Reflecting on his experience at this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato film festival in Bologna, ICO’s Projects and Business Manager Duncan Carson shares three films from the festival which made a mark and explores how this annual celebration of cinema history impacts film culture at large.
This year marked my third visit to Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato film festival, organised by Cineteca Bologna. If you’ve never been, or never heard of it, it’s the world’s largest festival celebrating cinema history; a place where new restorations are shown, archivists share their achievements, rightsholders offer their wares and audiences can see older films from around the world, whether as part of comprehensive retrospectives or thoughtfully-curated strands. Cineteca Bologna is itself the home of one of the world’s foremost restoration houses. For those in the know and given the privilege to attend, Bologna is the place to wash off the cynicism and sweat of the (sometimes) grind of supporting independent film, and have your passion for film – of all kinds – renewed. It was a delight to be back there.
While many of the restorations are ultimately headed for streaming services (and what a benefit it is to film culture to have these films readily available), it makes sense that Il Cinema Ritrovato has reverted back solely to in-person screenings for its 2022 event, after the 2020 and 2021 editions included small online programmes as a response to the pandemic. While it’s a delight to be able to watch classic cinema at home, nothing beats the time travel feeling of being able to watch these films as though they’re packed opening weekend screenings, even better when under the stars in Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore with 5,000 other cinephiles (and a stomach full of some of Italy’s best food).
It’s not solely nostalgia that fuels the festival’s preference for the cinema screen over the laptop. Il Cinema Ritrovato is a reminder not just of how much film history is waiting to be regained, but also of how much of film history is lost. It’s also a reminder of how much more of it we lose if we limit ourselves to digital projection. The question of DCP or 35mm is not some fetishistic canard here: there are many films that you cannot see any other way than on a print.
I sat down to watch Black Tuesday (1954) on my final morning at the festival. It’s a pitch-black film noir starring Edward G. Robinson as a convict who makes a daring escape from the electric chair, only to end up in a Reservoir Dogs-esque stand-off in a warehouse. By anyone’s standards it’s a very entertaining film, full of great one-liners, double crosses and bitter cynicism. There are canonical film noirs that I would pass over in its favour. The reasons why this film and others like it are little-known come down to poor circulation, the causes of which are often extremely arbitrary; a stray piece of music that makes renewing licences astronomical, an arcane string of producers who cannot be traced (or refuse to play ball), inaccurate cataloguing at an archive that means no print can be found… Listening to the programmers at the festival talk about their struggles to present these titles gives you a palpable sense of the detective work, horse-trading, archaeology, deal-making and personal finesse needed to show some of these films.
Most of the time, people don’t have the resources or expertise to do this work. As programmers and curators, our curiosity and passion are often frustrated by time, expense and uncertainty. There are films that we want — that audiences want — but aren’t available in distribution. Sometimes these films are available but either cost an absurd amount to play or there isn’t any viable screening material to show from. Il Cinema Ritrovato serves as bellows to the fire of cinematic enthusiasm where otherwise the spark is likely to die out. And doors they have kicked in can be swung open more easily by others. Take a look at festival programmer Ehsan Khoshbakht’s blog to see a round up of the number of festival programmers and cinema curators who attend. There’s a strong feeling that Il Cinema Ritrovato is the mouth of the river where many tributaries flow. What is put on ‘the map’ here reshapes which national cinemas are on the beaten track, which directors and stars are canonised and which films are regularly enjoyed by audiences.
So it’s good they take such a broad-minded approach to curation. In Bologna, there’s a promise of a culture that is not dominant or competitive, but comparative and expansive. One of the questions that surfaced again and again for me at the festival this year was, ‘Why are some films remembered and some films “forgotten”?’ Why are some films and filmmakers given lavish treatment – directors’ cuts, feted retrospectives, monographs written, slotted into endless lists – and why are others left out in the cold? The answers seem to me to sit equally between practical considerations and cultural ones, and they are inextricably linked.
The films that have traditionally been restored are those considered to have commercial prospects (my heart sinks seeing certain Hollywood films getting re-re-re-restored for another bite of the cherry). Yet what has been popular and central is no predictor of what will be popular (William Goldman’s dictum about nobody knowing anything in Hollywood applies just as much to the restoration market). I disagree with the notion that art can be ‘ahead of its time’ that is so often pinned on historical work. More accurately, ideas and work that were once marginal can move into the spotlight with the passing of years. When they can be shown, they can rewrite our sense of history, at small trickles of thought that have become rivers. It expands our sense of the possible, offering artists and curators new senses of lineage and inspiration, or routes not taken, possibilities not taken up. A film like Buck and the Preacher (1972) might have played as fairly standard in the period, but having the panorama of Sidney Poitier’s career, the way that Westerns have and haven’t included black people and how singularly the film deals with Native Americans’ place in colonisation, it takes on new, grander meaning (and pleasure!).
As we prep for another round of the Sight & Sound greatest films of all time list, it’s a stark reminder that people can only valorise films they are able to see. With major projects like the Film Foundation’s African Film Heritage Project (which yielded two incredible medium-length works by Djibril Diop Mambéty at this year’s fest: Contras City and Badou Boy), there is a place for people’s curiosity to be fostered. The dismay I feel when reading about some interesting-sounding title, only to find it’s not available anywhere (legally) is one of the great heartbreaks as a film lover. There is nowhere for that curiosity to go. With (by my count) only one African title in the 2012 list, people need more than relying on very rare screenings of fragmenting prints. When a title like Sambizanga (1972) can be shown on DCP regularly, it reshapes not just a canonical list of films, but also our sense of national cinemas, and ultimately our sense of the history of the world. We should be pushing for more chances to engage with the full history of film not just digitally, but in whatever format shows it off as it was intended and originally enjoyed.
Three Recommendations From This Year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato
NB: All are available on DCP for international bookings
Badou Boy (1970) + Contras City (1968)
Both bookable from Cineteca (Carmen Accaputo): carmen.accaputo@cineteca.bologna.it
The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project offered these two early works from Senegalese auteur Djibril Diop Mambéty, both absolutely dripping with the vitality of the streets of Dakar. Like his countryman Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi, these two films use emblematic characters who have a reason to travel through society – a wagon driver, a man in pursuit of a money order, a street urchin – as a way to take the national temperature. Neither sentimental about the life of Senegal post-independence, nor jaded, it’s instead the same mix of roses and thorns, tears and laughter that’s the stuff of life itself.
Ken (The Sword) (1964)
Bookable from Kadokawa (Mrs Miki Zeze) : zeze-m@kadokawa.jp
As part of Alexander Jacoby and Johan Nordström’s strand ‘Kenji Misumi: An Instinctive Auteur’, this was something of a revelation. While Misumi is more widely known as the director of many of the Lone Wolf & Cub series, this is a more elemental take on the life of the blade. Following the adherents of a university kendo society with cult-like dedication, this is an intense chamber piece that brings decidedly unswinging 1960s Japan to life with crisp cinematography. The ultimate message of this parable might be a surprise to twentieth century Western audiences, but it’s no less powerful for it.
Buck and the Preacher (1972)
Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier star in a film that plays unexpectedly with both of their star images. Poitier – who also directs – is the ‘wagon master’ who ferries freed slaves to unsettled territory in the West. Belafonte is the vagabond sham-preacher – complete with stomach-churning blackened teeth – who looks to play the angles with white colonists keen to brutally put down Poitier. Poitier and Belafonte both turn the wheel on their moral compass over the runtime, while the film adds further depth by reminding both black and white settlers that the terra nullius they are helping themselves to had pre-existing indigenous stewardship. It’s all offered with deft humour that makes the meaty issues all the more compelling. I went full ‘Rick Dalton pointing’ spotting the poster on the wall in Jordan Peele’s Nope (and I can see why it sits in the sweet spot for a director on the line between entertainment and radicalism).
To browse previous editions of Il Cinema Ritrovato consult their online database
Masthead image: Buck and the Preacher (Sidney Poitier, 1972)