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Festival Il Cinema Ritrovato 2004

Cineteca del Comune di Bologna and the Mostra Internazionale del Cinema Libero
3-10 July, 2004; Bologna, Italy

Reviewed by Michael Punt

Mpunt@easynet.co.uk

At first glance, a festival of films that have recently been restored may seem a rather esoteric event that is probably more of a curiosity than anything else. After all film restoration attracts a very small and well connected constituency of people whose drive and fascination with film history is without exception exclusive and all consuming. One reason for this situation is that all the materials that underpin the discussion take time to view just to establish their significance. And then of course when something important does come up it has to be looked at it all over again——at least half a dozen times to discover why they may be worth studying. For the past two decades this has been made much easier by the VCR which not only allows the film scholar to view on demand but also enables variable speeds from fast forward to freezer frame, something that earlier scholars could only experience at the viewing table in an archive (at enormous expense). The benefits of electronic technologies have been manifest in the growth of interest in cinema studies in universities (and schools) and the growth of a critical mass of published material that have created a certain independence in Film Studies from more inclusive discourses (such as media studies). The aesthetic losses incurred by these gains are, in comparison, relatively minor, but it is well to be reminded of other more important reductions that the electronic replacement of cinema history can effect. In the first place, reducing film to an image (with or without sound) encourages the current academic hegemony of Visual Culture which erodes the experiential differences that are part and parcel of the creation of meaning. Watching film, for example, not only takes time, but also has a corporeal impact as the viewer may get noticeably hungry or hot (for example) moreover, up until the 1990s a movie was a product intended to be viewed in a public space, in the dark, and in the company of an audience who had gone out of their way to experience it. A quite separate experience (no more or less valid) from watching a tape.

For most of the 20th century the cinema meant a collective and public interaction with technology that was extended into other technological media such as music, print, fashion, and so forth. Whatever differences cinema audiences came away with in the shape of perceptions of stars and stories, they almost all shared the same ideas about technology as an all encompassing——almost inevitable——dimension. Moreover for all the anxiety technological change produced, in the cinema technology made the impossible plausible. Restoring a film, then, is as much an act of material recovery as an archaeological reconstruction of an earlier imagination, not that of the directors, actors, or writers but the public’s collective dreams about the world and its future. The film archivist’s function is not just to restore film but also to recover the popular consciousness of an earlier technological environment.

It must always be remembered in this context that the cinema, until quite recently, was the intersection of architecture (bricks and mortar) and film (celluloid and acetate) where art, technology and audiences comprising ordinary people met and interacted. There can be no definitive version of what this idea meant (just as there can be no definitive version of a film). Recovering old movies is not a nostalgic indulgence but an ongoing interpretative and discursive act only made possible by successive generations continually looking at the films in order to use history as a tool in the ongoing exploration of what it means to be human. As a consequence to loose film material is to loose crucial evidence of what the majority of people thought and/or imagined when they were not working (and possible even when they were supposed to be working). To loose cinema, that is to stop watching film as film (strip) is to abandon the desires of ordinary people to the generalised top down history of culture that the humanities of the late twentieth century set itself against.

It seems unthinkable that in the early 21st century, less than a decade after the intellectual struggle to elevate popular perception as a crucial determinant of history, important film material is either being destroyed, (and/or actively allowed to deteriorate), or being preserved frozen in vaults like so much nuclear waste. National Archives, the repositories of film history, are suffering budgets cuts while at the same time many are having to fulfil arbitrary volumetric targets——restoration by the meter regardless of its significance. Laboratories that were used by national archives in the past are beginning to close through lack of work, which means soon, even with a more enlightened approach, there simply will not be the technical capacity to save film. Consequently, most responsible archivists are doing what they can and placing the rest of the material in safe storage. But this, as they will all agree, is unsatisfactory because film has to be viewed over and over again otherwise it is just so much plastic. History is about looking back from where you stand now and each generation has to learn to read the past and to cast their own critical eye over the assumptions previous scholars may have carried forward. Moreover, each national film archive is a material manifestation of what it means to be a creative. It is a collection of film material and a statement about a shared set of cultural values concerning film, technology, art, and the human imagination. Comparing approaches say between US, British, and Austrian archives reveals at once quite different understandings of what it means to make films and be an artist. Neither has a privileged claim, but current policy of restoration by the metre will obliterate difference and cast us as barbarians to later historians who may value human creative activity more than we appear to at the moment.

If for nothing else Il Cinema Ritrovato is worthwhile because not only does it provide an intellectual exchange for archivists, historians, and enthusiasts, but reminds us that movies must be watched to have any meaning. Given the diversity of cinema programming over a mere eight days is, of course, the difficulty; steering a course between idiosyncratic taste and opportunity is the trick of a good festival, and by and large Il Cinema Ritrovato performs this difficult task well, and details of the programme and its stranding are online (
http://www.cinetecadibologna.it/programmi/05cinema/ritrovato.htm). This year, for the second year running three cinemas were used along with open air public screenings in the evenings. This type of presentation allowed for greater coverage (including a section on endangered 70mm film), but it did mean that some attendees never actually met or saw each other, particularly since each venue specialised on a topic. Anyone interested in early cinema, for example, spent most of their time in one cinema while those whose fascination was artists’ films stayed in another, and yet, of course, the continuity of interest between the audiences is crucial if we are to understand either. This format seems an intractable problem as Peter von Bagh, the Director, admits, yet it is one that needs to be overcome if the wider implications of film preservation, that is the recovery of the story of human imagination and its interpretation of technology, is not to be overrun by a Whig history. Archives are culturally remote and lonely places inhabited by unusual and often obsessive people taking care of objects discarded by most of us. As a consequence, the demise of film history might seem like a storm raging around an ivory tower, but we might see that if this battle for the evidence of our own imagination is lost to the current fashion for targets and mere accountancy, then we are gambling with our own history (and our own future vision). Festivals that turn film strips into cinema such as Il Cinema Ritrovato possible and the more specialised Il Cinema Muto in Sacile are all that stands between the understanding of popular ideas and their oblivion; the vision and funding that supports them is to be applauded.

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