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Il Cinema Ritrovato 2014

A specter is haunting Bologna.

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2014

A specter is haunting Bologna. The 28th annual Bologna Ritrovato kicked off on June 28, the 100-year anniversary of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, by a Serbian nationalist. The legacies of the Great War of the 20th century marked the curating for a retrospective film festival opening onto the 21st. The “Cento Anni Fa” program—an entire retrospective dedicated to showing films made one century ago—has always been a special attraction at the Ritrovato. One hundred years ago, film production trends were shifting from the single-reel short films of early cinema to multi-reel serials and narrative features. This year, given the pointed historical significance of 1914, “100 years ago” became a broader thematic focus of the 2014 festival, in addition to an archival treasure trove for the “Cento Anni Fa” program.

Indeed, the curating options both of and about 1914—a cinematic world on the precipice of industrial self-destruction—inflected a century’s worth of programming, from Turkish travelogues from the 1910s, and pacifist melodramas like Lay Down Your Arms! (Holger-Madsen, 1914), to an entire program of WWII films thematizing Hitler impersonators. Forget The Great Dictator or To Be or Not to Be, and open your eyes to The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler (James P. Hogan, 1943), My Crimes After Mein Kampf (Alexandre Ryder, 1940), and The New Adventures of Schweik (Sergei Yutkevich, 1943). Of course, retrospective film curating wasn’t the only site of a fraught internationalism on display at the festival. Is irony an appropriate descriptor for the scene of festival masses shirking a tearjerker about the universal evils of war in order to rally around a television screen at a local Irish pub and scream their hearts out for France and Germany to humiliate their national enemies at football?

Not including the supplemental pub TV screens during World Cup matches, the Ritrovato played over 600 films on up to five or six parallel screens over the course of eight days. During the daytime, there were four primary venues: the Arlecchino, erected in the 1960s with a widescreen ideal for Cinemascope projection (this year, the 1960s Polish New Wave and 1950s Indian Golden Age programs); the Cinema Jolly, where many of the director retrospectives (William Wellman, Riccardo Freda) took place; and two smaller screens at the Cinema Lumière. In the sala Mastroianni, silent films from 100 years ago flickered with live piano accompaniment by virtuosos like Donald Sosin, Stephen Horne, Maud Nelissen, John Sweeney, and Gabriel Thibaudeau. Across the hallway, in the Sala Scorcese, feature-length silent films and early talkies (the Werner Hoechbaum and “Cinema Against Hitler” programs) ran parallel to the piano-hopping, 1914 cinema playing in the Sala Mastroianni. Screenings inside the Mastrioanni and Scorcese theaters rarely had subtitles; instead, foreign-language viewers channel live translations through an audio headset—which works well for silent films with intertitles, such as Germaine Dulac’s visually poetic Death of the Sun (1922), and less well for fast-paced, Austrian-dialect, German talkies such as Werner Hochbaum’s Suburban Cabaret (1933).

Il Cinema Ritrovato

In addition to these four main screening venues, other venues featured talks and workshops about everything from the ethics of digital film restoration, to the logistics of 21st-century silent-film production (The Artist’s director and lead actress were in attendance for part of the week), to archiving the very idea of cinema. The pièce de resistance of the curating happened every night at 21:45, just after the sun set, when a crowd-pleaser attraction (such as Rebel Without a Cause, The Merry Widow, or Hard Day’s Night) would play on a giant, outdoor screen in the Piazza Maggiore. To help offset the mobs at Bologna’s center, festival organizers Peter von Bagh, Guy Borlée, and Gian Luca Farinelli have curated rival night-time screenings. This year, these included a spectacular playing of the three-hour silent epic Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914) at the Teatro Comunale, as well as outdoor, carbon-arc projections of Princesse Mandane (Dulac, 1928) and Blue Blood (Nino Oxilia, 1914) on the Piazzetta Pasolini, the scenic courtyard in front of the Cinema Lumière.

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The festival did feel a bit overrun this year, with upward of 2,000 film enthusiasts in attendance. In previous years, maybe a few of the glitzy, star-studded events—such as Agnès Varda last summer introducing a new restoration of her 1955 directorial debut, La Pointe Courte—would be standing room only. This year, I found it harder to anticipate which screenings would fill the house. I was very surprised when I was shut out of a Tuesday morning screening of Louis Feuillade’s 1913 silent-film crime caper Fantômas, which is already available on DVD. In fact, my tendency to favor early silent films and rediscovered or restored historical oddities over canonical post-war classics only added to my plight: I viewed many a film from a side-aisle floor or the standing room in the back of the theater. While the festival’s poster film, Vittorio De Sica’s classic Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow from 1963, yielded dozens of empty seats, a recent rediscovery and restoration of an otherwise unknown work would pack the theater to capacity. A case in point was 1934’s Hitler’s Reign of Terror, a Vanderbilt heir’s compilation of 1930s documentary footage from his personal trip to Germany—laced with hokey reenactments of his political interviews featuring amateur impersonations of Hitler and the Crown Prince of Hohenzollern. This film clearly didn’t draw mass crowds for its production values or A-list celebrity, but for its archival meta-history. (See the New Yorker’s write-up about this film.) In other words, not only is the cat out of the bag (old movies are fun, and Bologna is pleasant), but mushrooming attendance has only augmented a general appreciation for the tremendous archival and curatorial labors sustaining the festival.

Identity, Variety, and Internationalism

Il Cinema Ritrovato

In a festival dedicated to unearthing forgotten fragments of film history, the identity politics of whose work gets preserved, restored, and re-circulated is always a major point of consideration. Specific threads on early Japanese talkies, post-1948 Indian social-protest films, and the geopolitical diversity of the fallen Ottoman Empire tempered the Ritrovato’s otherwise Western-centric tendencies. One program title, “India’s Endangered Classics,” made explicit the links between South Asian histories of political instability and the contingency of which film histories get made visible in the archival festival circuit.

Nations gained sovereignty as empires disbanded. Social-realist works like Bimal Roy’s Bengali Do Bigha Zamin (1953) and Mehboob Khan’s Hindi Mother India (1957) reflect on the aftermath of India’s independence from the British and the partition of the subcontinent: the economic and social challenges of national self-definition in a linguistically and geographically diverse terrain. Meanwhile, “Views of the Ottoman Empire, 1896-1914” provoked controversy for precisely the reasons that the Indian program circumvented further criticism and scrutiny. The Ottoman Empire, which once encompassed the Balkans, the Middle East, North Africa, and much of Central Asia, incited meta-archival concerns due to its linguistic heterogeneity (problems involving intertitle circulation) and the cultural challenges of archiving a multi-national Empire now 100 years fallen.

One of the program’s curators, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, explained her decision not as an attempt to compartmentalize the Ottoman Empire, but to grapple with the ambiguity and multiplicity of a supra-national terrain from a period in film history that we otherwise tend to regard in starkly nationalist terms. Kaynakçi and Mariann Lewinsky offset this geopolitical overspill with the entertaining variety of their curating: compiling newsreel and travelogue footage with comedic oddities like The Clown and the Pasha (Georges Monca, 1911), a precursor to Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, according to Lewinsky, in which a neurotic Egyptian dignitary sustains his infatuation with a cross-dressing circus ballerina even after the removal of “her” wig. “Nobody’s perfect” might have been a fitting subtitle for “Views of the Ottoman Empire.”

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Speaking of gender politics, French surrealist director Germaine Dulac (subject of Tami William’s highly anticipated new book, Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations) and German comedienne Rosa Porten (actress Henny Porten’s older sister) helped to balance the patriarchy endemic to many auteur-centered film retrospectives. In past years, the Ritrovato has spotlighted works by female directors including Lois Weber, Alice Guy Blaché, Agnès Varda, and Olga Preobrazhenskaya. Despite the significant stylistic differences between Dulac’s elliptical film poetry and Porten’s situational screwball comedy, the thematic similarities were striking. Across these two programs, female protagonists struggled to negotiate the balance between career aspirations and domestic obligations in their modern industrial societies.

In Dulac’s Death of the Sun, an ambitious woman doctor struggles to choose between tending to her needy husband and sickly son, or potentially discovering the cure to tuberculosis. As a filmmaker, Dulac uses the backdrop of female labor as a pretext for her own intricate visual compositions and complex optical effects. Instead of associative imagery, Porten’s films deploy zany comedy to navigate gender double-binds. Often featuring deadpan, screwball heroines played by Wanda Treumann (imagine a German WWI-era hybrid of Lucille Ball and Maya Rudolph), Porten’s films go to outlandish lengths to right the balance between domestic duty and professional invigoration. In these episodic larks, Treumann raffles off her own hand in marriage in a cigarette advertising gimmick; goes incognito as an impish she-devil to broker her own divorce from a wealthy industrialist and re-marriage to a figurative painter (who makes her a motion picture icon); and, incredibly, in a 1914 film, poses as a mannequin in a hat shop to befuddle a unit of Prussian military officers who’ve all been trying to woo with gifts of fancy haberdashery (the expense and size of the hat always corresponds with the military rank of the gift-giver). Whether through quirky farce or surrealistic pathos, the thematic of negotiating female identity in a commodity-driven, wartime society provided an impetus for narrative play and aesthetic experimentation across festival screenings.

A Miracle in Acetate: Analog v. Digital

Il Cinema Ritrovato

If nationalist, labor, and gender politics shape the conflicts that play out in many of the films, the digital-versus-analog conundrum continued to define the meta-archival debates of the festival. As an increasing number of festival screenings emit from DCP (Digital Cinema Package) files, as opposed to from 35mm nitrate or acetate prints, and while digital scanners become utterly intrinsic to film preservation techniques, the longstanding analog-versus-digital debate remains a bone of contention into 2014. The largest screenings of the festival are without a doubt the after-dinner, outdoor viewings on the central Piazza Maggiore. Free and open to the public, these nighttime screenings elicit local Bologna residents alongside international festival travelers.

I take this detour through the backdrop of Piazza Maggiore screenings in order to underscore the total chaos and crisis of an interruption by some kind of technical difficulty or malfunction. This is precisely what happened Sunday night to a DCP print of a silent, stencil-colored, Belgian anti-war melodrama: War Is Hell (Alfred Machin, 1914). Pieced together from multiple, incomplete prints housed in Belgian and Dutch film archives, the film’s restoration, according to the festival catalogue, “was really driven by the desire to overcome the well-known limitations of analogue techniques in restoring stencil-colored films.” Celluloid advocates no doubt experienced a little bit of schadenfreude when the last five minutes of a gripping war tear-jerker were unable to play in any form; the screening technicians cut to a 1918 French actuality about dirigibles.

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Sometimes there’s no better argument than to let the materiality of film speak for itself. During an afternoon screening of William Wellman’s Other Men’s Women (1931), a Depression-era romantic comedy about a love triangle between two railroad men and a witty homemaker, no less than an acetate miracle occurred. The two men struggle atop a moving train—one of whom has irreversibly blinded and also cuckolded the other man—to determine who will sacrifice his life in a desperate attempt to ward off a deadly flood. (Tropes of gendered symbolism and visibility metaphors abounded across Wellman’s pre-Code filmmaking, especially in such 1930s titles as Midnight Mary, Night Nurse, The Man I Love, and The Star Witness.)

Just as the fight scene escalated, the film stopped! The image cut to black, with the exception of several warped, distorted figures that congealed across the screen. We could hear the acetate reel physically melting from the projection booth. What’s more, the audible melting of the film reel uncannily matched the sound effects of the moving train in the pouring rain from the climactic closing sequence. Just as the flickering screen gave way to darkness, with the expectation that the reel would stop for the projectionist to re-splice the film over the melted strips, the next photogram magically jumped back into the sprockets and the film played on! Mass audience applause ensued. Senior archivists from the British Film Institute were gushing after the screening about how they had never seen anything like it in their entire careers. Very rarely, the film will melt and the projectionist will stop the reel to repair the missing link (unlike with DCP, whereby the solution to a projection mishap is oftentimes irresolvable), but never had anyone seen the reel jump back into the sprocket like that. We all agreed that it was a religious miracle.

Inner Experiences

Il Cinema Ritrovato

With program sections as broadly conceived as “Documentaries” and “Recovered and Restored,” or as specific as “Musical Orphanages” and “Cinema Against Hitler,” and covering a motley assortment of auteurs from William Wellman, Germaine Dulac, and Riccardo Freda, to the relatively unknown Werner Hoechbaum and Rosa Porten, coherence can only emerge in montage form.

For example, one afternoon I hopped from a 1965 Polish-Russian co-production, composed entirely of inner monologues from Lenin’s pre-WW1 months in Poland, to Yasujirō Ozu early talkie Only Son (1936), which, according to my doctoral advisor, “if you haven’t seen [it], you are a broken human.” Two separate scenes depicting meta-filmic spectatorship provided a thread between the two very different works, shedding light on the relations between their disparate national and historical contexts. In the Ozu, a hard-working Tokyo son brings his rural mother to an urban screening of a German talkie-musical, wherein the mother quickly falls asleep and starts loudly snoring—a strong statement in a film that’s all about passive projection and asserting one’s own voice through tacit familial bonds. While the mother finally “talks back” to the urban, capitalist forces oppressing her family, Lenin’s inner monologue during a meta-screening of a dancing-pig cabaret film flashed up in my mind. Lenin asserts that the eruption of WW1—an inevitable consequence of the division between capital and labor—was as plain as day to him from the variety entertainment and newsreel programs that he watched in the Polish cinemas in early 1914.

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Moments like these make you think differently about what it means now to desire the cinema from 100 years ago. The associative connections that emerge between screenings are always contingent and to an extent idiosyncratic. With four overlapping screenings, instead of Lenin in Poland (Sergei Yutkevich, 1966), I could have been watching Riccardo Freda’s campy horror classic Lust of the Vampire (1956), attending a FIAF Summer School lecture on the restoration of Raymond Bernard’s anti-war melodrama Wooden Crosses (1932), scoping out Léo Kouper’s Charlie Chaplin poster art in an adjacent exhibit, or watching a film opera from 100 years ago about the Roman Emperor Caligula, The Star of Genius (René Leprince and Ferdinand Zecca, 1914).

Whether these moments of cinematic revelation stand in for personal, psychic triangulations, or elucidate the subtler relations between an Italian, summertime film festival thematizing World War I and the austerity politics and violent border conflicts unfolding on distant screens, connections emerge precisely through the gaps and disjunctures between otherwise isolated viewing experiences.

As Mariann Lewinsky suggestively described the form of these often fragmented, incomplete, or decontextualized 1914 silent films: “We have the early cinema of attractions, the later cinema of narration, but here we see the cinema of emotions.” In other words, the loss of concrete materials and the absence of narrative orientation can become an impetus for the Ritrovato spectator’s emotional engagement and imaginative interjection. Perhaps this is what is really meant by “Cinema Rediscovered”: that recognition emerges through the very vanishing of film histories that we can only do our best to preserve and restore.

Il Cinema Ritrovato ran from June 28—July 5.

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Maggie Hennefeld

Maggie Hennefeld is assistant professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes.

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