The Cinephiles’ Heaven
[2019]
Our evening screenings in Piazza Maggiore have become the stuff of legend, with thousands of eyes transfixed on a gigantic screen, surrounded by majestic architecture and boundless love for the cinema. Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin will be lighting up the big screen in Piazza Maggiore in two cine-concerts. Released in 1928 within a few months of each other, The Cameraman and The Circus are the perfect expression of silent film’s last season and of an art that reached the height of its artistic power right before succumbing to the revolution of sound. Both films will be presented with a live performance by the Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna conducted by Timothy Brock. There are many masterpieces selected for Piazza this year, including Miracle in Milan, Easy Rider and Luis Buñuel’s harrowing Mexican masterpiece Los olvidados (The Young and the Damned). Other hypnotic cinematic journeys will take you through Rome (Fellini’s Roma) and into the heart of darkness (Francis Ford Coppola’s new version of Apocalypse Now). These will be screened in the Piazza, along with some other absolute classics of the canon. We will welcome some exquisite guests, who have been closely involved with making or restoring these films, introducing their gems for us.
Edition History
Never shown before on a screen of this size, Bicycle Thieves, perhaps ‘the’ masterpiece of neorealism, will reverberate with new emotional power as we watch the adventure of a poor father in post-war Italy, his wanderings captured by the camera of De Sica, whose work with Zavattini reaches its artistic peak in this film. We can also expect a new experience and sensations from the screening of The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman’s great medieval fable, a danse macabre brilliantly lit by one of the greatest photographers of all time, Gunnar Fischer. The film overflows with visual imagery that is literary, popular, tragic, farcical, horrid and carnal. And that is not all: Marcello Mastroianni in the unforgettable role of Baron Cefalù in Pietro Germi’s Divorce Italian Style, one of the films that exported an idea of Italy (part critical observation and part stereotype); The Deer Hunter, the most unforgiving and allegorical film of post-Vietnam American cinema; the rediscovery of the Mexican movie Rosauro Castro.
Gilda (1946) by Charles Vidor • Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) by Vittorio De Sica • Rosauro Castro (1950) by Roberto Gavaldón • Madame de… (The Earrings of Madame de…, 1953) by Max Ophuls • Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal, 1957) by Ingmar Bergman • The Apartment (1960) by Billy Wilder • Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style, 1961) by Pietro Germi • The Deer Hunter (1978) by Michael Cimino
Photo: The Deer Hunter
Once again, evening after evening, newly restored films, new and unforgettable film experiences. Saturday 24th will kick off with the most famous dive into a river, and the most famous pillow fight in the history of cinema: L’Atalante and Zéro de conduite by Jean Vigo, two unmissable films on the eternal youth of amour fou and the irrepressible anarchy of childhood. On Friday 23rd, there will be an exclusive screening of the most cutting and romantic coming-of-age story of New American Cinema, The Graduate; and during the week the Californian summer of love in the memorable documentary by Pennebaker Monterey Pop; then on Sunday 2nd July, the legendary photographer Bruce Weber will present Let’s Get Lost, the poignant ‘portrait’ of jazz musician Chet Baker.
Zero de conduite (Zero for Conduct, 1933) by Jean Vigo • L’Atalante (1934) by Jean Vigo • The Graduate (1967) by Mike Nichols • Monterey Pop (1968) by D.A. Pennebaker • Let’s Get Lost (1988) by Bruce Weber
Photo: Monterey Pop by D.A. Pennebaker (1968)
