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Movies Forum Index » Silent Movies Forum » The Guardian: Il Cinema Ritrovato, a film festival in...
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| Bruce Calvert... |
 Posted: Fri Jul 11, 2008 3:46 am |
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http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,2290174,00.html
Il Cinema Ritrovato, a film festival in flashback
Bologna's 22nd festival of rediscovery is a chance to experience great
movies of the past, some once thought lost forever, writes Nick
Bradshaw
Thursday July 10, 2008
guardian.co.uk
Film flows forward, but it loves to look back. And what greater form
of flashback could there be than an entire festival devoted to
reviving old movies - the restored, the rediscovered, or simply the
seen anew? Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato (Cinema Rediscovered), which
just wrapped its 22nd edition, offers a window on the past, turning
the most fantastic fiction films into documents of their time; but it
also reflects back on us now, holding a yardstick to our presumptions
of progress.
Like any good (and well-funded) festival, Il Cinema Ritrovato offers
an impossible choice of cinematic pathways. This year's festival
squeezed into eight days retrospectives of the great Hollywood
expressionist Josef von Sternberg, including but extending beyond his
Marlene Dietrich iconographies (Morocco, Dishonoured, Shanghai
Express, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress and The Devil is a Woman);
Lev Kuleshov, the Soviet theoretician and pioneer; the Italian silent
serials star Emilio Ghione; sundry Chaplin-related programmes, part of
the festival's ongoing Chaplin project; the Depression-era talkies of
the Warner Bros studio; and an international selection of movies about
the atomic bomb.
But the greatest discoveries were the compilations of short films from
the cinema's early years. Each edition of the festival exhumes films
that have reached their centenary - this year celebrated the class of
1908, the year DW Griffith joined the Biograph company, and American
cinema began to vie with the recession-hit French and Italians - in
what programmer Mariann Lewinsky calls "a long-term research project
in real time", or cinema chronicled as an annual serial.
1908 was also the year the vehemently anti-feminist Lord Asquith
became British prime minister, and helped radicalise the Suffragette
movement. Dovetailing with the 1908 anthology was an excellent survey,
Irresistible Forces: Comic Actresses and Suffragettes, which showed
the struggle for women's emancipation playing out in street protests
and screen farces. Here were suffragettes on the streets of Newcastle,
and the charred husk of Yarmouth Pavillion; here the spectre of
uppity, mannish maidservants on the rampage, and a henpecked husband's
fantasy of laying down the law to modern-day witches such as his
wife.
Most shocking was the footage of Emily Davison's death underfoot at
the 1913 Derby - or perhaps the newsreel's briefest pause for
acknowledgement before moving on to report the end of the race. Most
delightful, not least to those of us reared on a British cinema of
restraint (not to mention the passivity of modern female film roles),
were such anarchic comedies as Did'ums Diddles the P'liceman - clearly
an incitement to all hyperactive moppets to batter their local bobby -
or the series of Tilly the Tomboy shorts, in which the fair-faced
teenager and her sister Sally upend their parents' party, joyride a
stolen truck, and trampoline on their bedridden elders with gleeful
impunity.
Such movies need the conditions for which they were intended -
celluloid projection, the big screen, darkness, the company of other
movies - if they are truly to talk to us across time. The festival
helps us regain that context: where else would you find crowds
squatting in the aisles for a screening of the rickety 1927 idle-rich
melodrama Children of Divorce, starring Clara Bow and a young Gary
Cooper? (A Paramount rarity partly re-shot by Von Sternberg, the film
impressed me as a powerful argument for redistributive taxation.)
The festival's widescreen presentations stretch out down the road at
the city's half-century-old Cinema Arlecchino, with its original
curved screen and hopefully less original aroma of stale popcorn. I
caught Metin Erksan's Dry Season (Susuz Yaz), a prescient parable
about water privatisation which played something like a James M Cain
retelling of the Cain and Abel story. It was the first Turkish winner
of Berlin's Golden Bear in 1964, to the embarrassment of the Turkish
authorities; decades of studious neglect ensued, until a recent
restoration under the auspices of Martin Scorsese's new World Cinema
Foundation.
Movies need viewers, and Bologna's biggest events were saved for the
open air of the Piazza Maggiore, where at 10pm every festival night
5,000 seats beckoned delegates and Bolognese alike. Tuesday night was
a particular thrill: the silent version of Hitchcock's Blackmail,
accompanied by the premiere of Neil Brand's especially commissioned
new score, arranged for full orchestra by Timothy Brock. As night set
in, and the piazza gazed up at Anny Ondra's unravelling date in 1929
London, Brand's echt-Hitchcockian motifs and harmonies folded us right
back into the drama, with all those commingling Bernard Hermannn and
Miklós Rósza references in tow.
The festival ends, the archivists retreat to their darkroom forensics,
and we return to our DVDs. Il Cinema Ritrovato also hands out awards
for the best of the year's global DVD crop, though it's not very good
at publicising them. The BFI's Land of Promise: The British
Documentary Project 1930-1950 was one of the releases given a special
mention, though the French publisher Carlotta Films came out best with
three awards - best bonus materials for their Douglas Sirk box set,
best box set for sound movies for their collection of Brazil's Cinema
Novo director Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, and Best Silent DVD with
Marcel L'Herbier's L'Argent.
Best rediscovery of a forgotten film (silent) was Germany's Edition
Filmmuseum's release of Frank Borzage's The River, its sound-film
equivalent was Raro Video's edition of Antonioni's The Vanquished; the
best silent box set went to the American publisher Flicker Alley's
exhaustive Georges Méličs collection Georges Méličs: The First Wizard
of Cinema, and the best sound DVD to Criterion's double-disc package
of Pabst's The Threepenny Opera.
Bruce Calvert
--
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