Now in its 40th edition, Il Cinema Ritrovato has swollen to become a true labyrinth of cinema, a Borgesian garden of forking paths that one goes to get lost in. The festival takes place over nine days across 10-or-so theaters and comes replete with a 500-page catalog that weighs you down like a rock as you shuffle through the porticoed streets of Bologna between movies. It’s a cinephile’s dream, and it’s hard to describe how magical it feels to watch hundred-year-old silent films or experimental Armenian movies amongst thousands of people seated in the Piazza Maggiore next to a gorgeous 500-year-old Italian cathedral.
The title of the festival translates to “the cinema rediscovered,” and its overwhelming breadth offers a unique opportunity to move past your own film-watching habits and embrace the unknown. With hundreds of titles in the program, there’s inevitably a point (around the festival’s midway) where I almost entirely give up on all of my planning and rationality; I simply let intuition and coincidence decide what movies I’ll watch and walk into screenings with little expectation or foresight. Quoting German theorist Aby Warburg, one of the festival directors advised during the opening ceremony that “the book you need is always right next to the one you’re looking for.” At Il Cinema Ritrovato I tried to ignore my own wants and let the pursuit of discovery show me what I was really seeking. Here are four highlights which not only amazed, but, in true Il Cinema Ritrovato form, surprised me.
Pakeezah (Kamal Amrohi, 1972)
The movie of the festival that brought me closest to Stendhal syndrome, Pakeezah is a sumptuous Urdu musical set in Northern India. Shot over 15 years as the director Kamal Amrohi kept restarting production to move from black-and-white to Eastmancolor and eventually CinemaScope, the movie has a George Cukor-like conception of how precise visual beauty can craft layers of emotional depth beyond the narrative. Its story is a tragic romance between a courtesan, Sahibjaan (Meena Kumari), and a man, Salim (Raaj Kumar), who leaves her a love letter after glimpsing her feet on a train. He calls her “Pakeezah,” or “the pure one,” even as she tries running away from him out of shame over her past. Working on lavish sets depicting opulent mansions and massive street scenes, Amrohi utilizes a breathtaking mastery of space, depth, color, and camera movement. The various dances we see Sahibjaan perform as a courtesan are rendered with a sublime, divergent sense of stillness and movement: glacial tracking shots over large, nearly empty chambers contrast with Kumari’s deliberate, methodical spins to create rhythms that are hypnotic and filled with poetic overtones. Whole sequences consist of nothing but camera movements through empty palace rooms––dolly shots around fountains, mirrors, curtains billowing in the wind; crimson carpets with intricate gold lace; the moon in the sky––and its purely aesthetic textures were enough to nearly move me to tears.
L’Enfant Du Paris (Léonce Perret, 1913)
Giving proof to Martin Scorsese’s quip that “whatever you do now that you think is new was already done in 1913,” Léonce Perret’s L’Enfant Du Paris is a work of filmic craft on the highest level that changed my understanding of what cinema’s first decades look like. Telling of the search for a small girl orphaned and then kidnapped after her father is presumed dead in a colonial war, its plot echoes Dickens while looking forward to the crime serials of Louis Feuilluade, who served as producer. Though largely a melodrama, and a very effective one at that, L’Enfant Du Paris would be remarkable in any period for how gracefully it pulls off multiple contrasting tonal registers. From thrilling chases across the streets of Paris to documentary street scenes of lower-class saloons to small comic interludes––the film continually moved in surprising new directions without ever losing its emotional thread. In one of the most striking moments, Bosco, a side character who met the girl while she was kidnapped, unexpectedly becomes the narrative focus for the second half of the plot. Suspense even slowly gives way to leisurely sentimentality when the trail runs cold in Nice and he spends days meandering around the city, broke and crying whenever he passes a doll shop because it reminds him of the girl. Accompanied by a wonderful score from Gabriel Thibaudeau on piano and Fabiana Sommariva on English horn, L’Enfant Du Paris epitomized the Il Cinema Ritrovato viewing experience for me in quality, novelty, and revelatory wonder.
By the Law (Lev Kuleshov, 1926)
Directed by Lev Kuleshov, who is effectively known as the inventor of psychological editing with the Kuleshov effect, By the Law is a bleak morality tale based on a Jack London novel. Set in the Yukon Territories, it’s a frontier thriller about a group of prospectors overtaken by madness and murderous instincts on the eve of winter. Snowed and flooded into their cabin for an entire season, the surviving prospectors grapple with their own morality while watching over a murdering friend who they wait to bring before the law. Filled with some of the greatest faces of Soviet silent cinema at their most contorted and grotesque (Alexandra Khokhlova, Vladimir Fogel, and Pyotr Galadzhev are the leads) plus beautiful chiaroscuro cinematography that takes good advantage of natural landscapes––ice-breaking, trees blooming, torrential rainstorms––By the Law is an atmospheric wonder undergirded by layers of rich philosophical allegory. Brutal and swift like the best pulp art, it’s filled with moments of quick action surrounded by slow descents into regret and moral confusion. While the crimes committed are clear-cut and wrong, Kuleshov fills the proceedings with a heavy sense of ambivalence and fatalism, letting his best characters give into their worst sides and his worst characters demonstrate their most human features so that no one comes out clearly good or evil. The law, for its part, becomes an increasingly obscure and senseless force in absentia, a defining order that, in Kafka-esque fashion, never quite appears, but rules over everything.
Lady in the Dark (Mitchell Leisen, 1944)
A retrospective dedicated to an undersung auteur of the Hollywood studio system is becoming a staple of Il Cinema Ritrovato. This year’s focus on Mitchell Leisen offered a chance to reevaluate a career whose reputation rests almost entirely on being unrecognized and written off. Often eclipsed by the two best-known collaborators, Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, Leisen’s relegation to Andrew Sarris’ “Lightly Likable” category in The American Cinema seems like a curse that might never wear off. While I must admit, after the six films of his I saw, to walking away convinced that Sarris was largely right, what I did discover was how interesting, if highly imperfect, Leisen’s works often are.
A perfect case in point is Lady in the Dark, a Ginger Rogers vehicle that is half a splendorous technicolor musical and half a creaky workplace comedy rife with unfunny jokes and misogyny. Rogers plays Liza Elliott, a fashion magazine editor who goes to psychoanalysis to try to overcome her terrible anxiety. The doctor, ultimately and eye-rollingly, tells her she needs to embrace her womanly side, but before that he asks to hear about her dreams, each of which initiates a fantasy sequence set to Kurt Weill music and Ira Gershwin songs. The less said about the non-fantasy scenes the better, but Leisen, who began his career as a costume designer and art director, has a wonderful eye for visual design and the sumptuous studio sets are Lady in the Dark‘s real attraction. From a monochromatic blue ballet to a 30-foot-high gold wedding cake waltz to a circus tent filled with bizarre puppets and Ginger Rogers in a stunning crimson mink dress lined with gold––allegedly the most expensive costume ever created at the time––the film is pure brilliance if you shut your ears to the script and only open your eyes. A pretty movie does not, however, necessarily make for an interesting one; what actually renders Lady in the Dark worthwhile is an inherent, almost subliminal tension between these lavish sequences, which are all surface yet purport to give a sense of depth to Liza, and the regressively dull real-life material, which has little in the way of surface pleasures and too much expository explanation. There’s a schizophrenic nature to this film, its two registers never able to fully complement each other even though they’re ostensibly about one another, and the whole thing comes across as slightly incoherent, never in full control of itself. Yet in this way, it’s also true to itself—a more interesting, authentic psychoanalytical object than many other contemporary films that demonstrate a more coherent grasp of Freudian psychology.
