The intense activity undertaken during the year by the 21st Mostra Internazionale del Cinema Libero concludes as usual with the sixth edition of II Cinema Ritrovato. Of all the festivals produced by the Mostra, Il Cinema Ritrovato is the most important. In a symposium organized by the Mostra in 1976, we expressed the hope that festivals would become permanent cultural institutions. Il Cinema Ritrovato represents the result of this idea, because it is a joint effort between the Mostra and the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna.
The choice to give life to a festival of an archival and historical character (one of three festivals of its kind held in the world, the others being “Cinémemoire” in Paris and “Le giornate del cinema muto” in Pordenone), this choice is the result of the meeting between a constant search for emerging phenomenon by the Mostra with the vocation for restoration. This vocation is a manifestation of the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna, its primary function being an institution of research, conservation and the transmission of the history of the cinema.
Il Cinema Ritrovato offers the opportunity for archivists, historians and scholars of the world to see the fruits of its research. Its work which is also the fruit of relationships with institutes, universities and scholars within the cinemagraphic community and also with institutions from other disciplines. Disciplines that are directly related to the cinema but also to sociology.
The foundation of the work, which has been defined clearly in this edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato, is a rapport between cinema and its history, a rapport that has its roots in its pre-history (the so called pre-cinema) that uses the typical instruments of the archeaological sciences. The rapport between the cinema and history must be intended in the sense of a rapport not casual with the history of culture but more generally with the history tout court.
This edition follows and defines better the way of the last edition in which the Silent Italian Cinema was compared with the culture of its time (see: the book Sperduto nel buio, edited by Renzo Renzi, published by Cappelli). In the last edition along with the section on the Silent Italian Cinema was the section dedicated to the American Cinema During World War Two. This year II Cinema Ritrovato will put a stronger emphasis on the historical and theoretical relationship between the passage from silent to sound production with that of The Totalitarian Cinema. In the respect of how Europe took possession of the technical innovations of the sound cinema, making it the basic instrument for the persuasion of the masses and to make the European way into a cultural industry (see: the essay by Pietro Bonfiglioli in the book Il cinema dei dittatori, edited by Renzo Renzi, published by Grafis the book that accompanies the edition).
The Totalitarian Cinema is a matter of a specific rapport between the history of the cinema and political history. The evidence of this rapport is offered to us through cinemagraphic materials (films and documentaries of which European dictators of the 30’s had a direct influence). These materials are of extraordinary interest; because they were discovered in archives and then restored for making them accessible and to make it possible for these films to be viewed from different perspectives. It is a firm point that the rapport of the cinema with its own history is defined inside the synchronic rapport with the culture of the technical age and inside of the diachronic rapport with history in general. Only in this way can the cinema get out from itself without loosing its own specificity. The cinema can establish a non content rapport with the world, so that the cinema is liberated from the conditions between specialistic disciplines. In this way the activity of a film archive could have a profound effect without the passivity of only conserving or the monotony in the repetition of the rite of the spectacles. For this result it was necessary for the Cineteca to construct a series of institutional relationships without which II Cinema Ritrovato could not be possible. A fundamental relationship has been established with The Department of Film Studies of the University (DAMS). From this collaboration a series of screenings connected with seminars at the University were born dedicated to the passage from silent to sound film. Necessary also was the collaboration with the “Instituto regionale per i beni culturali” with which a conference on the function of the film archive of a museum has been organized. This conference is the first of its kind though this type of research has long been a part of our festival. Of interest also is the relation begun this year with the Teatro Comunale where the prestigious conclusion will take place. Basic also is the participation of the most important Italian archives (most of all the Cineteca Nazionale) and foreign archives.
We can consider II Cinema Ritrovato a festival of all international archives. Not only because it programs in its traditional section “Ritrovati e Restaurati”/ “Recovered & Restored” so many films recently preserved and restored; not only because many Archives help the Festival by lending rare and precious prints and by staring preservation works for the purpose of presenting them in Bologna, but mostly because of the active participation of these film archives that collaborate generously with us on the research that make our Festival possible.

If the rapport between cinema and history with this meeting of historians is the brain of II Cinema Ritrovato, then the institutional network that the Cineteca of Bologna has created with the archives of the world is the heart.