scenes to run for as long as they need to, which gives his narrative the messy, wayward rhythm of real life. In the early stages the film struck me as shapeless and a little confounding, but it gradually sharpens as we get a sense of the various social and psychological pressures that shaped this man’s actions, as well as the corrosive impact his drinking and moonshining had on his health, livelihood and family. As a director, Niskanen has an incredible eye for quotidian details and firm grasp of tone. As an actor, he is simply astonishing – particularly in the wrenching closing scenes – and he is matched by Tarja-Tuulikki Tarsala as Pasi's long-suffering wife, who is increasingly furious and fearful as her husband's drinking worsens. Eight Deadly Shots reminded me of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman (1975) in the way the repetition of mundane details gets more riveting with every passing second, and as we get to know these characters more intimately, the awful foregone conclusion grows even more unbearable. The late Peter von Bagh, a former artistic director of Il Cinema Ritrovato, spent many years promoting Niskanen’s work and pushing for a 35mm restoration of his magnum opus. As well as being the rep cinema event of the year, this screening was a glorious fulfilment of his legacy.

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2020

The world has changed in 2020, and Il Cinema Ritrovato – Bologna’s annual celebration of archive cinema – has changed too. Having been postponed in June, the 34th edition took place at the end of August, which at least meant we didn’t face last year’s obstacle of temperatures hitting 40°C. The festival was shorter, running for just under a week, and a couple of the planned strands have been held back until next year.

But Il Cinema Ritrovato has expanded in other ways, hosting regular screenings in the opulent Teatro Comunale and Manzoni auditoriums, adding extra outdoor presentations in BarcArena and Arena Puccini, and taking up one of the screens in the charming Odeon cinema, which usually hosts new releases. The muffled sound of Tenet (2020) booming away in the adjacent screen thankfully didn’t spoil the experience of watching John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940) or Fort Apache (1948) in this beautiful space.

Other changes were enforced by the questions that have become central to all our lives this year: social distancing and safety. The festival introduced a new ticketing system that cut down on queues and crowding; the capacity of each screen was reduced with alternate seats blocked out; access to the nightly outdoor screening in Piazza Maggiore was strictly controlled; and, of course, hand-washing and mask-wearing was mandatory across all venues. There was even an online version of the festival provided for anyone unable or unwilling to attend, streaming a selection of films and masterclasses for home viewing. Festival directors and cinema owners around the world who are struggling to figure out the best way to proceed in the age of COVID-19 could do a lot worse than look at this event for guidance.

Read the rest of my article at the BFI website now.

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2019

"I read an article the other day that claimed the world's weather is changing" Cary Grant tells Ingrid Bergman as they discuss the unseasonably muggy atmosphere in Indiscreet (1958), which screened from a vintage Technicolor print at year's Il Cinema Ritrovato. The line got a laugh from viewers frantically fanning themselves inside the Arlecchino Cinema because the encroaching heatwave had been a prime topic of conversation in Bologna all week, as it had been across much of Europe. "Hell is Coming" was a headline that confronted me as I read The Guardian over breakfast one morning. It's not really the kind of thing you want to read on your holiday.

The stuffy atmosphere inside the Arlecchino can threaten to make even a brisk trifle like Indiscreet feel like a slog, especially when the cinema is packed to capacity with viewers even sitting in the aisles, as it often the case for these Technicolor screenings; Alfred Hitchcock's Under Capricorn (1949), hardly one of his most popular films, was similarly oversubscribed. Fortunately, the star power on display in Donen's film cannot be dimmed and it was a real treat to experience it with such a huge and appreciative crowd, particularly the increasingly farcical and funny second half of the movie. David Kossoff's perfectly timed appearance at the door following his protracted rehearsal towards the end of the film brought the house down.

The heat only defeated me on one notable occasion. When I watched the German film Der Ruf (1949) on my last evening in Bologna, I just couldn't focus on the movie. My energy had been completely sapped by the oppressive weather and I couldn't connect with a film that everyone else seemed to love. Perhaps it wasn't all down to the heat, though. I wonder if the film's steady pace and muted drama made it feel a little stodgy after the imaginative and zippy German films I'd enjoyed earlier in the week. The “We Are the Natives of Trizonia” strand focused on the immediate postwar period of German cinema, when filmmakers began contemplating the country's traumatic recent past and uncertain future. The methods they used to do this were frequently surprising. Helmut Käutner's In Jenen Tagen (1947) is narrated by the wreck of an old car, recalling its seven previous owners as it is stripped down in a scrapyard. Through these vignettes, which begin in 1933 and end in 1945, In Jenen Tagen attempts to tell the story of life in Nazi Germany from the perspective of ordinary citizens. In the hands of many filmmakers it may have felt gimmicky and clunky, but Käutner is such an elegant director, and so good at developing characters in a few swift strokes.

Käutner's touch was also evident in Film Without a Title (1948), with his ingenious screenplay being directed with great verve by Rudolf Jugert. The film begins with three filmmakers (including Willy Fritsch, hilariously spoofing himself) debating whether it's possible or even right to make a lighthearted romantic comedy in these dark times, and as they continue to argue the point we see the romance between a professor (Hans Söhnker) and his maid (Hildegard Knef) rewritten several times, with elements of social realism bleeding into the comic storytelling. What's so striking about these films is how they steered clear of the neo-realism or 'rubble films' that one might expect from a nation emerging from a destructive war. Instead they are slick, stylish entertainments made with great confidence and wit.

It's easy to imagine someone like Käutner crossing over into Hollywood and becoming one of the great studio directors. Il Cinema Ritrovato tends to put one Hollywood figure under the spotlight every year. In previous editions we have celebrated Leo McCarey, Carl Laemmle, Jr. and John M. Stahl, and this year Henry King was the main man, with eleven of his films (a fraction of his long career) being presented. I'd already seen two of the films in the programme – Twelve O'Clock High (1949) and The Gunfighter (1950) – and I caught another of his collaborations with Gregory Peck in Bologna with the riveting western The Bravados (1958). This is a shockingly dark and violent western, with Peck on excellent form as a man consumed by his need for vengeance, but the King films that really captivated me blended emotional complexity with a deceptive lightness of touch. State Fair (1933) and Wait till the Sun Shines, Nellie (1952) displayed King’s gift for recreating a nostalgic, idealised vision of American life and investing it with a melancholy undertone.

Wait till the Sun Shines, Nellie in particular is an extraordinary piece of work. Shot in dazzling Technicolor by Leon Shamroy, the film follows fifty years in the life of both a town and the barber (David Wayne) who was one of its original inhabitants. His willingness to placate his frustrated wife through a series of lies and his determination to dictate his son’s ambitions drives them both away from him, and there’s a fascinating tension in this film between the colourful, high-spirited surface and the bitterness and regret that haunts its protagonist. Wait till the Sun Shines, Nellie is a very strange film that shifts direction three or four times, even incorporating a gangster subplot and a musical number into its decades-spanning narrative. That strangeness is a key part of its appeal, though, and while this programme may have presented some Henry King films that feel more cohesive and complete, none of them got under my skin and lingered in my thoughts in quite the same way.

The question of what constitutes a filmmaker’s greatest achievement is an interesting one to consider. When introducing one of the Felix Feist screenings, programmer Eddie Muller described Tomorrow is Another Day (1952) as this director’s masterpiece, and it certainly is a fine film; Steve Cochran and Ruth Roman are excellent as the ex-con and the dame he gets mixed up with, and the film moves into morally ambiguous territory in its third act. It’s unquestionably a classier piece of filmmaking than The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947), but give me the choice right now and I’d choose to re-watch the scrappy hour-long B-picture instead. This is a drum-tight noir with a hint of screwball comedy in which Laurence Tierney (on brutish, swaggering form) hitches a ride to make his getaway and causes all manner of problems for the driver and two women they pick up along the way. Within its limited boundaries the film is nimbly plotted and directed, and Feist finds room for several eccentric supporting characters who relish the hard-boiled dialogue (such levity was notably absent from The Threat (1949), the second half of this double-bill). Feist was a director capable of great elegance when required – I loved the understated, unnerving climax of The Man who Cheated Himself (1950) – but the title of this strand was ‘Brutal Nasty and Short,’ and no film lived up to that billing better than The Devil Thumbs a Ride.

Both Henry King and Felix Feist enjoyed long careers and varying degrees of success, but what happens to a director when a film just disappears? Spring Night, Summer Night (1967) has a fascinating ‘what if?’ story to tell. The film was programmed in the 1968 New York Film Festival before being dropped to make way for John Cassavetes’ Faces (1968), and that was pretty much it for Joseph L. Anderson’s film, which largely slipped out of public view for the next five decades, although it briefly emerged re-cut as an exploitation film entitled Miss Jessica Is Pregnant. Now it as been restored for Nicolas Winding Refn’s ByNWR streaming channel and it should finally earn its place as a major work of American independent cinema. It’s a tale of incest between two siblings (Ted Heimerdinger and Larue Hall) who come from a broken, bickering family in a rural Ohio town, but the film proceeds with no judgement and respects the complexity and ambiguity of each character. It’s a stunningly evocative piece of filmmaking, with crisp black-and-white photography and a haunting sense of place; it’s as vivid and moving a portrait of small-town American life as The Last Picture Show (1971). The performances are so naturalistic and affecting (particularly Larue Hall, who is jaw-droppingly great) it’s hard to believe that these actors have such few credits to their name, and I was glad to hear that a blu-ray release is currently in the works which will hopefully shed further light onto this overlooked masterwork.

Seeing forgotten directors be rediscovered is one of the great joys of this festival, particularly when those filmmakers are present to receive their long-overdue applause. I witnessed such an occasion two years ago when Med Hondo was present to give emotionally charged introductions to his films, and Hondo – who died in March – was a spiritual presence at this year’s festival with his film Les Bicots-Nègres vos voisins (1974), an imaginative and provocative examination of colonialism, capitalism, socialism, immigrant labour, exploitation and racism that unfolds in a series of arguments and sketches. This is the fourth film I’ve seen by Med Hondo and every one of them has been audacious, original and powerful. He wants to activate his audiences, to provoke questions and action, and in this is perhaps his most directly confrontational work.

One of the central questions Hondo poses in Les Bicots-Nègres vos voisins is to ask what exactly constitutes African cinema. It’s a question that the festival has attempted to answer in recent years in collaboration with the African Film Heritage Project, which aims to restore and distribute fifty African films over the coming years. The latest fruits of its labour were presented at this year’s programme, with the best of them being Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa’s Muna Moto (1975), a riveting portrait of misogyny and exploitation within an African community. The film has a raw emotional force but Dikongué-Pipa brings lyrical touches to his direction – his use of direct point-of-view shots is particularly potent – and it’s brilliantly structured, opening with a dramatic confrontation and then flashing back to show how a young couple in love reached this moment of crisis. A film made with great passion, anger and artistry, Muna Moto deserves to be rediscovered by a new audience, and it was a privilege to be present as Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa shared this moment with us. As the director told festival curator Cecilia Cenciarelli: "You didn't restore my film, you restored me."

Many of the themes touched on in Muna Moto were reflected in Baara (1978), another of the African films presented in Bologna. The film’s title translates as Work, and almost every scene focuses on labour or capital; a series of negotiations through which Souleymane Cissé details a whole social and economic fabric of this patriarchal society, and the cycles of exploitation and corruption inherent within it. Like Muna Moto, Baara feels incredibly alive and resonant, but much discussion in the post-film Q&A focused on the quality of the presentation rather than the knotty themes of the film itself. Cissé was very unhappy with the quality of the 35mm print screened (which was the best the festival could locate after a months-long search and having rejected even worse prints), and in fact he said he would rather see this print destroyed than be shown again. It felt like an overreaction to me – the print certainly was far from the worst I’d seen, and it in no way diminished the film’s power – but I can understand his frustration at seeing his rarely screened film presented in sub-optimal conditions. One hopes this exceptional piece of work is next on the World Cinema Foundation's restoration list.

Director Q&As are a rarity in Bologna. The filmmakers who do attend usually introduce their films rather than take questions after them, and sometimes that’s more than enough; Nicolas Winding Refn’s antics during his pre-festival intro to Drive (2011) caused a full-body cringe from anyone who recalled them over the following days. Sometimes an impromptu Q&A session can break out in an unexpected way, though. "I don't want to disrupt the event... well, maybe I do" Francis Ford Coppola said as he began to question why an event billed as a ‘masterclass’ was in fact a staid onstage interview and expressed the desire to speak directly to aspiring filmmakers and students in the audience instead – to talk to them "student to student" as he put it. Soon a long line of young admirers was lining up to ask their questions with Coppola eagerly answering every one of them, resisting his interlocutors’ attempts to get the event back on track and refusing to leave the stage until he had addressed each question, even as the event overran.

But it wasn’t just his rebellious, disruptive spirit and passionate engagement with his audience that made this such a special event, it was the tone of his speech. He was full of earnest advice for the next generation, encouraging them to find new ways of making films, to form collectives and write from the heart and take advantage of modern technology to bypass the traditional cinematic structures. Coppola has always been a forward-thinking artist – remember his “one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart, you know, and make a beautiful film with her little father's camera” line from Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991)? – and it was thrilling to see how insatiably curious he remained about the potential of this medium. Il Cinema Ritrovato is a festival that celebrates cinema’s past, but its most invigorating spectacle was provided by a great filmmaker looking with boundless optimism and excitement into its future.

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2018

It can get pretty hot in Bologna in June, particularly inside the cinemas. A perennial complaint in previous editions of Il Cinema Ritrovato was the sweltering and suffocating atmosphere in the Arlecchino and Jolly cinemas, where the most eagerly anticipated screenings tend to take place, and which are often oversubscribed, with every seat taken and attendees sitting in the aisles. I remember feeling rather light-headed during a packed screening of Vertigo on a rare Technicolor print, or emerging from Trouble in Paradise last year drenched in sweat and gasping for air – hardly the customary response to the Lubitsch touch. So this year's festival began on a high note, with an announcement before John Ford's The Brat that the cinemas were now equipped with air conditioning. In fact, I found myself suffering from a slight chill in some screenings this year, but it really would be churlish to complain.

The Brat was the opening film in the William Fox strand, curated by Dave Kehr at MoMA and scheduled to continue at next year's festival. The programme was a mixed bag of pre-Code pictures, some of them undeniably being minor films from major directors, but still possessing certain charms. The Brat won't trouble anyone's list of their favourite John Ford films, but it's beautifully photographed and very funny, with a couple of inspired comic sequences, and I loved Sally O'Neil's wide-eyed and squeaky-voiced performance. It's a shame her film career petered out just a few years later. Raoul Walsh's Women of All Nations similarly isn't anything like the director's finest hour, and in fact many audience members could be heard tut-tutting at its sexist and racist gags, but I have to admit that the sequence in which El Brendel tried to hide a monkey in his pants almost made me choke with laughter, and on that basis alone I am prepared to declare this film a rousing success.

More consistent laughs could be found in Bachelor's Affairs, a sprightly comedy in which Adolph Menjou marries a gold-digger half his age and finds it impossible to keep up with her. It's a lot of fun, beautifully played by every actor, and it gets the job done in 64 minutes – the joys of pre-Code cinema! Other films in this strand might have taken a look at Bachelor's Affairs and learned a few lessons about tight pacing. Now I'll Tell is built around a tremendous performance from Spencer Tracy, who plays an incorrigible gambler and liar, but it seems to run out of steam in the final twenty minutes, limping to its conclusion when the build-up had promised so much more. At least it fares better than 6 Days to Live, however. The title seems to promise knife-edge tension, but this sluggish thriller only comes to life during the surreal sci-fi section in the middle of the picture, when a recently assassinated politician is reanimated in the hopes that he can identify his murderer. There's so much potential in the wacky premise but the film squanders most of it, proving to be a slog even with a 72-minute running time.

The Jolly cinema, where the Fox films were shown, was usually my first port of call in the morning, and it was also where one of this year's major director retrospectives was held. Going into the festival I'd seen about half a dozen films by John M. Stahl and admired or loved them all. Now I’ve seen twice as many, I’m starting to wonder if the man ever put a foot wrong. The Bologna programme had a couple of his lesser-known features, like the solid WWII propaganda film Immortal Sergeant and the amusing farce Holy Matrimony, but of course Stahl is at his best working in melodrama mode. When Tomorrow Comes (one of three Stahl films later remade by Douglas Sirk) is a beautifully crafted love story, following Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer as their romance develops in bustling New York locales – a diner, a union meeting, a sidewalk – and then forcing them to spend a night together as they take shelter from a raging storm. The film won an Oscar for its atmospheric sound design, but the moment that really pierces the heart is one of the film’s quietest, as the two leads sit together and acknowledge that they must go their separate ways. The final close-up on Dunne as Boyer walks away is perfection.

When Tomorrow Comes is a near-masterpiece, but might Seed be even better? It certainly felt like the greater revelation; more measured and thoughtful in its approach to tricky material, and with an even greater emotional punch in the final moments. Made in 1931, Seed stars Stahl’s favourite cad John Boles as a man who gave up his dreams of being an author and instead dedicated himself to a humdrum life as a clerk in support of his wife (Lois Wilson) and their five children. When he meets a glamorous old flame (Genevieve Tobin) who rekindles his writing urge, Wilson begins to suspect that she is losing her husband, both to his ambitions and to the other woman in his life. In contrast to the more heightened style of Sirk, Stahl’s films are stylistically restrained, constructed through simple two-shots and close-ups that are charged with emotion. He frequently lets the camera rest on Lois Wilson’s face, which betrays all of her character’s desires and fears as she watches her family fall apart in front of her, and the climactic ten minutes had me weeping. Seed is one of the great films about maternal love and sacrifice, and it ends on a wonderful, unexpected note of female solidarity.

Of course, restraint and female solidarity aren’t things associated with Stahl’s best-known film Leave Her to Heaven. While my Bologna experience is usually built around discoveries, it’s also a great opportunity to revisit favourite films on rarely screened prints, and when I learned that Stahl’s wonderfully lurid melodrama would be playing on a vintage dye transfer Technicolor print, it instantly became a non-negotiable part of my schedule. I’d seen the film projected digitally before, but this was something else. Gene Tierney’s green eyes and red lips have never looked so vivid, and this screwy, unsettling melodrama has never felt so deliriously transporting. Is there anything to match the feeling of seeing a masterpiece projected in its original format? Re-watching films like Deliverance, Meet Me in St. Louis and The Godfather on rarely screened Technicolor prints was a thrilling, revelatory and deeply moving experience.

Rare prints are always my priority in Bologna, but digital restorations are an increasingly prominent part of the Il Cinema Ritrovato programme. This year the great René Clair had two films on show, with his madcap silent comedy Two Timid Souls and his homage to early filmmaking Silence is Golden providing two of the most delightful viewing experiences of the festival. But the major revelation was from the man who challenged Stahl’s status as Il Cinema Ritrovato’s resident master of melodrama: Emilio Fernández. The Mexican director's excellent Enamorada was one of the big event screenings in Piazza Maggiore, being introduced by Martin Scorsese (and I was thrilled to find my Sight & Sound article on the film being using for the accompanying programme notes), but I was completely blown away by his 1951 film Victims of Sin. Set in Mexico’s red light district, Victims of Sin stars Ninón Sevilla as a cabaret dancer forced to raise another woman’s child, and protecting him from gangsters with the ferocity of a lioness protecting her cub. The intensity that Sevilla brings to her performance is something to behold; in a way, it reminded me of Elizabeth Berkeley’s full-throttle turn in Showgirls. Working again with master cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, Fernández delivers one powerful, dynamic scene after another, punctuating the narrative with exhilarating dance numbers. It’s a sensational, unforgettable picture.

Aside from the pleasing amount of melodramas contained within the festival lineup, It's hard to find many consistent themes or recurring motifs across Il Cinema Ritrovato's sprawling, eclectic programme. Sometimes it throws up odd double-bills, however; films made decades and continents apart that seem to be telling the same story in very different ways. On one afternoon I caught a 35mm presentation of a Chinese film called The Winter of Three Hairs, which is the story of street urchin who is entirely bald except for the three long strands of hair in the centre of his head. Sanmao is apparently an Iconic cartoon figure in China – as distinctive as Charlie Brown – and co-directors Yan Gong and Zhao Ming give their film a comic-book sensibility, with exaggerated performances, lively visuals and frenetic, episodic action. Despite being destitute, Sanmao remains a figure of dignity and honour; when pressed into stealing by a street gang, he feels guilty and immediately returns the victim's stolen goods, and he won’t take handouts from a rich family if it means changing his identity. Fortunately for Sanmao, Communism – in the shape of an abrupt ending, hastily added after Mao’s 1949 revolution – is here to save the day.

But who would save the street kids of Brazil? A couple of hours after The Winter of Three Hairs I sat down for Pixote (roughly pronounced as Pee-shoat), Héctor Babenco’s shocking portrait of delinquent kids, which has just been restored by the World Cinema Project. Within ten minutes we’ve seen a child get brutally gang-raped, and from there it only gets worse, with Babenco sparing us nothing as he follows 11-year-old Pixote’s downward spiral into crime, drugs and depravity. The director cast real street kids in the film and drew on their experiences and ideas as he crafted his story, with the young actors bringing an unsettling authenticity to their dead-eyed performances, while Marília Pêra is outstanding as the aged prostitute with whom Pixote and his gang enter into a short-lived criminal enterprise. This is a film driven by anger and despair but made with real artistry, with Rodolfo Sánchez’s richly textured cinematography creating a series of vivid images. Pixote ends with the young protagonist, gun in hand, walking alone down the train tracks towards God only knows what fate; an ending given an extra weight by the knowledge that the actor Fernando Ramos da Silva was gunned down by police within a few years of the film’s release.

Last year in Bologna I made two major directorial discoveries. Med Hondo and Helmut Käutner were filmmakers I’d never heard of going into the festival, but having seen three extraordinary works from each of them I instantly felt the need to see more. There were no such standout individuals in this year’s festival, and in general my discoveries felt more disparate and idiosyncratic. Consider The Czar Wants to Sleep, for example, a bizarre Soviet comedy about a spelling mistake that can’t really maximise the potential of its premise, but remains utterly compelling just because it’s so damn weird; and I was stunned by Lights Out in Europe, a 1940 documentary that captures preparations for WWII in the UK and abroad, containing astonishing footage that offered a fresh perspective on this dark era. I had a blast with the cheap but colourful Republic production Laughing Anne, I loved both the inventive Technicolor climax and the daft ‘Oirish’ insults in the rambunctious Marion Davies-starring comedy Lights of Old Broadway, and I snoozed through a 3D screening of Revenge of the Creature. (Although I appreciated the cameo from young Clint.)

Of course, I still came away from Il Cinema Ritrovato with regrets. The programme is so dense and wide-ranging it’s impossible to see everything, and it can be galling to hear friends raving about a film that you skipped; a film that you might never have another opportunity to see projected. It’s a big festival, and every year it seems to get bigger, with more people squeezing into every cinema, so it makes sense for additional venues to be brought into the mix. This year I visited the glorious Teatro Comunale for the first time, to hear Martin Scorsese talk, and I attended one screening in the Cantiere Modernissimo. Still in the construction phase, with exposed concrete and makeshift seating, this underground space opened its doors for the first time this year for daily screenings of the 1918 serial Wolves of Kultur, and even in its unfinished state it provided a lovely space to watch a movie. When the work is finished, it’s going to be a wonderful addition to Il Cinema Ritrovato; and, most importantly, it’s lovely and cool down there.

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2017

No two experiences of Il Cinema Ritrovato will be the same. The festival’s vast and eclectic programme offers so many options for the curious film fan, there’s really no right way to navigate it. Some will choose to revisit old favourites screened from original prints or restored copies, while others will focus on rare titles and unknown quantities. Treats are to be found in every corner of the festival, along with a number of very difficult choices. On a single evening in Bologna, you could see one of the following: D.A. Pennebaker introducing Monterey Pop on Piazza Maggiore’s huge screen; the Austrian silent film Die kleine Veronika presented on a carbon projector; or a new restoration of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, with Dario Argento himself in attendance. It’s not always easy being a cinephile.

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Il Cinema Ritrovato 2016

What makes a classic? Why do some films establish unassailable reputations as great works of cinema, while other films with just as many virtues slip through the cracks of time and are forgotten? At this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, a number of acknowledged masterpieces from the canon were screened – films such as Singin’ in the Rain, Modern Times, The Godfather, A Streetcar Named Desire and McCabe & Mrs Miller – but the thrill of a festival like this lies in uncovering hidden gems and being surprised by a film that you had no great expectations for, or in some cases had never even heard of. There were plenty of such revelations this year, and we unearthed a few films that really do deserve to have their names listed among the greats.

For example, take the strange case of Only Yesterday. The opening credits of John M. Stahl’s 1933 film suggest that it was adapted from a book by Frederick Lewis Allen, but it quickly transpires that the source material is actually Stefan Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman, and Universal in fact quietly secured the rights to Zweig’s novella just two weeks before the film’s release. Of course, that story was filmed beautifully in 1948 by Max Ophüls, a film that is justifiably renowned as a masterpiece, but it’s hard to see why there is such a disparity between the reputations of these two pictures.

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Il Cinema Ritrovato 2015

At the height of summer, when cinemas are dominated by the noise of 3D blockbusters, Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival can feel like an escape route for filmgoers seeking something more sedate, rare and esoteric. Now in its 29th year, the festival gathers together an eclectic range of films from across the world, presented on both archive prints and new restorations, and introduces them to audiences who may never get another opportunity to see them. The large and detailed festival brochure handed out to attendees uses the term Il paradiso dei cinefili, the cinephiles’ heaven, and I found little in my time there to contradict this statement. Having said all of that, it felt a bit incongruous to don a pair of 3D glasses as I sat down for my first film after arriving in Bologna. It seems there’s no escaping stereoscopic gimmickry.

Read the rest of my article at Mostly Film