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 againat 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
encompassingalmost inevitabledimension.
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 publics collective dreams about
the world and its future. The film archivists
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 targetsrestoration
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.