A jour­ney through the past at Il Cin­e­ma Ritrovato

Like many peo­ple my age my cinephil­ia start­ed online and has most­ly stayed there. If in the cin­e­ma you can escape amongst strangers, in more atom­ised times you can only tru­ly escape by your­self; com­mu­ni­ty is now clos­er in inter­est but held at a com­fort­able dis­tance on the oth­er side of a screen. As such I’ve nat­u­ral­ly shied away from film fes­ti­vals, but Il Cin­e­ma Ritrova­to in Bologna seemed the right place to chal­lenge that. Its pro­gramme, crammed with rar­i­ties, new restora­tions and recla­ma­tions of jour­ney­men would feel famil­iar to any online cinephile; they show the kind of films peo­ple share files of in Twit­ter DMs.

But I was con­front­ed with the dif­fer­ence of oth­er peo­ple from the very first film I saw (which was part of the Rouben Mamoul­lian strand), when, two seats away from me, a twen­ty-some­thing gave Applause about ten min­utes of atten­tion before pulling out his phone. For the next sev­en­ty min­utes I saw him send walls of mes­sages to some­one who nev­er respond­ed. If you can’t resist the dis­trac­tion of your phone at home, you can at least fre­quent­ly pause what you’re watch­ing, but with­out that buffer it seems some can’t stom­ach the mild bore­dom of stiff dia­logue and a some­what uncon­vinc­ing romance to ultimate;y see a movie burst­ing with tragedy and invention.

After two days of trav­el, two hours of sleep the night before, and a day in the bru­tal Ital­ian heat, I was so exhaust­ed dur­ing Chaplin’s effort­ful Woman of Paris that my brain start­ed to project colour onto the images. I could tell there were some bril­liant scenes, but now how they con­nect­ed to one anoth­er. Walk­ing back to my slight­ly dis­tant flat I passed count­less build­ings that were cov­ered in queer and left­ist sym­bols and draw­ings of Lupin III. In the Piaz­za Mag­giore, the huge out­door square where films were shown in the cool­ing evenings, I saw one of the fes­ti­val direc­tors giv­ing the open­ing night speech. Every time I saw him he wore a suit and an obvi­ous sense of (self) impor­tance. That night the applause seemed loud­er through the speak­er than in person.

After I got some sleep I set­tled into the festival’s rhythm and the con­text around the films start­ed to become a bless­ing. Whether it was see­ing Renoir’s strange and com­plex sto­ry of unknown inten­tions, The Woman on the Beach, baf­fle an audi­ence as much as it did in 1947, or watch­ing some 1903 films on a long-obso­lete car­bon arc pro­jec­tor that let off a pil­lar of smoke into the still-blue night sky above the small square at the festival’s hub. The 1903 strand was gen­er­al­ly reward­ing because, as Bry­ony Dixon said in her intro, film­mak­ers were becom­ing con­scious of their audi­ences. But they were also real­is­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the medi­um, Méliès being the obvi­ous exam­ple, but even The King of Coin, which like a film from pre­vi­ous years sim­ply showed some­thing ( a man doing coin tricks) cre­at­ed those tricks through editing.

Still there were learn­ing curves beyond know­ing how many films you could squeeze into a day before the images start­ed to pass with­out mean­ing. The lack of raked seat­ing means that a tall per­son a row or two in front of you could block your view, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing the sub­ti­tles are pro­ject­ed onto a sep­a­rate screen below the film. Only once was this so bad I had to leave, but it was a con­sis­tent issue at all but one of the venues.

I only sat close to the front to see Wim Wen­ders intro­duce Drag­net Girl, which he admit­ted to only hav­ing seen on the flight over. When I acci­den­tal­ly made eye con­tact with his trans­la­tor just as she start­ed talk­ing, she decid­ed to focus on me. Out of polite­ness I nod­ded along, as if I under­stood a word of Ital­ian or thought that there was any­thing worth hear­ing in an intro that boiled down to: it’s a dif­fer­ent kind of sto­ry from Ozu, but some shots are the same. Even with my neck craned painful­ly, I could see this was more than an odd­i­ty by an not-yet-formed artist. The fes­ti­val direc­tor sat next to Wen­ders and laughed along, pro­ject­ing par­i­ty with this famous man as he ges­tured for an employ­ee to move the water jug to his side of the table.

But these excep­tions aside, the films were allowed to speak for them­selves. Lubitsch’s The Mar­riage Cir­cle is such a per­fect exam­ple of form that it tran­scends any con­tent or con­text. Queen Christi­na shone bright­ly, clar­i­fy­ing a major theme of Momoullian’s. Gar­bo must sac­ri­fice love to become the tit­u­lar queen, and in Song of Songs Diet­rich must sac­ri­fice her­self to become a stat­ue for her lover and a wife to her upper-class hus­band; these women are forced into images, like actress­es mould­ed into stars. Gar­bo had briefly left Hol­ly­wood before Christi­na, and in its final sus­tained image of her face, as the Queen leaves her King­dom, you can almost see her imag­in­ing her final escape from Hol­ly­wood that would come in the ear­ly 40’s.

Apart from a row­dy and stu­pid crowd in the sem­i­nal King Box­er (a reminder of how far mar­tial arts cin­e­ma has to go, even amongst cinephiles) the audi­ences were won­der­ful­ly self-select­ing. I can’t imag­ine many groups being as moved by Stel­la Dal­las as we were, weep­ing as Stephen Horne’s beau­ti­ful live orches­tral score sang through the Piaz­za. In moments like those there is almost a sense of com­mu­ni­ty, even with­in a city that remains dis­tant. Parts become total­ly famil­iar – the walks from one cin­e­ma to anoth­er and the afford­able, fast-serv­ing restau­rants and cafés inbe­tween – but the whole remains fuzzy and com­fort­ably exotic.

Play­ing to such a select group can make the fes­ti­val almost com­i­cal­ly insu­lar. Mul­ti­ple screen­ings were ded­i­cat­ed to the obscure French com­pa­ny Lux Film, who were pre­sent­ed as inter­est­ing sim­ply by the fact of their exis­tence, cer­tain­ly not on the mer­it of their films, which ranged from bad to not-good. Still, this is noble work. Some­body should be look­ing in these mar­gins, even if it isn’t me. I saw as many inter­est­ing as bril­liant films, but many of both that I wouldn’t have oth­er­wise. So even if Mamoul­lian, for exam­ple, is less a great auteur and more an inter­est­ing and exu­ber­ant styl­ist, what oth­er fes­ti­val would think to ask that question?