An Identity

The Cinema Ritrovato is a festival of research, which surveys the vast territory of the history of cinema through the work carried out over sixty years by film archives worldwide. Hence its activities, its discoveries and the programme it puts together are the result of the material found, revealed and selected in colla- boration with these film archives. Once again this year the Festival reaffirms its own lines of research: a close look at European cinema from the 1920s onwards, a growing interest in the quality of the musical accompaniments and, underpinning it all, the curiosity, eclecticism and openness to the unexpected which alone can assemble and breathe life into a programme ranging from secret Hitchcock clips to once lost and now recovered Japanese films, from a 1950s clandestine neorealist Losey to a broadcast Orson Welles, from the début in colour of Dreyer to the world première of a sumptuous restoration of The Kid. As this Century comes to an end, the world of film archives is going through a period of important change. Many archives – Amsterdam, Berlin, Bologna, Lisbon, Madrid and Paris are preparing to move into new premises, and this is just the most visible part of a programme of innovations in planning and of profound changes in their activities. They are designing new and diverse projects, often with the aim of broadening and developing the traditional notion of a film archive, yet all with the same goal: that of rescuing from oblivion, in the face of the rise of new technologies, that fragi- le and inevitably dwindling memory which is the cinemato- graphic heritage of our century – a store of images and sounds which for decades the market has squandered and the State neglected (only to discover, just recently, its possible economic potential). How to accomplish this mission, in the century ahead, is a question that requires debate today more than ever before. We would like to think that this year’s Cinema Ritrovato might contribute to the discussion.

Time and Its Rewards

As usual, Il Cinema Ritrovato is impossible, because it demands so much from its public. To be sure, one could make a quick visit, sneaking in, choosing the odd film for a couple of evenings maybe. But if you want to savour its many offerings, the sirens basking among the wealth of films in a programme too unfashionable for any television station to cope with, you will have to give up the first week of July.
This year there are just two principal sections: the regular section of Films Recovered and Restored, and the latest chapter of our exploration of the star-system, launched three years ago with Rodolfo Valentino, Divine Apparitions. The latter, this year, is devoted to the female star in Europe, and next year will examine the birth of the female star in America, with a large exhibition, organised together with the Centre Georges Pompidou, that will take place over the course of several months between Paris and Bologna. Here we offer just some notes on the sections that you will find explained in more detail below.
Divine Apparitions is without a doubt one of the most complex retrospectives we have ever undertaken. It deals with a transnational phenomenon, spans twenty years of production, and takes in names and faces that at the time were as important as they are now forgotten. We have to be selective, and that inevitably means leaving some things out. Our original plan when we started out a year ago, was to show works from all over Europe; but the material we came across taught us that the star phenomenon, born out of Asta Nielsen’s fatal apparition in Denmark, from there rapidly spread along clear and precise lines to Germany, to Italy and, in a different way, to pre revolutionary Russia. Other countries, like France and Great Britain, whose industrial organisation could easily have supported a star system, produced actresses rather than stars. Italian cinema, which has regularly been the focus of our research and the subject of frequent retrospectives, gets only a brief treatment this time. The Divine Apparitions will, therefore, turn out to be almost exclusively German: and it is no mere coincidence that the road to Hollywood during the 1920s will be taken by the Polish Pola Negri, the Swedish Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, to become (Garbo and Dietrich in particular) shining stars in a new firmament. Finally, to launch a discussion of the acting techniques of the female stars of the silent era, you are invited to a colloquium with Erich de Kuyper, Gerardo Guccini, Sabina Guzzanti and Daniel Schmid who will attempt, in the seminar on Monday 5 July, to open new perspectives on a topic as yet poorly explored by film history and criticism.
Films Recovered and Restored is like a huge river, having its source in 1880, emptying into the 1960s, and flowing through a Century of images, rich in varied landscapes and unexpected islands. It is our ‘end of the century’ instalment of a retrospective that has always sought to recapture the secret and splen- dour of a lost vision, to retrieve a capacity for wonderment worn away by time and by the accumulation of too many mediocre images. We thought it natural, therefore, to extend its range this time, to wheedle out gems and at the same time to put together an anthology, taking our leave of the century with nostalgia but without overindulgence. Marey’s chronophotographic gun, the noir B-movie’s dark beauty, Orson Welles’ work for television, Chaplin’s fierce lyricism, the vampires’ oniricism, the MacCarthy era’s nameless cinema (Imbarco a mezzanotte), and a cinema plagued by censorship (La ragazza in vetrina). The end of a century of cinema, and our conviction that there’s still plenty to be tracked down and recovered.