Peter von Bagh

Il Cinema Ritrovato, April-May of 1994 in Bologna, was a wonderful link in the tradition inaugurated in the mother of the modern FIAF congresses - Brighton (1978). It was there when the biblical unity of the FIAF professionals and best film people of all disciplines was demonstrated for the first time. This synthesis of historians, writers, critics, collectors produced some years later the annual miracle of Pordenone - with its conglomeration of the best bunch of film scholars and writers and archivists and restoration specialists on earth getting into one small Italian town spontaneously, compulsively and gracefully, without any of the painful characteristics of a "meeting" or symposium - as well as the Bologna event, which I now visited for the first time and will - after its seven days of hallucination and dreamlike happiness, with "real life" receding into the background as we would have been true-life participants in the ending of Buñuel's Abismos de pasion - continue to visit to the end of my days.

Behind the temptation of the wunderschön town of Bologna (that itself competing strongly with the films) there was another tough paradox. At the same time when the endeavours of FIAF and the creative flowering of Il cinema ritrovato are ideally one and undivided, on the practical level there is a duality with a touch of absolute masochism: some are doomed to the daylight of a symposium, others sit in the sublime dark. That's entertainment? That's schizophrenia! And it's a high mark of self-inflicted cruelty in a situation when more and more FIAF persons seem to share a personal interest of films - which has not always been so, if I remember correctly one body count done on a restaurant table maybe in Lausanne - with, according to the selfish calculation of those counting, less than ten delegates whose interest of films seemed to be real. - In brief, perhaps not an ideal arrangement. (In Brighton, and in Varna that preceded it, the situations did not overlap to this extent if at all.)

The centerpoint of temptations was Italian silents, with beautifully selected examples of genre, divas (Bertini, Menichelli, Borelli), stars, farces, etc. I don't get into details here and only repeat what Gramsci said (commenting on Lyda Borelli): "Observe, remain stupefied, it seems incredible." Certainly so, and I remain enormously grateful for this miraculous flood of images. We were once more reminded that the Italian silents - of all the great national traditions - remain the least commented, the worst known among us foreigners, with (apart from Cabiria) no single films spearheaded and marketed to the pantheons of film histories (partly perhaps because the overall quality of the golden years is so miraculous). The final clou of Bologna, however, seems now to be circulating festivals (as evidenced by its recent programming in San Sebastian): the fireworks of Maciste all'Inferno more than justified Fellini's enchanted memory of it: "I remember a large woman with nude belly, her belly button, her eyes, darkened with make-up, blazing. With an imperious movement of her arm she created a circle of flames around Maciste, he also half naked and with a dove in his hand."

I'll try to group the dreamlike elements of the program, not out of any sense of organisation, but to glimpse the vision of Gianluca Farinelli and his colleagues:

1) "Great" directors are evidently indispensable in the drama of programming. The heavenly messages this time were sent by Fritz Lang (how spontaneously Harakiri, 1919, opens all his great themes!), Frank Capra (who already with The Matinee Idol proved to be the finest comedy mind), King Vidor (Wild Oranges), or - why not - Pastrone who, with his Tigre reale, just hypnotises us with his masterminding of Pina Menichelli and with his views of opera, spectacle and spectators - an original 3-D if there ever was one. - I'll add the name of Abel Gance with due passion but practical reluctance, as the two editions of Mater Dolorosa in a row proved to be a tough sitting, "too much for one man" (to paraphrase the old profound slogan relating to Lorna).

It was good to be reminded that Downhill is the fourth of Hitchcock's great silent quarter, along with The Lodger, The Ring and Blackmail. Hitch gave us another fine experience as The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) was shown with its original Perspecta Sound. As with the 3-D of Dial M for Murder, this was an authentic creative solution, not just a technical curiosity: the high point of the film - The Storm Cloud Cantata and the fears of the American motherhood facing the destiny of the cymbals - thus got its full, pathetic meaning.

2) The next line, the all-too-forgotten artists, was equally enjoyable. Genina and Gallone are certainly known by Italians but for others their oeuvre (incredibly expansive at that) threatens to remain obscure, as is the fate of some other names of Bologna - Meinert, Bonnard, Holger-Madsen, or Boese, with the often-mentioned, seldom-shown Algol (Hans Werckmeister, 1920), about a certain citizen Herne, a story of power and the loss of humanity, with striking similarities to the Mackendrick masterpiece The Man in the White Suit, and with Emil Jannings doing another bravura. A very special mention should be given to a (too?) small retrospective of Arthur Robison's "fantasmagoria": Schatten (experienced with a truly special score by Gabriel Thibaudeau) and two wonderful titles from his British period (when Robison was a neglected colleague of Asquith, Saville and Hitchcock) period - The Informer and Looping the Loop, one of the decisive images of clowns (Werner Krauss!) in the 20s vogue of clown films.

3) Comedies, the regular highlight of Pordenone as well, should perhaps be mentioned apart from the Italian series. It was another bunch of heavenly messages, with all the angels proposing to us something not seen before or after: Cretinetti (André Deed) and the magical movements of a luggage, or some highly inventive views about behaving in the cinema (Cretinetti al cinematografo, 1911), the dog's life of Ernesto Vaser (Rincasare non è sempre facile), or something equally mad from Robinet, or a small item called Le Cottage hanté - with the idea of I soliti ignoti already, as well as a surrealist variation of Chaplin's One A.M.

4) There were more equally short and enjoyable treasures, starting with the very generous Pathé compilation from Holland, which included one of the highlights of the week, L'âme des moulins by Machin - a true hallucination, and visually a startlingly beautiful object from an alien planet also called last century, then adding to the strange and rich visions of the eruption of Etna, the sight of Fernand Sardou himself, "amusing transformations" from the genius mind of Segundo de Chomón, the frivolities and obsessively bad taste of a film called La tentation du Dr Antoine, or more biblically still "Giuseppe Ebreo" himself - or so I felt in my Bologna dream, so very authentic it was.

5) More fragments and more hallucinations - 10 minutes of Emilio Ghione in Dollari e fraks (1919), another 10 minutes of Caserini, 8 minutes of early Lubitsch touch in Der Blusenkönig - fragments, outtakes, rushes, with almost as many bonuses, as evidence the test film of Loren, Alberto Sordi dubbing the voice of Oliver Hardy, or a wonderful outtake of the young Vittorio de Sica trying to convince Americans with "Blue Moon". And it was a simple pleasure to witness the rushes of Welles' Don Quijote - an unfortunate undertaking to the very end, if we think of the most tragically misedited and effectively destroyed version made of it a couple of years ago. Just to see the outtakes makes one remember Jay Leyda's humble and beautiful 5 hour version of another unique effort, Que viva Mexico! - and experience Welles' profound love for the details of Spanish landscape, objects, the culture and the noble simplicity of his images.

A special mention should be made at the sunset of the 20th century. The case was created with a demonstration of Technicolor hosted by Jeffrey Selznick. Various versions of one reel of Duel in the Sun were shown, leaving us amidst humble meditations concerning the implications of our systems not being able to sustain this unforgettable system and now having the Chinese comrades as only true believers and practitioners of it, thus creating the one case of socialism truly saving the most wonderful blossoming of capitalist culture and imagery.

6) One unforgettable program was dedicated to the "great unknown territory of Italian cinema", the documentary, including three strong shorts by Blasetti (including the wonderful Nel Duomo di Milano, 1947), a tragic story by Renzo Renzi, Duando il Po è dolce, about the death of the children of a circus family, the tragedy and humanism of that world in general, not to speak of Ave Maria (Fernando Cercio, 1947), with an impressive combination of holy and everyday.

As evidenced also by Pordenone, the Italians are the best in the world when we come to the silent events requiring a special kind of attention not only towards film history but history and human memory and movements of human mind in general - and what Vittorio Boarini, and Gianluca Farinelli and Nicola Mazzanti did in Bologna was fabulous. One magical presence should be pressed still: "Geografia del precinema", a superb exposition of pre-cinema and the birth of cinema, organised by the writer of "Cent'anni di cinema", the finest one-volume national film history (along with Leyda's immortal Kino), Gian Piero Brunetta.
Thank you so cordially, Bologna. Count me as a regular.