Il Cinema Ritrovato XXXVII edizione (Bologna 2023 Catalog)

Cover photo: Damiano Damiani: Quién sabe? / A Bullet for the General / Yo soy la revolución / El Chuncho, quien sabe? / Naurava paholainen (IT 1967)  with Lou Castel (Bill "Niño" Tate), Klaus Kinski (El Santo), Martina Beswick (Adelita), Gian Maria Volontè (El Chuncho Muños).

Il Cinema Ritrovato XXXVII edizione : Bologna 24 giugno – 2 luglio 2023

Catalogo
Supervisione: Gian Luca Farinelli, Ehsan Khoshbakht, Mariann Lewinsky, Cecilia Cenciarelli.
Cura editoriale: Alice Autelitano, Alessandro Cavazza, Gianluca De Santis con l'assistenza de Nora Diofili
Grafica: Mattia Di Leva con la collaborazione di Elena Nannetti

Soft cover, 448 pp.
Bologna: Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, 2023

"Madamina, il catalogo è questo!"

This catalog is no leporello but a weighty tome, brilliantly illustrated, with original texts from internationally leading experts, a keepsake, a significant contribution to international film literature.

It is possible to see but a fraction, and during the festival there is no time to read, so I start reading tomorrow on my way back home from Bologna, to learn what I missed.

GUIDA AL CINEMA RITROVATO 2023 / Cecilia Cenciarelli, Gian Luca Farinelli, Ehsan Khoshbakht, Mariann Lewinsky

EVENTI SPECIALI
Omaggio a Joe Dante
Omaggio a enrico ghezzi
Omaggio a Jonathan Nossiter
Omaggio a Nan Goldin
Omaggio a Ruben Östlund
Zeffirelli 100

LA MACCHINA DEL TEMPO
Il secolo del cinema: 1903 / Mariann Lewinsky e Karl Wratschko
Cento anni fà: 1923 / Oliver Hanley
Progetto Samama Chikli / Mariann Lewinsky
Dive russe in Italia / Tamara Shvediuk e Federico Striuli
Documenti e documentari / Gian Luca Farinelli

LA MACCHINA DELLO SPAZIO
Teinosuke Kinugasa: dall'ombra alla luce / Alexander Jacoby e Johan Nordström
Cinemalibero / Cecilia Cenciarelli – texts by Bahram Beyzaie, Cecilia Cenciarelli, Mohamed Challouf, Ehsan Khoshbakht, Marco Lena, Tiziana Manfredi e Aboubakar Sanogo
Elfi Mikesch: filmare è dedizione / Martin Koerber
I colori del Cinema Ritrovato 2023
L'ultimissima risata: commedie tedesche dell'esilio: 1934–1936 / Lukas Foerster
Leopold Lindtberg: la Svizzera e il mondo / Frédéric Maire

IL PARADISO DEI CINEFILI
Ritrovati e Restaurati / Gian Luca Farinelli
Anna Magnani: l'irripetible / Emiliano Morreale
Rouben Mamoulian: sfumature di desiderio / Ehsan Khoshbakht
Suso Cecchi d'Amico, scrivere su misura / Masolino d'Amico, Silvia d'Amico, Caterina d'Amico
Attraverso la nebbia: Powell prima di Pressburger / James Bell con Ian Christie e Thelma Schoonmaker
16 mm – Piccolo grande passo / Karl Wratschko con André Habib, Marion Brouant, Benoît Charpentier, Garance Fromont, Guillaume Lafleur, Rémi Llorens, Johanne Sloane e Naeje Soquer
Il Cinema Ritrovato Kids e Young

"Osservate, leggete con me!"

Like Midnight Sun Film Festival one week earlier, Il Cinema Ritrovato enjoyed a record year in attendance. Both for four reasons, I would propose: the uncompromising quality of the programming, an advance ticket booking system that guarantees entry to screenings even when queues are long, the graceful commitment of the dedicated staff and the extraordinary joy of the theatrical experience put into relief by a comparison with the dreary remote viewing circumstances of the pandemic years.

The more the merrier!

...

24 JULY 2023

Visiting the festival and reading the catalog, the mission is: film history revisited.

I have now finished reading the catalogue, one month after the festival started. When Il Cinema Ritrovato expanded beyond what was possible to see, and the participation fragmented so that it was no longer possible to meet everybody or even know who was present, I used to be depressed and heartbroken. Now the explosion has magnified beyond heartbreak.

Before this year's festival edition, I decided on the following selection criteria:
- No silents.
- No Piazza Maggiore (with one exception).
- No films that I had seen before. For instance I had seen the Rouben Mamoulian retrospective in the Berlin Film Festival in 1987.

On Tuesday afternoon, I became the victim of theft. After a screening delayed because of overlong introductions, there was a double throng on the alley to Cinema Jolly, people trying to get out and to get in at the same time. In the middle of the throngs was a thief posing as a beggar. She was aggressive, and when she hit me violently, I did not mind, but ten minutes later I realized that she had stolen my wallet during the assault. The kind festival staff helped me immediately to the carabinieri where I filed a report and mortified my credit cards. The process took a few hours, and in the afternoon heat I had no money to buy water, caught a sunstroke and a cold and became bedridden for three days. I could identify with the film I had just seen - The Dupes - and also reconfirm that the "lesson in crime" in Robert Bresson's Pickpocket, about which I had just been reading in Lauri Timonen's mammoth Robert Bresson monograph, was still perfectly au courant. This episode also created a "selection criterium", because I could not see any films in the next three days.

The quality of writing in the catalogs of the Italian heritage festivals keeps rising. They represent the best in film literature, not only as separate introductions to films and themes, but in their constantly evolving sense of history in general, and world cinema as a whole.

Because of the high quality of the writers, it is worth the effort to read the entire catalog with focus and attention. Mounting the festival, the programmers go to the best sources, and every film is revisited or reconsidered also from a technical point of view, as a real, concrete object. In the cinema, form and material is also of the essence, a matter of substance.

One of the tributes was dedicated to Anna Magnani, and La voce umana was included. The image of the Bologna 2023 totebag was the logo of the film in which it's included in letters of fire:

L'amore

That is all you need.