An Archival Bug: The 38th Il Cinema Ritrovato

Film history is back in vogue, or perhaps it never went away. When Il Cinema Ritrovato – likely the world’s largest and most popular event dedicated to archival, outmoded, and newly restored film – opened at the Cineteca di Bologna in December 1986, evidence suggests the affair was ambitious yet comparatively small-scale. The festival evolved out of the International Exhibition of Free Cinema (held with some regularity among the hot springs of Porretta Terme between 1960 and 1982), revivified as a five-day specialist conference on “Experiences and Perspectives in the Conservation and Promotion of Film Heritage.” Speaking were representatives from about twelve European, mostly Italian, institutions alongside a constellation of academics, cinema and television producers, distributors, exhibitors, executives, and collectors. Attendees were offered eight screenings in total, including two films by Ritrovato co-founder and longstanding director Gian Luca Farinelli, all in the iconic Cinema Europa, then known as Cinema Lumière.

Reports and coverage from the festival’s initial years are hard to come by, with Senses of Cinema first publishing a dispatch in 2005 courtesy of Jay Weissberg.¹ The International Federation of Film Archives Bulletin (today’s Journal of Film Preservation, the moving image archivist community’s paper of record) of course wrote on and from Bologna frequently, but it took until the early 2000s – perhaps not coincidentally with the explosion of Web 2.0 participatory communication, as well as of worldwide festival culture – for magazine editors and critics to detect Ritrovato. Remarkably, the Financial Times, always out for innovation and new market trends, ran a laudatory article in July 1998. The text, penned by a self-proclaimed ‘sympathetic outsider’, came from FT’s Italian correspondent William Weaver (otherwise established as the premier English-language translator of Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, and Umberto Eco, the latter a University of Bologna professor for half a century). “The audience in Bologna’s Cinema Fulgor was not large, but it was certainly select,” noted Weaver. “This is a far cry from your usual film festival, your Venice or Cannes: no starlets, no TV crews, no cigar-puffing producers and distributors working out deals in grand hotel lobbies… No champagne, no glamorous parties. This is a festival assiduously followed by connoisseurs, but its achievement affects anyone who likes cinema.”²

Twenty-six years on, nothing and everything has changed. The eclectic, haute-cinephilic happening is still frequented by a hefty demographic of historians, scholars, specialised researchers, curators/programmers, museum professionals, and abundant others engaged in the archival and/or film orbit as more or less moneyed workers. There is still no champagne (even as certain cognate grape-based drinks abound) and no ostentatious parties, although one’s specific definition may vary. That the nine-day Emilia-Romagna embarrassment of riches is zealously followed by connoisseurs still holds true as well, but here Weaver’s otherwise accurate diagnosis should be expanded and updated. The four artistic directors begin their 2024 catalogue introduction statistically: “Let’s start with the numbers. They give an idea of the extent to which Il Cinema Ritrovato constitutes an exception among the panorama of festivals and cultural events… Between features, shorts and scopitones, we will present 480 films produced in 35 countries and sourced from more than 140 archives and lenders.” Watching this goliath inventory is, as the organizers triumphantly note, a robust viewership: “Last year we welcomed more than 5,000 pass holders from 51 different countries and over 12,000 spectators enjoyed 280 individual screenings. This year, with the addition of the Modernissimo, we expect even more amazing numbers. Are we exaggerating? Not at all.”³

Indeed, they are not, for Ritrovato denotes merely a drop – albeit a hugely influential one – in what can today be described as an ocean of interest in archival, repertory, and newly unearthed film culture. “Lately it feels like everywhere I look obscure old films are being dusted off and presented to eager publics,” observed Erika Balsom in the 97th (and last) issue of Cinema Scope. “Rather than the pleasures of the classics, it’s about reaching for the deepest of deep cuts. I’m thinking of the fetish for prints with provenance, the vogue for the unfinished and the lost, and the large number (and high quality) of festivals and exhibitions presenting extensive historical materials, far beyond the usual suspects who have been doing it forever.”⁴ (Is it an innocent coincidence that the eruption of excavatory endeavours in film exhibition arrived at the same moment as the existential crisis of English-language print film criticism? Or are the economic and technopolitical forces enabling the ‘archival impulse’⁵ and those driving a slow cancellation of all but the most turbo-commercial publishing one and the same?) Surely Il Cinema Ritrovato ranks supreme among Balsom’s usual suspects, yet despite (or rather precisely because of) its status as an old dog enveloped by exciting new players – an established archive-oriented event in a world gone archival – it acquires a newfound role and importance.

“For as long as I’ve been coming to Il Cinema Ritrovato, I’ve always known the audience to be one that values authenticity,” opined Academy Film Archive executive Michael Pogorzelski in his introduction to a screening of John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) – not an esoteric (re)discovery by any metric but decidedly one of the festival’s unadorned highlights, shown at the Arlecchino mini-palace from a (notably desaturated) Technicolor reference copy in all its muffled dialogue and widescreen grandeur. But authenticity to what, or to whom? The 35mm dye transfer print was not intended or designed to ever reach paying spectators. An internal technicians’ aid above all else, it was used by Hollywood engineers in the ’70s to ensure hue and colour palette accuracy in release prints. Boorman’s eco-thriller avant la lettre as seen in Bologna came from photochemical film that, during and well after the film’s theatrical run, the public wasn’t privy to: the Academy Technicolor Reference Collection’s supremely restrictive guardianship codes (always excluding at least one reel, making all copies incomplete and thus unavailable for outside loans) ensured that. Yet the film’s summer 2024 presentation trafficked proudly in exaltations of originality, authenticity, and specialness,⁶ as if the images on screen weren’t anything but one of Deliverance’s innumerable equally authoritative versions, one of which happened to be accessible here and nowhere else. With information on print pedigree flanking the screening, one would be forgiven for thinking glorifications of film viewing as an authentic experience – of witnessing the ‘real’, unique thing – are a promotional manoeuvre.

Deliverance

Upholding film spectatorship as a singular, unrepeatable occurrence is not exclusive or new to Il Cinema Ritrovato. Authenticity, historicity, and rarity (of forgotten masterworks or of aged prints) have long been in circulation as certificates and tokens of value in cine-loving cultures high and low; what is more, every moving image screening is of course, in a material way, a once-in-a-lifetime collective performance, never to be enacted in this exact way, shape, and form again. The buffet of one-of-a-kind offerings in Bologna is surely overwhelming: alongside Technicolor reference copies, visitors saw the usual assortment of various gauges (from 8mm upwards), live musical (at times orchestral) accompaniment, and the always spellbinding carbon-arc lamp projections. Yet it is worth emphasizing that the festival’s strongest works often mesmerise and exact attention differently, altogether removed from discourses of technological marvel or the spectacle of obsolescence. A 4K restoration of Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow’s Camp de Thiaroye (1988) looked and sounded immaculate, but it is the film’s scalpellic indictment of French ruling-class hypocrisy that grips the viewer every second of its 153-minute runtime. Every bit as anti-colonial and fierce, three short documentary exposés by the Pan-Africanist artist-agitator Sarah Maldoror – shown, like Camp de Thiaroye, in the routinely indelible Cinemalibero line-up assembled by Cecilia Cenciarelli – illuminate the May Day carnival in Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde just months before a 1980 military coup in the former signalled an end to the two newly-independent countries’ union. Exhilarated, festive, and restrained in equal measure, the films honour the legacy of revolutionary leader and Maldoror’s friend Amílcar Cabral (assassinated in 1973) by incarnating his statement that the “liberation movement must embody the mass character, the popular character of culture – which is not and never could be the privilege of one or of some sectors of the society.”⁷ Making deft use of wide crowd shots to depict the holiday festivities (in which a wide spectrum of West African society is an active participant), the cineaste enacts Cabral’s idea in practice.

Fogo, l’île de feu (Fogo, Fire Island)

Ritrovato ordinarily isn’t distinguished for robust thematic coherence across its 17 sections and their accompanying extra- or para-filmic workshops, roundtables, and book talks. Eclecticism and autonomy, rather than narrow top-down imposition of a ‘correct’ way of approaching the program, is (and has for years been) the festival’s paradigm. Yet this is far from asserting that the event lacks in thoughtful curatorship. Next to impressive single-author retrospectives of Delphine Seyrig, Yoshimura Kōzaburō, Gustaf Molander, Sergei Parajanov, Marlene Dietrich, Pietro Germi, and Anatole Litvak (whose 1937 class-consciousness caper Tovarich was an instant Bologna favourite), ‘Dark Heimat’ stood out in terms of scope, vision, and research. Both wildly esoteric and audaciously panoptic, the seven-film series programmed by Olaf Möller expanded – indeed thoroughly exploded – some persistent (mis)conceptions of the German and Austrian Heimatfilm. The curiosities on display, as Möller outlines, were “made slightly before and parallel to the Heimatfilm wave’s beginnings, which are mostly set in the same Alpine surroundings but are completely different in tone and attitude.”⁸ Gone are the exuberance and carefree optimism most typically affiliated with the genre; anxiety, existential dread, and deep-rooted national phobias replace them in films as seductively morose as they are unapologetically bizarre. The infidelity melodrama Die Sonnhofbäuerin (Wilfried Fraß and Károly Kurzmayer, 1948) functioned well as the series opener, efficiently setting the terrain for all that was to follow: expressionist touches mingled with clunky yet honest social realism, just as Christian morality took turns with fantasy and ungovernable (female) desire. Screened from a heavily scratched-up 16mm print, the film was optimal fare for an obscurity-hungry Bologna audience.

Die Sonnhofbäuerin

Connections between Dark Heimat and today’s ethnonationalist European – or indeed world – politics are not difficult to make. The brief but significant consideration of WWII collective guilt in Die Frau am Weg (Eduard von Borsody, 1948), for instance, resonates with the post-Shoah reckoning that continues to inflect life and discourse in the region. Yet some archival revelations speak to urgent crises and concerns more explicitly than others. In al-Leil (The Night, 1992), the Syrian auteur Mohammad Malas chronicles Quneitra, a town in the country’s southwest (in the Golan Heights) and the filmmaker’s ancestral home; destroyed by Israel in 1974 after the Yom Kippur War, the city today remains largely abandoned. Malas, who travelled from Damascus to Italy and introduced the film in Arabic, activates lush colour cinematography to narrate a story as hopeful as it is devastating. “Evocations of the tragedy of Palestine permeate the basic storylines to build dramatic resonance, but also to defy and subvert its appropriation in the discourse of the regime,” observed curator and writer Rasha Salti in her appraisal of al-Leil.⁹ Shown from an impeccable (French-German subtitled) 35mm copy, Malas’s sepia images were nothing short of breathtaking, and they illustrated in no uncertain terms what power astute curating can have when allowed to thrive. If the recently spreading archival bug means filmographies such as Malas’s interest a growing intergenerational audience that may or may not identify as cinephilic, then the affliction is nothing to be afraid of.

al-Leil (The Night)

Il Cinema Ritrovato
22 – 30 June 2024
https://festival.ilcinemaritrovato.it/

Endnotes