With the rediscovered Cinema you travel in space and time – Francesco Boille

There is a festival in Italy that deserves a detailed preamble, before going into the merits. A unique festival. It is the Cinema rediscovered, in Bologna, which begins on 25 June. In these pre-festival days, the Bolognese have already been able to admire in Piazza Maggiore what is now a classic visionary of cinema: The warriors of the night (1979) by Walter Hill, moreover in the magnificence of 4K. And even when the festival is over, the projections in the square will continue for example with The giant (1956) by George Stevens (but presented in theaters during the festival), a film also mythologized by the interpretation of James Dean, an emerging but brutally fallen star.

Imagine then that you are all in Bologna to follow the Rediscovered Cinema, a festival dedicated to the memory of cinema, however, made to live as if it were current events, a festival where they come from all over the world to follow it, including major newspapers such as Le Monde. A festival, moreover, curated by the Cineteca di Bologna which for some time has been carrying out important restorations of titles belonging to cinemas of all latitudes with commissions from all over the world (and which has to its credit an important catalog of DVDs). Here we travel in time but also in space. There are not only the classics of Italian, European and Hollywood cinema but of the whole world, including “other” cinema.

A cinema out of any format and academicism: both that expressed by the cinemas of rich countries, and that of distant cinemas that today are still too far away in Italy compared to what happens in other countries. All in a magical and convivial atmosphere that is experienced by passing from the rooms of the Cineteca to those of the Arlecchino, Europa, Jolly cinemas and which finds its climax every evening in Piazza Maggiore to which are added more or less neighboring bars and restaurants. from a good “side dish” to the main dish: cinema. Here in all its splendor of the past which, like a precious gem, radiates that of the present giving it a new light.

Given all this, the question is then inevitable as to why such a festival and an institution like the Cineteca di Bologna are not much more appreciated and known than they would in other countries. Perhaps because we are in Italy, a country where there is a lack of reasoned and planned ambition and which when it has its flagships, and has more than one in various fields, paradoxically does not value them as it should because it is unable to incorporate them into an overall project. Yet ours is not a country with any cultural history: Italian cinema illuminated the arts of the second half of the twentieth century, not just cinema itself.

But the growing public of the rediscovered Cinema seems to indicate a new desire: the need to regain possession of a cultural memory that had at its center a great visual power, direction and photography. A need that becomes evident even in a city like Rome, to limit itself to the capital, where there is no lack of interest in the classics, as the rows for cinemas such as the Quattro Fontane or the Nuovo Sacher have shown in the middle of the pandemic for initiatives dedicated to cinema. of the past, even recent.

Seeing yourself in Cannes on the big screen, as happened years ago, Red shoes (1948) by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger restored, with Martin Scorsese present, means entering a hypnotic and multilayered world that would almost seem like David Lynch experimentation, if there was something comparable in genre cinema today. A flamboyant and sumptuous film like Red shoes it is an example of a type of vision that brings us all back into communion on the big screen for something “big” in its highest sense, detoxifying us from the homologation caused by the small screen platforms as well as by the codified rules of the TV series. Series that undoubtedly bring new life to the more strictly narrative dimension, but in which, unfortunately, the director mostly disappears, the visual power becomes rare – unless important authors from the big screen sign them – precisely because the figure of the director , that is, a talent that dominates other talents by directing them, fails, as productions tend to be based on the script.

It will take a large and intense debate on this. Waiting for a hoped-for union between the younger brother – the series on the small screen – and the older brother – the cinema on the big screen – which could bear great results for both, considering all that has been said so far, we can better grasp the importance and the need for this thirty-sixth edition of Cinema rediscovered. So what does the event directed by Gianluca Farinelli offer us this year for communion on the big screen?

Certainly the high share of restored feature films is the first attraction. Among these, the titles of classic Hollywood cinema of the golden age, of the fifties to be exact: works like Singing in the rain (1952) by Stanley Donen, a film that even when restored is making a lot of talk about itself, or how The leaves in the wind (1956) by Douglas Sirk, the great German director who escaped from Nazi barbarism who with his melodramas reinterpreted the puritan frustrations of America of those years, and the aforementioned The giant; but it is also a science fiction classic from those years The space invaders (1953) directed by the set designer William Cameron Menzies: a film with remarkable atmospheres and visual suggestions conceived for 3D, made with few means and ruined in the Italian version of the time that here it will be possible to see on the big screen and with the restored colors; but also the revisionist and disenchanted cinema of the second half of the sixties and seventies will have its place with the western Don’t preach, shoot (1972) by Sidney Poitier, where blacks and Indians are allies against whites; or the always unconventional one before the rampant ebb of the 1980s The Blues brothers (1980) by John Landis, an amazing anarchoid carnival with the greats of black music, also famous for being very hostile “to the Nazis of Illinois” and presented here in full version; or again Driver, the elusive (1978) by Walter Hill, a spectacular and experimental road movie at the same time.

A breakthrough work in cinema not only in France is then mom the whore (1973) by Jean Eustache, now restored in the transalpine rooms; it’s still Ludwig (1973) by Luchino Visconti, a monumental film which at the time was massacred by the producers; but it is also an opportunity to discover the powerful cinema of Moldovan, Ukrainian naturalized, Kira Muratova, never released in Italy (even if her feature films have been shown several times by Fuori Ora), not even with her Asthenic syndrome (1989) which won the Special Jury Prize of the Berlin Film Festival in 1990. Two of the first films are presented restored by this great director, relentless photographer of the paradoxes of the former USSR, Short meetings (1967) e Long goodbyes (1971).

But the (re) discovery of rare restored feature films signed by female directors continues, for example, with the historical film, on which the female portrait is superimposed, Dismissed (1982): produced by Ingmar Bergman, directed by the Finnish Tuija-Maija Niskanen and written by two women, it takes us right to the Cinemalibero section, which among the many magnificent titles of distant cinemas that deal with burning issues, offers us for example the possibility of discover movies like Canoe (1976) by Felipe Cazals, a true story set in the repressive climate of Mexico in 1968. But there are many other nuggets left to the pleasure of discovery by scrolling through the detailed program of the many sections, nuggets that we will try to detail in an upcoming breaking latest news from the festival.