Tagged: Il Cinema Ritrovato
Cinemalibero: FESPACO 1969 – 2019
Filmmakers at the tomb of Thomas Sankara
The Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou or FESPACO) is a film festival in Burkina Faso, held biennially in Ouagadougou, and dedicated to African and African film-makers. It was founded in 1969 . Then the host state was known as Upper Volta. The state became Burkina Faso under the leadership of Thomas Sankara, a revolutionary anti-colonial figure. In an early speech Sankara drew on the traditions of the US War of Independence, the French Revolution and the Great October Revolution. His socialist style programme was bought to a halt in a military coup in 1987: clearly involving intrigues by foreign states, in an area where French Neo-colonialism is potent. The Festival has continued and remains the most important forum for African Cinema. In the same year an association of African filmmakers was formed, The Pan African Federation of Filmmakers (Fédération Panafricaine des Cinéastes). Several of the film-makers featured this year were important in this development, including Med Hondo and Gaston Kaboré, who later became Secretary-General. And there was Ousmane Sembène who is the best-known of these film-makers and who features have been fairly widely available.
Il Cinema Ritrovato has developed a productive relationship with the World Film Foundation, dedicated to the restoration of important films across world cinema. Their new project aims at restoring fifty African films that are considered important as films, as cultural products and historical artifacts. The programme in Bologna this year presented eleven films, eight in new restorations, as examples from the African Film heritage.
I have already posted on one of the titles: Arabs and Niggers, Your Neighbours (Les Bicots-Negres, vos voisins, 1974). This was one of the films screened in its original 35mm format. And it provided a tribute to the film work of Med Hondo, who died early this year. The film provided a link between the other films shown in a Ritrovato retrospective in 2017.
‘Muna Moto’
Among the titles were a number seen here in the 1980s but not seen since. From 1975 in Cameroon came Muna Moto directed by Jean-Pierre Dikongué-Pipa. This was a critical study of the dowry system, but which was constrained by the censorship operating at that time. Dikongué-Pipa felt that he was able to present
only one fifth of what he felt in his heart.
In the film a young woman, because she is pregnant, has to marry an older man who already has there wives, all sterile. The drama develops when the young man who fathered the child takes drastic steps.
Problems also attended the restoration as there was mould on some sections of the original negative and Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique had to work in part with a dupe print. The film, in black and white, used indigenous Duala and French with English sub-titles.
‘Baara’
Baara from Mali (1978) was directed Souleymane Cissé. His subsequent feature Yeelen (1987) has become a classic of African films seen in Europe. Cissé had suffered arrest and jail for his previous film which addressed the question of rape; the charge was for accepting French funding; something the ruling class in this state have done right up until today. Set in Bamako this film is a study of trade unionism in a country struggling to escape Neo-colonialism. There are two key character, of similar ages; one an intellectual the other a manual worker. Both work at a factory where the exploitation leads to confrontation and the need for people to identify their interests, individual and collective.
The various elements operating in the film are unified by the narrative strategy employed – specifically related to the Marxist notion of history as essentially collective.
The film screened from a colour 35mm print and used indigenous Bambara language. This was a version with Italian sub-titles and an English translation.
‘Wend Kuuni’
Wend Kuuni was from Burkina Faso itself and made in 1982 by Gaston Kaboré. A young boy is abandoned in the bush. Found, he adopted into a village family. The simple drama develops as we learn the trauma that made him mute and the further action that leads to a cure.
Kaboré, in 2017, explained that
My preoccupation has been to find a film making form to address my own people enshrined in both cinematic language and the legacy of our own story-telling tradition.
This offers as sense of the form of the ‘griot’, a traditional story-teller whose function can be seen at work in a number of African films. The dialogue was in the local language of Mooré with English subtitles.
This was another restoration by the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique. The digital version looked really good. We also had an introduction by Nicola Mazzanti from the Cinémathèque which was less happy. His intentions seemed good but the delivery was rather like a harangue on the neglect of African films. Given that the audience were cineastes who had traveled distances for the festival and for this particular screening, then queued up to get a seat, [some had to stand] this seemed to me completely misdirected.
There were two films by the Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty. His two most famous films, Touki Bouki (1973) and Hyènes (1992) were both features. The two titles were intended to be part a trilogy, Histories de petites gens / Tales of ordinary people, but Mambéty died before he could complete the third part.
‘Le Franc’
Le Franc [which refers to a lottery ticket] runs for 45 minutes. The protagonist, Marigo (Dieye ma) is an itinerant musician.
With his easy-going walk and Chaplinesque clothes, Marigo immediately expresses his irreverent nature: . . . (Alessaandre Speciale, quoted in the Festival Catalogue).
Indeed Marigo does share some characteristics with the famous ‘silent’ tramp. And the film has its moments of humour. But it also shares Mambety’s taste for sardonic comment, bricolage and a narrative that literally jumps around characters and settings. Marigo shares Chaplin’s famous characters ability to stare down adversity. But such adversities are more dramatic and oppressive in a Neo-colonial setting. This is a landscape in which poverty and decay surround everybody. Yet the characters are vital as is the music which repeatedly disrupts the action.
We had a good transfer to digital with the Wolof dialogue accompanied by English sub-titles. However, the songs were not translated and I am sure they added to the dynamic but bitter story.
‘The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun’
La Petite vendeuse de Soleil (The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun). The ‘sun’ of the title is a daily newspaper which children tout round the streets of [I think] Dakar but it clearly has a double meaning [at least] in the story.. Sili (Lissa Baléra) is a paraplegic. Despite this and her crutches she gamely works round the streets selling what seems to be a popular tabloid. She also gamely ignores the taunts and tricks of the other sellers, all teenage boys. This is a film about facing adversity but with a more upbeat and less sardonic tone than Le Franc.
Mambéty, who died in 1998, was unable to finish the film which was at that point ready for editing. It was completed by colleagues after his death. It is an affecting drama with an emotional punch. It is also more in a linear fashion that Mambety’s other films and there is little sense of the irony that he usually offers. I did wonder if the final film is exactly as he himself would have made it. Like the other title it was in a good quality DCP, running 45 minutes and again in Wolof with English sub-titles.
There were several other features and material on FESPACO. Notably, nearly all the films came from North and West Africa. The exceptions were the Hondo and a title from Morocco. A number were in French though we also had titles in indigenous languages like that by Cissé and by Mambéty. This is an area once termed ‘Francophone’ because France was the dominant colonial power. This offers an interesting cultural factor, since narrative films are more common from this area than other parts which were dominated by Britain and the English language. France has continued to exercise a neo-colonial dominance in the region including military adventures. The flip side being the cultural plank and many films had to rely on French technical resources in their production. One of the key aims of FESPACO was to develop the indigenous film industries. This lead to a flowering in the late 1970s and 1980s, witnessed by some of the films at the festival. This fell away in the 1990s but there have been some important cinematic ventures in recent years; [see posts under ‘African Cinema’].
We can look forward to more of the restorations by the World Film Foundation at future festivals.
Film from 1919 at Il Cinema Ritrovato
Neil Brand at the piano in the Modernissimo
Every year this Archive Festival in Bologna has a programme of titles from the parallel year in the 20th century, A Hundred Years Ago: 1919′. The curators of the programme, Mariann Lewinsky and Karl Wratschko, made the point in the Festival Catalogue:
1919 is the first year of the A Hundred Years Ago strand for which a certain canon exists . . . the easiest option seemed not to be the most interesting one, and we decided, as in every year since 2004, to go on a pilgrimage to the archives and view as many films from 1919 as possible . . . We also decided at an early stage to include as many short films as possible …
They also argued that the focus is on films from Germany and Scandinavia.
This was not planned but simply happened as a result of the fact that in 1919 the most interesting films were made there.
So we enjoyed some known classics, unknown films and surprises, and a programme of varied short films from small dramas to travelogues and newsreels. One of the attractions of the selection was that the bulk of the screenings were on 35mm. Even so, given the complexity of the overall festival programme, with up to seven screens at any one time, it was not possible to see every single film.
The programme was divided into eight chapters, the first being ‘Old and New’.
Here we saw Carl Théodor Dreyer’s very fine The President (Præsedenten, 1919). Adapted from an Austrian novel the President of the title is a judge. His fallibility repeats the transgression of both his father and grandfather. The print from the Danish Film Institute was both tinted and toned and the visual quality was enhanced by a fine accompaniment by Gabriel Thibaudeau. This was a great film to revisit.
‘The President’
Three other titles were by Jakov Protozanov, Mauritz Stiller {Sir Arne’s Treasure / Herr Arnes Pengar} and Augusto Genina. The last was a social comedy, The Mask and the Face / La maschera e il volto, in which a husband’s macho boasts on what he will do if his wife takes a lover come back to haunt him.
Next was ‘Censorship Abolished. German ‘Vice and Enlightenment Films”.
A vice film (in German: Sittenfilm) is a film that, under the mantle of ‘enlightenment’, deals with taboo subjects mostly from the field of sexuality. (Karl Wratschko in the Catalogue).
There was a film directed by Richard Oswald on a gay them, Different from the Others (Anders als die andern). The Pimp (Der Mädchenhirt) directed by Karl Grune with prostitution and venereal decease in the plot. When censorship was re-imposed it disappeared from view. Whilst Misericordia (Tötet nicht mehr!) was a committed film addressing capital punishment directed by Lupu Pick.
‘Indian Cinema’ was a screening of D. G. Phalke’s Kaliya Mardan (The Childhood of Krishna). This is one of the few surviving silent films made in India and the only film by the key pioneer Phalke to survive almost complete.
‘Three actresses from the US with Love’ featured an extract from Creaking Stairs with Mary McLaren who also starred in Lois Weber’s Shoes (1916). A woman director, Ruth Stonehouse’s Rosalind at Redgate. And the French director Albert Capellani working with the star Nazimova at the Metro Picture Corporation. This drama, The Red Lantern, was set during the ‘Boxer rebellion in China; with fairly awful stereotypes of Chinese people.
Nazimova
‘Independent Cinema’ offered Back to God’s Country, a Canadian wilderness adventure. Historien om en gut / The Story of a Boy, a Norwegian drama of a boy who runs away. And fragments from La Fête Espagnole / Spanish Fiesta directed by Germaine Dulac. All three showed the way that many independent productions utilized actual locations, offering natural detail often lacking from studio productions.
The sixth chapter was titled ‘Revolution’, Karl Wratschko commented;
1919 was one of the most revolutionary years in the C20th. In this year there was revolutionary activity in many different countries of Europe as well as in Egypt.
From Hungary we had a film by Mihály Kertész [later Michael Curtiz] My Brother is Coming (Jön az öcsém), adapted from a revolutionary poem,
released barely two weeks after the proclamation of the world’s second communist republic . . .
‘My Brother is Coming’
From the opposite standpoint came Die Bolschewistischen … (Germany) which depicted the killing by the Bolsheviks in Ukraine of the opposition in the Civil War. A German newsreel showed the street battles during the Spartacist uprising in Berlin. A second included the funeral of one of the Spartacist leaders Rosa Luxemburg.
‘Nature, Humour, Science’ provided a sense of a cinema visit in the early C19th.
. . . for nearly two decades, . . . [this] meant not seeing a long story . . . , but some 10 to 15 short films from a wide range of genres and with maximum diversity in aesthetic impact and emotional register; . . . (Mariann Lewinsky in the Festival Catalogue).
So we had non-fiction, newsreel, adverts and comedy. There was the famous and staged signing of the United Artists incorporation with the stars gathered round Chaplin. From the Soviet Union ‘The Funeral of Vera Kholodnaya, a major star of the Russian silent cinema, including films with Evgeni Bauer. The adverts were animated films from a French pioneer, Robert Lortac. And among the comedies was Seff Kostet 24,50 dollar groteske von seff (Austria). This followed the adventures of a tailor’s dummy and its human look-a-like.
Dummy or human?
The final part of the programme was a serial screened in parts, morning and evenings, at the Modernissimo. This is an underground cinema waiting restoration but extremely atmospheric and [seemingly] the coolest spot in Bologna. I Topi Grigi is an Italian production starring and directed by Emilio Ghione. A major star Ghione played Za la Mort, a master of disguise, who has eight episodes to outwit and bring to justice the ‘Grey Rats’ of the title. As always in serials there were cliff-hanging ends of episodes, a variety of criminal enterprises, a changing cast of villains and victims and a final denouement between hero and arch-villain. Following the whole serial was a commitment but a bonus was that one would hear nearly all of the ensemble of talented musicians who accompany the silent screenings.
Arabs and Niggers, Your Neighbours (Les Bicots-Négres, Vos Voisins, Mauritania-France, 1974)
Med Hondo in the 1980s
This film was part of the ‘Cinema Libro FESPACO 1969-2019‘ programme at Il Cinema Ritrovato. The Festival has developed a strong relationship with the World Film Foundation who are leading the African Film Heritage Project which is committed to restoring 50 African films significant in cinema and culture. This series celebrates the Pan African Film and Television Festival at Ouagadougou which was set up in 1969. That festival has become the centre for both enjoying African film and supporting and developing African Cinema.
This title was directed by Med Hondo and provided a testament to this important film-maker who died on 2nd March this year. We had enjoyed a trio of Hondo’s films at the 2017 Ritrovato. And fortunately he attended and we were able to hear him talk about his film work. Med Hondo was born in Mauritania in 1936. He migrated to France in 1959 and the exploitation and oppression of migrants was a central theme in his films. He was well versed in International Cinema and his own work was both unconventional and used avant-garde techniques but in the service of accessible films which were ‘made politically’.
Les Bicots-Négres, Vos Voisins was his second film following on from Soleil O (1967). Aboubakar Sanogo in the Festival Catalogue described the film’s structure:
[It] analyses the living conditions of African migrant workers in France in the m id-1970s . . . It comprises seven sequences exploring, respectively the conditions of possibility of cinematic representations in Africa …historical dissonance through the dialectic of past and present . . . a flashback to the eve of African independence , the predicaments of the post-colony, an assessment of the living conditions of migrant workers and the actions taken to transform these conditions . . .
The film opens with a bravura sequence where an African man addresses the audience direct to camera. In a sardonic manner familiar in Hondo’s films he questions the viewer on cinema, Africa and representation. The camera tracks between close-ups, mid-shots and longshots to also reveal the walls covered with film posters. In other sequences he uses a montage of stills, prints, pictures to show Africa in this way. Dramatised sequences point the experiences of African migrants whilst others point how European capitalism retains its hold, in this case on a ‘Francophone’ Africa. And documentary film reveals the actual conditions and the actual actions as Africans become part of the French proletariat. Towards the close of the film footage of a vast worker’s demonstration, with black and white proletarians side by side, voices the opposition to exploitation and racism.
Hondo and his team used both visual and aural montage as developed by the Soviet pioneers. The cinematography was by Jean Boffety and François Catonné working to a script developed by Hondo. The editing, involving a sequence of stop-motion, was by Michel Masnier. And the music, with a varied combination of African rhythms and French popular songs, was by a team of Catherine Le Forestier, Mohamed Ou Mustapha, Frank Valmont and Louis Zavier.
The screening used a version from 1988. In an approach shared by other in Third Cinema, Hondo screened parts of the film to the workers who appear in it and made changes in accordance with their suggestions. So in the opening sequence we actually see in the background a poster for the release of the first version of the film in 1974. Hondo described it as ‘a work in progress’.
The complete film is challenging but the presentation is quite clear. Med Hondo has a clear grasp of the operation of capital in advanced European states and of the way that neo-colonialism operates in the late C20th. The tone varies from sardonic to dramatic to informative to the powerfully moving. The film was shot in colour and we enjoyed a 35mm print from the Audio-visual Archive of the French Communist Party.
The film develops the content and style of the earlier Soleil O and also connects with the later works of the film-maker. The screening provided a memorial to a fine director. I was saddened by the thought that I would no longer be able to wait for another film from Hondo; who had been trying (it seems vainly) to develop a further cinematic project. However, I am heartened that his unique films will be available still for audiences. A friend in New York recently saw two of these at an impressive retrospective of Liberation Cinema.
Il Cinema Ritrovato 2019
This major Archive Festival opened on Saturday. We reckon up to 4,000 visitors may be here over the coming week for a feast of cinematic classics and masterpieces. The temperatures are expected to reach 40℃ so film-buffs will be thankful for the city’s elegant arcades to shelter as they move between the festival’s five different sites and venues.
The Festival opened officially at mid-day on Saturday with a screening in the Cinema Modernissimo, a 1915 underground cinema which is currently be restored. The lower cavern is a wonderfully atmospheric setting for ‘reel’ film. We were welcomed by the festival’s key organisers in both Italian and English. Then we enjoyed a tribute to that glorious gothic masterpiece which suffered so recently, Notre-Dame de Paris.
The tribute was George Franju’s Notre Dame – cathédrale de Paris (1957) filmed in colour and a scope format. This was a fine 35mm print with the narration translated in digital sub-titles. Franju had a great visual sense and this is beautiful to watch. The film’s treatment seemed to me to be influenced by Victor Hugo’s marvellous descriptions in his classic novel.
The film explores both the interior and exterior of the massive building and treats the famous gargoyles with care and attention. The film ends with these ‘petrified statues’ and their great vistas of the city. This was a fine way to open a week of cinematic treasures.
Il Cinema Ritrovato 2018
Piazza Maggiore
The city of Bologna was crowded for the 32nd edition of this archive Festival. The crowds, up to 3,000, swarmed in. So whilst there was a varied and exciting programme one had to exercise judicious judgement in selecting programmes as quite a few screenings were full, really full. As usual there was a mix of digital formats and 35mm. I think there were slightly less ‘reel’ prints than last year. But there were enough to satisfy a film buff starved of the ‘reel thing’ in Britain.
This year saw the partial inauguration of the Cinema Modernissimo, a vintage cinema under process of restoration. Every morning (repeated in the evening) the venue screened episodes from a US serial of the ‘teens, ‘Wolves of Kultur’. Produced by Pathé in fifteen episodes this was a spy drama with cliff-hanger after cliff-hanger:
our heroes, now a couple, are meeting dangers and escaping it, climbing, running, driving, on ships, motorcycles, trams, in woods, caves, lakes, on towers, peaks and rails. (Marianne Lewinsky in the Festival Catalogue).
In fact the episodes were rather reliant on intertitles for progressing the plot but there were some exciting sequences over the week. But it was the venue that was the star. Currently the auditorium is a dark cavern awaiting renovation. But this made it atmospheric. And the accompaniments by different musicians on different days, resonated around the impressive space. However, there is much work to be done and it seems unlikely that the Modernissimo will provide a new venue in 2019.
The star experience for 35mm film fans were the screening in the Piazzetta Pasolini from a 1930s Prevost Carbon-Arc projector. This year we had three, all devoted to the programme ‘Song of Naples, Tribute to Elvira Notari and Vittorio Martinelli’. Elvira Notari was a film director who, with her husband Nicola, produced films throughout the silent era that celebrated and dramatised the city of Naples. Vittorio Martinelli was a scholar and enthusiast for these filmmakers; he passed on ten years ago so it was also an anniversary. The atmosphere for these screenings in the Piazzetta was great. And all the films had musical accompaniments by Neapolitan singers and musicians. Worth a trip to Bologna on its own.
There were innumerable programmes covering early and silent film, classic mainstream cinema, documentary, art cinema and cinemas of liberation. The last included restorations by The Film Foundations World Cinema Project (Waquai Sanaway Al-dhamr, Algeria 1975), and a screening of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s seminal ‘Third Cinema’ film La Hora de los Hornos Neocolonialismo y violencia (Argentina 1966 – 1968). There was a fine Argentinian film from 1939, Prisoners of the Earth / Prisioneres de la Tierra. Filmed partly in the Amazonian jungle the film dramatised the experience of bonded workers on fruit plantations. The plot was fairly melodramatic but the actual locations gave the film an immediacy whilst the critical treatment of the exploitation and oppression of native workers was powerfully subversive.
The key silent offerings were in ‘A Hundred Years Ago: 1918’ (Cento Anni Fa: 1918), and the majority of these were on 35mm. We had Charlie Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms and The Bond.; an early Germaine Dulac short, Âmes de fous, and a restored film with Italian Diva Pina Menichelli, La Moglie di Claudio (Cláudio’s wife). What I found most interesting were two films that featured the Soviet poet Vladimir Majakovskij. There was short both scripted by and featuring Majakovskij, Shackled by Film (Zakovannaja film’moj, 1918) which played with cinematic techniques and illusion. And there was a three reel feature The Young Lady and the Hooligan (Baryšnja I chuligan, 1918). The young lady of the title (Aleksandra Rebikova) is a newly arrived teacher at a rural school. Majakovskij, who also scripted the film and was also involved in other aspects of the production] plays the hooligan, though this term does not really describe the character. The Italian translation had him as a ‘punk’. He seems unemployed and is an outsider among the locals. He is set upon by some of the pupils and their fathers. The film is fairly melodramatic and our protagonist is smitten with the teacher. But the film is also experimental with a dream sequence and scenes with multi-imagery, showing the influence of Futurism.
We had a programme of later films from the same territory, ‘Second Utopia: 1934 – The Golden Age of Soviet Sound Film’. As in China and Japan the new sound technology arrived in the Soviet Union later than in the Western capitalist countries. It also coincided with the change from a cinema predominately concerned with the political values of revolution and socialist construction to a more conventional approach:
‘Entertainment’ stopped being a curse word, and audiences returned to cinemas.(Festival Catalogue).
This is somewhat of an exaggeration. If you watch the films of Boris Barnet it is clear that audiences of the 1920s were offered both political dramas and documentaries but also dramas that were extremely entertaining titles. The advent of ‘Soviet Socialist realism’ tended to reduce the politics to slogans and offered a more one-dimensional view of Soviet Society. Chapaev / Čapaev was constructed around the heroic protagonist of the title. He is a military commander in the Civil War, when Britain, France, Japan, the USA and allies invaded the young socialist state. Chapaev leads regular and irregular forces against the invading Czechoslovakian Legion, mainly around the Trans-Siberian railway. In leading the battles against the invaders Chapaev has to come to terms with the Political Commissar. This resolves the drama and Chapaev emerges as a heroic figure but with little sense of the contemporary contradictions.
A different approach, less in line with ‘socialist realism’ was The Youth of Maxim (Junost’ Maksima), set in the Tsarist period around 1910 and written and directed by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. This film retained the vitality and some of the experimentalism of their silent work with FEKS. The sound sequences are fairly stagy but the action sequences of demonstrations, conflict and revolutionary underground work are impressive. There are some fine examples of moving camera, exteriors with a strongly expressionist look and factory settings worthy of a silent film. And whilst Maxim is heroic this is only after a tutelage by an experienced Bolshevik and involvement in class actions.
Hollywood conventions were on show in ‘William Fox Presents: Rediscoveries from the Fox Film Corporation’. There was a screening of 7th Heaven (1927) in the Piazza Maggiore with a full orchestral accompaniment. And among the other titles was delightful comedy, Bachelor’s Affairs (1932) in which Adolphe Menjou as middle-aged playboy Andrew Hoyt discovers the drawbacks of marrying a young, beautiful blonde, Eva Mills (Joan Marsh). The film subverts Menjou’s standard persona whilst providing quick and punchy dialogue.
Alongside this was ‘Immortal Imitations: The Cinema of John M. Stahl’. Stahl started out as an actor then moved to direction in 1914 and continued until 1949. He directed 43 films, many of them are lost. His films are predominately melodramas, often adapted from best-selling novels. The programme in Bologna will be paralleled at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in October when there will be presentation of most of his surviving silent films. Stahl’s best films dramatise romantic relationships, often where a woman is forced into a ‘back street’ in a relationship with a married man. When Tomorrow Comes (1939) is taken from a story by James M. Cain. Irene Dunne plays the waitress Helen Lawrence who has a brief affair with pianist Philip Chagall (Charles Boyer). The principal leads are excellent and the melodramatic plot develops the strong emotions. The intriguing opening presents a waitress strike in New York but this soon fall away as the romance takes over.
A woman kept in the ‘shadows’ in a different sense is the central line in Imitation of Life (1934), adapted from the novel by Fannie Hurst. We have two single mothers with young daughters, Beatrice Pullman (Claudette Colbert) and Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers). Beatrice is white, educated and self-reliant; Delilah is black and dominated by years of submissiveness. The film not only dramatises the inequities of racist classification and representation but also contains an undeveloped critique of US capitalism. Beatrice acquires wealth and fortune by marketing Delilah’s home-made pancake recipe. Yet even when the pair move to a affluent mansion Delilah remains ‘downstairs’. This contradiction finds potent expression in the situation of Delilah’s daughter Peola (Fredi Washington) who can ‘pass for white’. The film lacks the trenchant criticism in the treatments of this subject by Oscar Micheaux (for the segregated ‘race cinema’); but, I think, is superior to the better known remake of 1959.
‘The Rebirth of Chinese Cinema (1941)’ offered films from the period when, following the end of the Japanese occupation, the Communist Party of China defeated the capitalist Kuomintang and embarked on its own Socialist Road. The nine titles included straightforward entertainment films, films of resistance during the occupation and films made under the new dispensation.
Along the Sugari River / Songhua Jiang Shang (1947) was produced in Manchuria. Officially in a studio under the control of Kuomintang the film drama tends more to the political line and struggle of the CPC. The film opens on a rural family prior to the Japanese invasion. When the Japanese army arrives their treatment of the indigenous people is brutal and racist. Members of the family succumb to the Japanese violence and finally a young couple flee the village on Sugari river and the husband takes work in a Japanese run mine. After a disaster the Japanese offer derisory compensation to victims. A protest is brutally put down with many deaths. The young couple flee again and are rescued by partisans; thus they join the struggle against the occupation. The film used an amount of location work and prior to the occupation sequences have lyrical feel. The maltreatment under the Japanese is well presented and there are some fine tracking sequences. Like the other titles this film had been transferred to DCP. The surviving 35mm prints were rescued by a French University Department, thus they have Chinese dialogue with French sub-titles. Apparently the prints had not been looked after for years so there survival is welcome.
Equally rare we enjoyed a retrospective of some films by Yilmaz Güney, ‘Despair of Hope’. The Catalogue notes opened with a quotation from ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’, by Nikos Kazantzakis:
Hope, lasting too long, had begun to turn into despair.
which suggests a meaning for the title.
Güney was a major star of Turkish cinema in the 1950s and 1960s and went onto become a major film-maker. But his political views, expressed both in writings and in his films led to prosecutions, prison and eventually exile. He both wrote and directed films, and later, when in prison or exile, he supervised his films through collaborators. There were three titles screened plus German documentary. The Legend of the Ugly King / Die Legendae vom Hässlichen König (2017); a title that picked up on Güney’s nickname in as a star noted as a
tough-guy character [who] was often forced to violence because of certain social circumstances . . .
This could be seen in Bride of the Earth / Seyyit Han (1968), a film in black and white widescreen, clearly influenced by the ‘spaghetti westerns’. Güney plays Seyyit, a loner who has been in exile from his village. He returns just as his love Keje (Nabahat Cehre) is being married off to a local landowner. Here we see the power relations in traditional rural society. Seyyit finally has to confront Haydar and his henchman, whilst Keje becomes a victim of the conflict. Just as in a western Seyyit rides away alone a the end. This is a bleak action film, but also one that offers a critique of the traditional power structure in rural Turkey,
The three titles had been transferred to DCPs for the Festival. The quality was reasonable but not great on contrast or definition in long shots. This was presumably partly due to the quality of the surviving 35mm prints.
There was a tribute to the great Italian actor, ‘Marcello Come Here. Mastroianni Rediscovered (1954 – 1974)’. The programme included a fine comedy directed by Alessandro Blasetti, La Fortuna di Essere Donna / Lucky to be a Woman (1955) with Mastroianni as a photo-journalist playing opposite a Sophia Loren as a perspective subject/model. Both actors were delightfully witty.
And there were the programmes one could not fit in like a number of vintage colour prints and an array of documentary films. A festival jury selected the DVD Awards, including Flicker Alley’s The House of Mystery / La maison du mystère (France 1921 – 1923) for ‘The Pater Von Bagh Award’ There was also the announcement that the sadly missed Peter Von Bagh [Festival Director] has been replaced with a ‘gang of four’; Cecilia Cenciarelli, Mariann Lewinsky, Ehsan Khoshbakht and Gian Luca Farinelli. All are experienced in the Festival and wider cinematic culture. It will be interesting to see how they address the increasing popularity of the Festival whilst contemporary cinema is changing so rapidly.
Il Cinema Ritrovato 2017
The 31st Archive Festival presented by the Cineteca di Bologna ran from Saturday June 24th until Sunday July 1st. The Festival has expanded rapidly in recent years. During the day there were screenings in four auditoria – The Salas Mastroianni and Scorsese at the Cineteca and the Arlecchino and Jolly cinemas. And there are smaller salons for supporting events. In the evenings these four screens are added to by the Piazza Maggiore in the city centre and the Piazzetta Pasolini at the Cineteca.
My friend Peter Rist worked out that there were 250 titles in this year’s festival, and only a fifth of these had repeat screenings. Thus even the most dedicated cineaste could see even a fraction of the Festival programme. This year those cineastes exceeded 3,000. So popular titles nearly always involved queues and sometimes a fairly crowded auditorium. My strategy for coping was to focus on 35mm; these composed just under half the programme. I managed 30 35mm prints and then ten digital (titles described were in 35mm unless noted otherwise). Even then one had to make choices between interesting and even fascinating films.
‘A Hundred Years Ago: 50 films of 1917 in 35mm’ offered a series of daily programmes, with both short and feature-length films. One that caught a crowd was Abel Gance’s early masterwork, Mater Dolorosa. One of the finest was Thomas Graals Bästa Film / Thomas Graal’s Best Film ((Sweden). Directed by Mauritz Stiller, this was a delightful comedy centred on a scriptwriter working on his next film. The writer and title character was played by Stiller’s fellow-filmmaker Victor Sjöström. And as was often the case in Swedish films of this period there was a strong and independent minded female lead, Bessie (Karin Molander). We also enjoyed a film directed by Sjöström, Tones Fran Stormyrtorpet / The Girl from the Marsh Croft (Sweden). The film was based on a novel by Selma Lagerlöf, whose writings provided stories for a number of Swedish films in the silent era. The plot was familiar, focusing on class, bigotry and the restraints of religious morality. The put-upon young heroine Helga was played with real power by Greta Almroth, whilst future star Lars Hansen played Gudmund. The film made great use of contrasting spaces and offered that exceptional use of natural locations that grace the silent Swedish films.
‘Thomas Graal’s Best Film ‘
Also in the programme was a rare Triangle western directed by Frank Borzage, Until They Get Me ; a Lyda Borelli vehicle directed by Carmine Gallone, Malombra; and a German ghost film directed by Robert Wiene with a young Conrad Veidt and distinctive tinting, Furcht / Fear. Needless to say they all proved popular, generating queues of expectant admirers and full auditoriums.
The programme that I managed to see in its entirety was ‘The Japanese Period Film in the Valley of Darkness’. This was another programme curated by Alexander Jacoby and Johan Nordström. The titles all came from between 1937 and 1941 when Japan was under the control of a militaristic regime: all were jidai-geki or period films. In their introduction Alexander and Johan explained that the series of films selected all explored,
“how to present the past . . .”
and that all these films in some way
“challenge the samurai values . . .”
which were central to the regime.
The opening title was a film that I have read about often but which I had to wait until now to see, Ninjo Kamifusen / Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937). The film was directed by a promising young filmmaker Yamanaka Sadao, who sadly died in the war against China the following year. The film opens with a Samurai suicide and then follows the effects as they work through a small tenement community. The film has a substantial group of central characters and represents the class divisions underlying conflicts through the use of spatial difference. It also offers one of the great endings on film. There were seven others films in the programme, two of which, Hana Chirinu / Fallen Blossoms (1938) and Sono Zen’ya / The Night Before, are set in the crucial year of 1877 when a samurai rebellion attempted to stopped the modernisation led by the Meiji Restoration. And Kyojinden / The Giant (1938) was an impressive though not completely successful adaptation of Victor Hugo’s great French novel ‘Les Misérables’. All the films were interesting and worth watching. However, the print quality of some of these films, dating back decades, was mixed. Several did not have great definition or contrast: in the case of one film this meant that it was difficult to identify all the characters and their actions. The projection accentuated this because it mainly used the sub-titles as a point of focus, and on 35mm there is a slight difference in the plane.
‘Humanity and Paper Balloons ‘
The Film Foundation’s World Cinema project is now an established event in the Festival. The Foundation has now embarked on a project to restore fifty key films from Africa. So, as a real treat, we were able to see three films by Med Hondo. Born in Mauritania Hondo worked elsewhere in Africa and then in France. He took up acting and founded his own company in 1966. Then, working in television and film, he moved into cinema. Like some other notable filmmakers he has funded his film direction by his work as an actor. Since 1967 he has been able to make eight films. The Foundation has produced a digital restoration of his first, Soleil Ȏ (Mauritania, 1970 – DCP). Shot in black and white the film uses avant-garde techniques but it is better described as an ‘agit-prop’ documentary. Whilst it has a dramatised plot line the film presents the experiences of black people in Paris in this period.
“All the scenes were based on reality. Because racism isn’t invented, especially in film. It’s like a kind of cloak put on you, that you’re forced to live with.” (Med Hondo, 1970 quoted in the Festival Catalogue).
It is powerful document and stands up as relevant forty years on.
The programme also included two of Hondo’s later films in 35mm prints from the Harvard Film Archive. West Indies (France, Algeria, Mauritania, 1979) could be described as a period musical. The film presents
“a giant slave ship that symbolizes the triangular relationship between Africa, Europe and the Caribbean – as it explores the parallels between the forced migration of the Atlantic slave trade and the contemporary migration of Afro-Caribbean subjects to former colonial metropoles.” (Aboubakar Sanogo in the Festival Catalogue).
Sarraounia (Burkino Faso, Mauritania, France, 1986) dramatised the historical record and the successful resistance to a French colonial expedition in the late C19th. The film had a more conventional linear narrative and was shot in colour and Technovision. Using African locations (but Burkino Faso not Niger), African songs, griots and cultural artefacts , the film celebrated both African culture and resistance. It also inverted the stereotypes of mainstream cinema with the psychotic French commander reduced to brutal sectarian violence.
‘Sarraounia’
Med Hondo was present to his introduce his films. He was clearly moved by his reception and by the re-emergence of his cinema. Hondo also was passionate about his films and the radical political content. The writings of Franz Fanon would seem to be central to his standpoint whilst stylistically the films use montage, both visual and aural, to create their effect. But seeing them in the UK (and likely elsewhere) has always been difficult. Soleil Ȏ, Les ‘Bricot Négres’ vos voisons (1974) and Sarraounia have been screened cinematically in the UK. Channel 4 screened the three films shown in Bologna in its ‘Africa Film’ season in the 1980s, but Sarraounia was cropped to Aacademy ratio.
The Foundation also continued its work in restoring Cuban classics. This year we had Lucía (1968). The film directed by Humberto Solás and also scripted by him together with Julio Garcia Espinosa and Nelson Rodriguez, is a fairly epic work with three stories and running 160 minutes (DCP). The three tales present three women of the same name, from 1895, 1933 and in the present.
“Lucia is not a film about women, it’s a film about society. But within society, I chose the most vulnerable character, the one who is more transcendentally affected at any given moment by contradictions and change. ” (Humberto Solás, quoted in the Catalogue).
There were also two films by Tomás Gutiérrez Aléa restored by the Academy Film Archive: Una pelea Cubana contra los demonios / A Cuban Fight Against Demons (1971 – DCP) and Los Sobrevivientes / The Survivors (1970). The programme was rounded off by a selection of ICAIC Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano (1960 – 1970): the complete series has been restored and digitised by the French INA and is available on their website. This is clearly a welcome archival source: my main reservation is that it seems that INA have bought and hold possession of the archive, which would be better retained and controlled in Cuba.
‘The Survivors ‘
There was a programme of films related to the French writer, ‘Colette and Cinema’. This included documentaries about her; films based on her writing; films that she reviewed as a critic; and films that she worked on providing French sub-titles for foreign language films. One of the famous films from her writings is Gigi: but the festival screened the 1949 French version, directed by Jacques Audry. This seems closer to the spirit of Collette’s writing than the Hollywood musical.
“Gigi opened the way to films focused on the subordination of make characters to female ones ….” (Émilie Cauquy in the Catalogue).
A popular treat was Divine (1935), based on her novella and with dialogue by Collette. The film has a rich representation of the French music-hall, but it was the stylish direction of Max Ophuls that made the film stand out. Her critical work was represented by Mater Dolorosa, directed by Abel Gance, another film from 1917. Collette had some reservations about the style and characterisations but
“I applaud a new use of the ‘still life’, the touching use of props, as in the fall of the veil on the floor.” (College quoted in the Catalogue).
The film is a marital melodrama and was relatively successful on release,. The cinematography of Léonce-Henri Burel is reckoned one of the films outstanding qualities.
The regular programme ‘The Time Machine’ focused on the year of 1897, right back in the pioneer days of cinema,. Both the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès featured here. The notable Lumière programme was ‘Palestine in 1896’, a ‘land without Zionists’. And there was a programme of film originated on 68mm by American and British Mutoscope Biograph, now presented on 35mm.
Another regular programme ‘The Space Machine’, included both Mexican and Iranian films of the past. The Mexican programme included Dos Monjes / Two Monks from 1934 (DCP). The restoration also involved The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project. Most of the film was flashbacks prior to the monastery setting that opened the film. What stood out in a melodramatic tale was the style, which was at time expressionist and at time surrealist: visually potent. The stand-out film in the programme was Maclovia (1948), the name of the heroine played by Maria Felix and opposite Pedro Armendáriz as José Maria. The film is set on the Island of Janítzio where an indigenous people have their own mores and also suffer the contempt and oppression of the European élite. The film was directed by Emilio ‘El Indio’ Fernández working with the great cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. The latter’s use of the camera and lighting, together with what seemed to be all the fishing nets from around Mexico, was beautiful, especially as we happily had a 35mm print.
‘Maclovia ‘
I was less struck by the ‘Teheran Noir: The Thrillers of Samuel Khachikian’. Working in the developing days of the Iranian film industry Khachikian was clearly seeking out the conventions of film production and a style appropriate for the Iranian world of the time. The only title I watched was Chahar Rah-E Havades / Crossroad of Events (1955). The story follows a young man tempted into crime by his desire for a young woman. The tale was fairly conventional and the style did not really seem to suit the melodrama.
The Festival offers all sorts of other pleasures. One of these are the evening screenings in the Piazza Maggiore. A large screen offers open air cinema to thousands of people. There is a screening every night, unless the weather intervenes. The opening night saw the presentation of Jean Virgo’s classic L’Atalante (1934) accompanied by A propos de Nice (1930), part of a programme on this French filmmaker. By the end of the week a fellow French filmmaker Agnès Varda introduced her new film Visages Villages (2017). In between there were a number of digital screenings and two on 35mm; the famous Battleship Potemkin / Bronenosec Potëmkin (1925) with a full orchestral accompaniment; and then in a lighter vein The Patsy USA 1928) starring Marion Davies.
On three evenings the Piazzetta Pasolini was the site of screenings projected from a 1930s Carbon-Arc projector,. Therese events are equally popular and the particular palette from carbon arc through 35mm prints is a delight. The opening screening featured Addio Giovinezza! / Goodbye Youth (Italy 1918). The film was directed by Augusto Genina who was the subject of a programme of screening at the Festival. This was, as the title suggests, a bitter-sweet comedy. The young protagonist leaves his small town to attend Turin university. Not an engaging figure though, he exploits both his student friend and a young woman with whom he has a romance.
‘Goodbye Youth ‘
There were all sorts of other exciting and/or interesting films in the Festival. There was a retrospective of the US independent filmmaker Bill Morrison. I had seen many of the films when he visited the Bradford Film festival, so this was one of the choices I missed. One recurring programme is ‘The Cinephiles Heaven’. This included the fine restoration of Kean ou Désordre et génie / Edmund Kean, Prince Among Lovers (1924) from the Cinémathèque française which I had seen at the 2016 Le Giornate del Cinema Muto. I was able to revisit Trouble in Paradise (USA 1932). This is one of the most delightful comedies by Ernst Lubitsch, with Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins and Kay Francis offering beautifully modulated performances. I also watched The Asphalt Jungle (USA 1950, on 4K DCP), John Huston’s fine crime/noir thriller, with an outstanding characterisation by Sterling Hayden.
‘Una Dominica a Bologna’. This was a varied and fascinating selected of ‘Sunday’ titles. I had to forgo seeing Menschen am Sontag / People on Sunday (Germany 1930) another time. But I did recommend to an Italian friend that he must see It Always Rains on Sunday (UK 1947, DCP).
‘Universal Pictures: the Laemmle Junior Years was a follow-up to the first programme in 2016. There were films directed by Lois Weber, Tod Browning, James Whale and Frank Borzage. ‘The Two Faces of Robert Mitchum’ included the classic film noir Out of the Past (1947) and Home from the Hill (1960). ‘In Search of Color: Kinemacolor and Technicolor’ featured films from as early as 1907 right up to the 1950s: there were the classic Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and Rancho Notorious (1952), plus three of the melodramas directed by Douglas Sirk in the same decade. And there was a programme dedicated to William K. Howard ‘Rediscovering a Master Stylist’. These were films from C20th Fox, including the much written about The Power and the Glory (1933, 4K DCP). The other featured filmmaker was ‘Watchful Dreamer: The Subversive Melancholy of Helmut Käutner’. His first film was an actor in 1932, then he took up scriptwriting and direction in 1939. He worked through the war years and on into the post-war industry up until 1977.
Unter den Brücken / Under the Bridges (1945/49 – one of those films which was released after the end of the war). There was little sense of the conflict going on around the filming. The story was fairly conventional, two friends running a barge were both attracted to a young waif who fell in their way. However, the film was finely constructed and there were excellent sequences by cinematographers Igor Oberberg and M. Wolfgang Webrum of the canals and especially the bridges that cross them. Ludwig !!. – Glanz und Ende Eines Königs / Mad Emperor: Ludwig II looked good but suffered by comparison with the Visconti film. And there was no Romy Schneider and no dog. Das Glas Wasser / A Glass of Water (1960) was set in C18th Britain, the reign of Queen Anne. It was very much in the style of 1960s tongue-in-cheek period comedy: reminiscent in some ways of The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (UK 1965).
‘Under the Bridges ‘
This only gives a sense of part of the Festival but you can check out the complete programme of titles.
The final screenings saw rounds of applause for the organisers and volunteers who worked on the Festival. It ran remarkably smoothly given the complexity of the venues and programming. There was also applause for the team of musicians who provided accompaniments for all the films from the Silent Era. The majority added to the films without overpowering them. There was one guitar accompaniment which I found rather over-the-top. And the projection teams did pretty well with the range of formats for screenings.
The weather, 30% some days, and the queues were an inevitable part of a summer festival. Less acceptable were problems with people using electronic gadgets. There were merciful few ring tones in the auditoriums but there were quite a number of members who seemed to need to check their phones/tablets for the time or something similar; or even for texting. The worst culprits were a few recalcitrant’s who used their machines to take pics during the actual films. One person took something like 20 stills or video clips during a two reel film running only 28 minutes. I did report her but I was disappointed that she did not appear in the stocks in the Piazzetta Pasolini rather in the manner of Maud Hansson in 1957. Mariann Lewinsky, a redoubtable programmer presence in the Festival, did ask patrons to desist before the Carbon Arc screenings, but I think this was the only example of warning given during the Festival. I think for the future they organisers need to introduce some notices before screenings to try and prevent this.
So we now await for 2018. Apart from Battleship Potemkin we only had four pre-revolution features from Russia and a short Danish animation in the 1917 ‘Film and Politics’ section. I hope we will get a revisiting of Soviet films as we pass the Centenary year of the Great October Revolution.
The Case for Global Film 