Peter von Bagh

There is, perhaps, a moment when our beloved themes and preoccupations converge: the scope of programming and the scale of the films (with inevitable "masterpieces" from time to time), the unity of cityscape and projections, the selfish professional feeling that you couldn't spend eight days better than this, the simple act of seeing. Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato (29 June - 6 July 1996) came near to that ultimate. I can't stop wondering at the Italian achievement and the way the two festivals specializing in "rediscovered and restored films" - Pordenone and Bologna - manage to activate showings that are more intensive and exciting than any of the forums of the new cinema. Both gather an all-star bunch of archivists, historians, critics, collectors, university luminosos (of whom the Americans seem to come only to Pordenone), and although the events are somehow also intensely different, both have changed, if not the earth, at least our understanding of early film history.

Among these groups I can only offer the testimony of a deranged fan and some guesses about the poetics of the festival - how the young équipe of Bologna (along with the Nederlands Filmmuseum, always a superior agent in the restorations) has proceeded. Instead of repeating what Gian Luca Farinelli, Nicola Mazzanti, Mark Paul Meyer, Ruud Visschedijk write in the beautiful preface of the admirable program booklet, I'll proceed freely from my memories - fully remembering the many times I didn't manage to stay awake.

That's a problem too - it means to be alert 15 hours a day, for eight days, in a situation where there was almost nothing you were likely to drop voluntarily. A Romanian film (Haiduchii) from 1929? - A rare privilege to travel to an unknown country and time that is no more - I saw it finally with great affection, hardly even thinking that it was an important link in the combination of strategies our wizards were offering to us.

Anyway I'll start with the "official" themes - travel (in time, in space) - the travelling generation between Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Austria, Germany...

The selection of the "mitteleuropean" cinema was quite scattered - each touch made you want more - but there was an impeccable intuition behind it (Vittorio Martinelli, the foremost specialist, was one of the fabulous program scouts), and it worked with amazingly few touches. As silent Hungarian cinema will be presented in Pordenone in October, Czechoslovakia (with one of the sensual masterpieces of the late 20s, Hans Tintner's Pasak Holec, Karel Lamac's Dobry Vojak Svejk - along with the Hungarian 1918 adaptation of Anna Karenina, one of the week's many literary adaptations that were more than valid, even inspired) makes the mouth water for further investigations.

Mihály Kertész was represented by the impressive agit-prop short called Jon az ocsem (1919) - gestus refound in the Marseillaise sequence of Casablanca... - and then at the point when he had left Hungary forever. His three Austrian films (Der junge Medardus, Die Lawine, Sodom und Gomorrha, also that rare in its full length) are fabulous first, with many crowning moments (his incredible visual gifts in the spectacle or in the Alpine milieu) but finally disappointing in their basic formlessness and coldness, with Kertész himself clearly in need of the hard hand of Hal Wallis or Darryl Zanuck, at that moment still deeply occupied with the dramaturgy of Rin-Tin-Tin movies.

For a while the German films were in their own class - either rare and welcome occasions like the chance to see at long last Ludwig Beck's INRI - die Katastrophe eines Volkes - a tragic vision of the troubled times -, or an opportunity to see the work of directors that still remain to most of us more just names than a concrete knowledge - Tintner... von Bolvary ...Eichberg... even Wiene. Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame! (Robert Land, 1929) was one of the unlimited pleasures of the week, Frauen, die nicht dürfen (Geza von Bolvary, 1925) a tough film from a director before and after mostly in the midst of his "gnädige, schöne Frau" comedies - a film about the fakes and grotesques of the world of money, about the cruel working of years on the human face, about the inevitable perversion of youth.

The lost continent of Mitteleuropa became thus strangely palpable and familiar so that some views from the outside startled authentically: O destino (Portugal) directed by the Frenchman Georges Pallu, a Chinese picture poem (A Poet from the Sea, 1928). In good programming the old montage principle of "one plus one is now two but 2 plus..." always works, and thus also here even the shorts got very exciting. There were some very feeble copies (an incomprehensible rendering of the always expected Segundo de Chomon) but also a great set of jokes from Fregoli (1898-1903 - saved by the grace of "Lumière"), a fine print of the incredible Pathé film called Un coup d'oeil par étage which as a celebration of voyeurism grows into a missing link between Grandma's Looking Glass and Rear Window... and a rare occasion of the authentic futurist cinema in La Gazza Ladra (or Rivista Luce N. 2) - a unique testimony of its moment, and as such a moment worth the whole trip.

Perhaps there were masterpieces, although that is not so important. Faust, the sublime restoring job of Luciano Berratúa and Filmoteca Española, became a crowning moment only the last afternoon instead of the first evening (when one of the few - the only - sad moment of the festival was experienced, as the lights of Piazza Maggiore and the orchestra sabotaged the noble image). Other great moments were given their full value, and more. Bologna is on its way to set a new standard with wonderful musicians like Maud Nelissen, Paul A. Hensel, Marco Dalpane or inspired groups like Dire Gelt - the music was all in all clearly an inspired result of an overall plan instead of just taking care of single performances one at a time.

The magnificent Rapsodia Satanica was a perfect show to end the week which, from the "masterpiece point of view", included The Lodger, Yiddishe Glikn (the true miracle of the week), then two long lost French masterpieces (or near so), the wholly impressive Belle Dame sans Merci (Germaine Dulac, 1920) and the intensely complicated and intriguing Marcel L'Herbier film about the nature of appearances, truth and illusion - Le vertige which incidentally is frighteningly near the themes of another film of almost the same name - a certain Vertigo...

I experienced especially luminously - some weeks have gone and I can witness their force - the faces - they sure had faces then - from the time when their illumination was general knowledge and when writers like the young Béla Balazs knew that the human face is "der einzige Text", "the only text". Some less known faces were not less interesting than the icons of the century. What about the chance to see Machaty as an actor and think about the "Eigenart" of Czech films emerging already in the late 10s, or to see the all too forgotten Harry Liedke (Ich küsse Ihre Hand...) doing things that we probably suppose were only initiated by Lubitsch with Chevalier as a privileged intrument of his?

Who then were the privileged shadows of Bologna? Marlene Dietrich - as Joâo Benard da Costa whispered knowingly beside me, only one detail separated her from immortality, and that was that her elbows were shown. Conrad Veidt in his very first role - the hypnotic Furcht (which stars Bruno Decarli and throws light on the mystery of the independent creative powers of Robert Wiene), Alla Nazimova and her troubled face in a double role of Capellani's Red Lantern (1922), the fabulous Lyda Borelli in Rapsodia Satanica, Gabriel Gabrio in the midst of the dark mysteries of Le Juif errant, shown in four sequences and thus a true chance to experience a "ciné-roman" of glorious or almost cosmic dimensions... Mozzuhin and the strong, near-intolerable psychic suspense of Protazanov's Justice d'abord (1922), and the most moving of all, the great Solomon Michaels, the assassinated martyr, here such a profoundly humorous and tender person in the unforgettable Yiddishe Glikn (1925).

Rudolph Valentino inspired another suggestive theme - "viaggiosotto le stelle del cinema" - a definition suggestive enough to hold the suspense for the eight very long days, as were also the films of Rodolpho himself. Perhaps this retrospective - dedicated to a local boy who made it - is something to be lived only in Italy. Again, it was not only the masterpieces (Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Son of the Sheik and the unexpected jewel among them, Moran of the Lady Letty) that mattered. The rest was full of suspense, great melodrama and fantastic boudoir behaviour (a fully convincing Armand Duval) and "realist" (a lad from the Lower East Side) and proofs of convincing versatility, moments of love and hate, tenderness and sensualism, pain, masochism and cruelty - and in the midst of it a man with dark problems (the earliest glimpses of him are especially precious) with his role, thus an enigma in the way the "eternal" ones are... Some single images stick to mind, as the extremely rare shots from the weeks following the Russian revolution: nothing very special in them, and that is exactly the point - enough for a correction of the Oktjabr shots that made their way to more than one documentary. Or - INRI - hungry people devouring the guts of a horse in the street -
simple images of the cruelty of world war's aftermath as a ghostly reminder of Rossellini and Germania anno zero... The constant surprise element was essential, along with the gratitude to so many inspired archives. This time the background work of La Cinémathèque Suisse was impressively strong but many others were present as well, with of course La Cinémathèque Française whose contribution in the very last showing of the last evening came like a heaven-sent gift - a restoration of King Vidor's Family Honor (1920).

I mentioned notes. I make them, endlessly, rather like Dr Mabuse in his hospital bed. What happens to us in the dark? It's again Eric de Kuyper, the sublime philosopher of our mutual experiences, who expresses the essential. He writes in the "Cinegrafie 9" about his habit of scribbling notes which he then never consults afterwards, except perhaps exceptionally. "Elles font tout simplement partie de mon plaisir de spectateur, qui n'est complet que quand je puis lui adjoindre le plaisir de l'écriture. Avoir crayonné pendant la vision du film suffit à mon bonheur." That's the word. Happiness was total.