Last month, the ICO’s Duncan Carson and Sami Abdul-Razzak headed to Bologna for this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato – the Cineteca di Bologna’s annual festival showcasing the latest restorations and rediscoveries from archives and film laboratories around the world. In this blog, they share a few of their highlights.
Duncan Carson, Projects and Business Manager
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (dir. Sergei Parajanov, 1965)
Watching Kleber Mendonça Filho’s cinephilic paean Pictures of Ghosts (2023) last year, the director, reflecting on a lifetime of self-documentation and cinema-going, notes that photographs only unburden themselves as time passes, that the latent parts of an image only emerge with the passing of time. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors [Tini zabutykh predkiv, 1965] is the film that Sergei Parajanov viewed as his breakthrough into the lyrical, lively, queer space he mapped out in his later work. Like many films at Il Cinema Ritrovato, their meanings are only now on view: not ahead of their time, but ahead of our understanding.
Listening to Daniel Bird and Olena Honcharuk speak about the process of restoring the film with the Oleksander Dovzhenko National Centre (Ukraine’s home for its cinematic heritage), it was hard to ignore the reason for making work like this and perpetuating its access. Parajanov was imprisoned and fettered in his time by the USSR, and it’s both hard and easy to see why: his work sings loudly about the power of the hyper-regional and untamed spirit, using every cinematic trick to build a language that is adequate to the true wildness of life off the bureaucrat’s map. Yet a line-by-line censors dissection would struggle to locate this in dialogue.
Watching the film in the newly refurbished, undiluted elegance of Cinema Modernissimo – a space I have visited during previous editions in states of decay and renovation – held a glimmer of hope that what seems ghostly or in retreat can be revived and rebuilt. Parajanov, with his joyful, resistant, inventive spirit, opens up these possibilities, for Ukraine and for the world.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is available in a new restoration from The Film Foundation and tickets are available for the UK premiere of the restoration at Cinema Rediscovered in Bristol next week.
The Annihilation of Fish (dir. Charles Burnett, 1999)
Director Charles Burnett, a venerable figure among the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers, has never made films with a continuity of genre or tone. Besides focusing with deep humanity on predominately African American lives, his films glide from the social realism of Killer of Sheep to the folkloric To Sleep with Anger to the gritty The Glass Shield. The Annihilation of Fish (1999) is a lightly madcap, near screwball comedy. James Earl Jones is Fish, a Jamaican gent who in the film’s opening scenes is booted from long-term residential psychiatric care to fend for himself. Despite consummate manners, he is beset by regular wrestling matches with an unseen demon called Hank. Poinsettia (Lynn Redgrave) is similarly moonstruck: she is in a tryst with Giacomo Puccini, a relationship undimmed by his death some eighty years previous. Both kooks find themselves renting adjacent rooms in an L.A. boarding house. After some understandable resistance, they soon find a route to co-dependence and then love.
Few films fit the rubric of why film restoration matters as closely as The Annihilation of Fish. Rubbished by Variety on release (‘A drear moment in the careers of all concerned… theatrical release other than via self-distribution is out of the question.’), it sputtered out as a theatrical prospect and never became available on home video. It’s as hard to see what film the contemporary reviewer in question was speaking of as it is easy to see what drove Milestone Films to seek a restoration of the film for nineteen years. Tender, and surprisingly honest about the complexities of later love, it’s a depiction of the grand polycule we engage in as we age and connect with others; we love each other, but we also have to tolerate – and better yet, embrace – a ménage with each others’ delusions.
The Annihilation of Fish is available through Cinema Rediscovered on Tour and tickets are still available in the festival.
Stars in Broad Daylight (dir. Ossama Mohammed, 1988) and The Night (dir. Mohammad Malas, 1992)
Two Syrian films wowed me in this year’s selection. The Night [Al-Leil, 1992] directed by Mohammad Malas, and Stars in Broad Daylight [Nujum An-Nahar, 1988] both told stories that refused to focus on individuals. In The Night, history is bent away from the iron path it seems to run in when viewed from the present. Instead, we see it as it is: swirling uncertainty and personal caprice. Centred on the 1936 Grand Revolt in Palestine, we follow successive calls to action by the men of the village as they are enlisted or volunteer, their choices rendered in the truly individual terms that make up grand moments of history. Told with intricate compositions and the long sweeping takes of Theo Angelopoulos, this feels ripe for restoration at a time when simpler answers to the roots of the Middle East conflict will not serve.
On the other side of the restoration divide lies Stars in Broad Daylight, brought back to screens in 4K by the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project. Set around a double wedding, the roving camera passes from hand to hand, resting momentarily on a truly stunning composition before stirring the water again and moving elsewhere. Full of moments of pathos and humour, the warmth of families and the knife edge of bitter memories, as they gather to celebrate, it’s a true arthouse delight.
Stars in Broad Daylight is available in a new restoration from The Film Foundation.
Sami Abdul-Razzak, Marketing Officer
My Grandmother (dir. Kote Mikaberidze, 1929)
Both Soviet Georgian director Kote Mikaberizde and his 1929 silent work My Grandmother [Chemi Bebia] were unfamiliar names to me before the festival. But while browsing the programme my eyes fell on the opening line of the film’s notes by Finnish critic Antti Alanen: ‘I have seen my share of weird and incredible films, but Chemi Bebia ranks among the craziest that I have ever seen.’ Very well – challenge accepted, I thought.
Despite what the title might suggest, there aren’t any grandmothers in Chemi Bebia, not the kind we’re used to at least. In this context a grandmother seems to be an influential businessman who is able to provide you with a letter of recommendation for a potential employer. And the second half of the film follows a worker’s quest to acquire such a letter, and employing rather desperate techniques to do so.
Before it gets there though, we are treated to a dizzying array of cinematic techniques (stop-motion, imaginative set design, freeze frame – to name a few), all employed with the intention of satirising the highly-bureaucratic world of the film. I found this the stronger of the two parts, much of which involves a room with a large circular table seated by the directors and managers of the company. Antti is right though, it is quite weird. Much weirder than I’ve managed to make it sound so far. Imagine that big table from Dr Strangelove – but on acid.
A favourite sequence: a child stands silhouetted upon a boulder in the wilderness, a spear-sized pen in one hand. He throws it out of frame and we cut to a businessman lounging in his office, who is duly impaled by the (now even more so) enormous spear-pen.
I later learned that like his compatriot Sergei Parajanov, Mikaberidze was imprisoned for his anti-Soviet statements, and this film was banned for nearly fifty years. Sadly, his list of works is quite small because of this. But the uniqueness and creativity on display in Chemi Bebia’s slim runtime has left me keen to seek them all out. I watched it with a live score from avant-garde Finnish band Cleaning Women, whose frenetic score brought the film’s already very-hectic energy to feverish new heights. Before the screening, festival co-director Gian Luca Farinelli stated that he ‘…can no longer imagine the film without this music’, and I hope that it will be available for use in future screenings.
Devil’s Doorway (dir. Anthony Mann, 1950)
Until recently, Anthony Mann was another name unfamiliar to me. It wasn’t until the Criterion Channel programmed a series on the director’s collaborations with James Stewart (of which there were eight – and if you’re inclined towards some further reading on the topic, K. Austin Collins wrote a good article on the westerns they made together), that I first came across his name, though this is the first of his films that I’ve seen.
Devil’s Doorway is one of three westerns that Mann made in 1950 (along with the better known Winchester ’73, starring Stewart, and The Furies, starring Barbara Stanwyck). It was the first time he’d worked in this genre, and it wouldn’t be the last, though it would be his final collaboration with cinematographer John Alton (co-winner of the 1951 Academy Award for Cinematography for An American in Paris). It stars Robert Taylor (sadly, a white American playing a Native American character) as Lance Poole/Broken Lance, a Shoshone man who returns from the Civil War having distinguished himself with a Medal of Honor. But, not only does he not receive a hero’s welcome, it turns out that legislation in the newly-formed Territory of Wyoming states that he is not even an American citizen. Lance and his family own a large portion of desirable land, but the new laws declare that it is now open to anyone who wants to homestead there. When a racist lawyer tries to take advantage of this, tensions ensue – leading to a tragic and bloody finale.
I was a somewhat late convert to westerns. When I was first exploring the canon, I would tick them off with a sense of duty more than excitement. These days however I approach the genre with a sense of comfort and familiarity, and after a long week with my nose to the grindstone there’s little I find more appealing than settling down with a tale of wagons and cattle herders. I suspect this isn’t such a unique experience however, and rather than walking down a narrow path I’m following in the footsteps of many men who have entered their 30s before me. Devil’s Doorway is a particularly dark entry in the genre, one which shows how racism was built into the constitution of the United States from the beginning. ‘Civilisation is a great thing’ says a character at one point, words which echo through our minds at the film’s destructive conclusion.
Undercurrent (dir. Kōzaburō Yoshimura, 1956)
The final film I’d like to highlight is Undercurrent [Yoru no kawa] (it seems to also be known in English as Night River). Less well-known than his more-lauded contemporaries Yasujirō Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Kenji Mizoguchi, director Kozaburo Yoshimura was the subject of a retrospective at this year’s festival.
While he often worked with screenwriter Kaneto Shindo (director of one of my personal favourites, The Naked Island), Undercurrent saw him collaborate with Japan’s leading female screenwriter of the time, Sumie Tanaka, whose influence is keenly felt. The story follows Kiwa (Fujiko Yamamoto), a young kimono designer who begins an affair with a married scientist. I think fans of Ozu and Naruse’s melodramas in particular will feel at home, with several recurring themes in their work being explored here too – tradition vs modernity (kimono design vs science), the relationships between fathers and daughters, societal expectations of women, impossible romances and the transience of things (‘mono no aware’).
Yoru no kawa was Yoshimura’s first film in colour, and it serves the story well – Kiwa’s kimono designs would look good in black and white too, but the vivid colours (seen here in a new 4K restoration) really elevate them and Yoshimura’s use of red is a recurring visual theme throughout the film. And while Undercurrent has easy comparisons with the melodramas of the time, a key scene at the centre of the story uses colour in a way that I would (perhaps wrongly) more readily associate with a more modern director: as the couple sit together in a bedroom at night, their first spent together after a long, cautious courtship, the lights are turned off to keep the moths away – leaving the two bathed in a deep red light that shines in from the Kyoto night.