Now Voyageurs: Il Cinema Ritrovato 2021

The night that I arrived in Bologna for the thirty-fifth edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato, I attended an outdoor screening in the Piazza Maggiore, which the festival’s organizers describe without much hyperbole as “the most magnificent cinema in the world.” At dusk, the heat was ebbing and the towers, domes, and battlements darkening against a sky the color of lemon gelato. I soaked up the realization that I was there—after so many interminable months of holing up, staring at my computer or my television under the siege of the coronavirus, I was somewhere else. Then the plaintive wail of bagpipes pierced the hum of the audience, as musicians playing wild, pure, full-throated Northern Italian folk music strolled through the crowd. I was somewhere.

The music formed a perfect overture to an evening that opened with Omelia contadina (Peasant Homily, 2020), a short film by Alice Rohrwacher and the photographer JR, a staged “funeral” for peasant farming, using JR’s signature monumental photographs of ordinary people. Maybe I was softened up by my exhaustion, after the red-eye from New York and a long day of airports, trains, and movie screenings, but I had a lump in my throat watching this solemn eulogy for human-scale stewardship of a biodiverse landscape overtaken by profit-driven industrial monoculture. In my sentimental state, I saw an allegory for Il Cinema Ritrovato itself, a festival that champions the long and diverse history of film, the painstaking work of film restorers and archivists, and the experience of watching movies together in theaters—even if we have to wear masks and sit apart.

The theme of peasant life recurred throughout the week, starting with the opening night’s feature, Alberto Lattuada’s sweeping and earthy Il mulino del Po (The Mill on the Po, 1949). The film traces the turbulent currents in a rural community at a moment when mechanization and social changes are just starting to weaken traditional ways; a pair of young lovers is tragically caught in the middle of bitter conflicts between tenant farmers, land owners, and stubbornly independent millers who live on floating grain mills. Plunging into the river, marshes, wheat fields, and crowds surging in confrontation or revelry, this is cinema of exceptionally vivid physicality and organic flow; it never looks like a period piece or feels like a political tract. It does not romanticize peasants, even when village women bravely stand up to soldiers trying to break their agricultural strike; but the film’s rootedness and clarity made me think about Carlo Levi’s definition of a peasant in Christ Stopped at Eboli, which is what we should all be: “Anyone who does things, loves it, and asks nothing more; everyone who produces.”

During the pandemic lockdown, movies were how most of us traveled. Even now that I was on a real trip—and as my pleasure at being in Bologna underscored my experience of films, the way the deafening buzz of cicadas pulsed through the walls of some theaters, droning beneath the soundtracks—I found myself noticing the different ways that films create a sense of place and movement through space, how they make the audience, in scholar Giuliana Bruno’s wonderful phrasing, not voyeurs but voyageurs.

Few films are more immersive than Araya (1959), Margot Benacerraf’s stunning, lyrical documentary about a remote coastal region of Venezuela where workers harvest salt under a pitiless sun. The film’s only flaw is a voice-over narration that, while eloquent, often feels redundant: the images and actions speak for themselves. Pyramids of salt rise above a landscape that is parched despite the lapping surf and baroque cloudscapes. Women carry heavy buckets of water on their heads, the weight making them walk with a distinctive, fluid grace. People’s gestures are repetitive, rhythmic, and precise: dumping out baskets of salt, mending fishing nets, shaping clay by hand into spherical pots, pounding salt with wooden flails in what looks like a ritual dance. Their graveyards are decorated with white coral and seashells instead of flowers. The narration expounds persuasively on the brutal hardships of this way of life, but when industrial machinery moves in at the end of the film, you cannot help feeling the loss of a great beauty.

Araya was included in this year’s Cinemalibero strand, an annual section devoted to world cinema. Titled “Feminine, Plural,” the program featured ten debut films by pioneering female directors. The centerpiece was Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972), recently restored as part of the African Heritage Film Project. Named after a neighborhood of Luanda, the capital of Angola, which was a birthplace of the movement to liberate the country from colonial rule, it is a cry for justice amplified by its sensual vision of everyday life. The story is sparked by the arrest of a young construction worker (Domingos de Oliveira) whose apparent crime is distributing leaflets. Just before he is violently dragged out of his home by police, there is a tender, tranquil shot gazing down at him and his wife sleeping with their baby between them, an image that haunts the brutal scenes of him being beaten in jail. His wife, the regally beautiful Maria (Elisa Andrade), sets off on foot, with her baby on her back, to plead for his release. The camera watches calmly as she walks away down a long, straight road that crumbles into a shimmering mirage. Her journey unfolds wordlessly, giving us time to admire the stoic elegance of her gestures, the trees checkered with sunlight, the women in brilliantly colored clothes gathered around a village water pump—and this beauty sharpens the anguish as she goes from office to office, wailing for the return of her man, being turned away indifferently by white administrators. This couple’s ordeal unfolds amid a network of militants who pass news by word of mouth, women who gather to comfort and care for Maria and her baby, and children who play in the dusty streets. In the end, the militants gather for a neighborhood dance party, where celebration makes space for mourning, but carries on into the night.

There is a similar vitality in Binka Zhelyazkova’s A byahme mladi (We Were Young, 1961), a semiautobiographical film about a group of young communist partisans during the Nazi occupation of Bulgaria. They are committed antifascists who plan bombings and sabotage, and sew packets of poison into their clothes in case of capture (like Sambizanga, this film culminates with scenes of torture and death in prison), but they are also restless, dreamy, clowning youngsters. Zhelyazkova seems more interested in their moments of failure and doubt, of exuberance and shy yearning, than in their cause. Her dazzling and poetic style is the cause: it is freedom. We Were Young opens with a literal bang, as a shot topples a man in the street and flocks of birds scatter out of the trees, flying in formation like fighter jets. The same kinetic rush comes in a scene of innocent ecstasy, when a young girl in a hand-pedaled wheelchair careens down a steep street, laughing. She snaps photographs of tussling shoeshine boys, babies with rattles, men in gas masks, fascist salutes, clown puppets—and the whirling film freezes to show what her lens has captured. Joy, art, and love are distractions, but also forms of resistance. Near the end, the young man and woman at the center of the story, Dimo and Veska (Dimitar Buynozov and Rumyana Karabelova), search for each other through the blacked-out, deserted streets of Sofia; all we can see is what the beams of their flashlights illuminate, circles of light nosing along the ground. (His nickname for her is “firefly,” and she objects that these creatures’ lights go out too quickly.) The beams meet, merge, and cross, finally lighting each other’s faces, hers wet with tears. This is as romantic a moment as I have ever seen in a movie, achieved with the simplest of means.

Another film by a woman in which walking through city streets becomes a way of recovering historical and personal memory is Annik Leroy’s In der Dämmerstunde—Berlin (Berlin at Dusk, 1980). Shot on 16 mm (and included in the “Great Small Gauges” strand), it follows the filmmaker through a hushed meditation on loneliness, twilight, trains, ruins, hotel rooms, lost love, and the ghosts of World War II. The camera trails behind or alongside her as she plods through interior courtyards, railway stations, snowy roadsides, and an alley beside the Berlin Wall. Words emerge—her own narration, snippets of poetry, and the voices of strangers debating German war guilt—as though she were a needle traveling through the grooves of a record.

As a rule, films made about wars while they’re being fought are propaganda, while ambivalence or resistance surface in retrospect. An exception is Les oliviers de la justice (The Olive Trees of Justice, 1962), a French production directed by the American James Blue, filming with an Algerian crew on the streets of Algiers and the plain of Mitidja during the Algerian War. The conflict is ever-present, but rarely seen. As the camera threads through bustling markets and outdoor cafés, it catches glimpses of police frisking young men, or clearing crowds away from suspected bombs in handbags. The main character is a pied-noir who has settled in France but returns to Algeria to attend to his dying father; he drifts in and out of memories of his childhood on a vast farm where he played with Arab boys amid vineyards and irrigation ditches. The film’s vision of colonialism complicates easy assumptions. It illustrates the blind, violent entitlement of settlers and the pain of natives who “have no country,” but also evokes the depth of visceral attachment that can bind colonizers to a place. At the heart of this story, somewhat inchoate, is the difference between believing land belongs to you and belonging to it.

What all these films demonstrated was that watching movies does not have to be a static, passive, or disembodied experience. Though projected on screens, they can be an antidote to the remoteness of our screen-dominated life. The key thing is how you watch, not where you watch—yet being in Bologna helped: the festival instills an intrepid spirit of discovery, and the place itself stimulates the senses with its colors and textures, its architecture and its food. Many of the movies that took me places were the furthest thing from escapist “armchair travel.” In keeping with the city’s reputation for its fiery left-wing politics (one reason it is nicknamed “La Rossa,” or “the Red,” also the color of its tiled roofs), the festival was rich in films about the lives of the poor and anatomies of class conflict. Characters laid out lucid arguments about how capitalism enforces inequality in both Sambizanga and the Bertolt Brecht–penned Kuhle Wampe, oder: Wem gehört die Welt? (To Whom Does the World Belong?, 1933)—though what stuck with me most from the latter, a dynamic film that bites like acid, is the bicycle ballet of unemployed workers moving like shoals of fish through the city as they desperately seek jobs.

The film unexpectedly veers toward a hopeful ending, with young socialists enjoying wholesome fun at a sports day in the country. But this brand of Depression-era faith in the masses and class solidarity gives way to a much darker vision of society in postwar films like Yuzo Kawashima’s Shitokayana kemono (Elegant Beast, 1962), about a family of hustlers. The son is an embezzler, the daughter a kept mistress, the parents shameless moochers and con artists: all greedy and crooked, but also vulnerable to more ruthless predators. The film never leaves their small, cramped apartment; the almost kabuki-like stylization and formalist visual devices emphasize claustrophobia and queasy, hothouse intimacy. In one delirious scene, the brother and sister dance wildly to the twist, silhouetted against a lurid purplish sunset, as their parents calmly eat cold soba noodles and remark on the generational divide created by the war.

Both Japan and Italy, on the losing side of World War II, experienced postwar booms, and many films from this period critique or satirize rampant materialist excess and growth at any cost. In Giuliano Montaldo’s Una bella grinta (1965), this attitude is represented by a textile factory going up in a muddy wasteland beside the autostrada. The man building it, Ettore Zambrini (Renato Salvatori), cannot pay the construction costs; he cannot meet payroll at the factory he already runs; his creditors are trying to have him declared bankrupt. Yet he refuses to give up, convinced he will be a success if only he can mount a giant sign bearing his name on the gleaming new building. His grinta (stubborn determination) is both admirable and repellant, showing up even more questionably in his obsessive pursuit of his estranged wife and her lover. The ambiguity of this central character, whom Salvatori makes charismatic, appealing, and often despicable, elevates the film, which takes a mordantly cynical view of who gets ahead in the modern economy, and what they can get away with. But the greatest pleasure of Una bella grinta is that it was shot on location in Bologna, capturing many sights familiar to festival-goers—the basilica of Santo Stefano, the Torre Asinelli, the shopping streets with their arched colonnades. The black-and-white cinematography, damp and misty winter weather, and grainy night scenes give the medieval buildings an austere, foreboding look, making it surreal to step out again into the peach- and apricot-colored city baking in July’s heat.

Another film that gains from the grit and specificity of location shooting is Gilles Grangier’s Le sang à la tête (Blood to the Head, 1956), a pitch-perfect adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel filmed in the port city of La Rochelle. Jean Gabin stars as a wealthy and powerful self-made man who discovers, when his wife runs off with a lover from her youth, how much everyone in town resents him—the dockworkers and fishmongers for having climbed out of their class, and the bourgeois for being a parvenu to whom they must kowtow. With his minimalist precision and effortless authority—like the noiseless engine of a very expensive car—Gabin creates a subtle portrait of a melancholy, baffled patriarch who decides, at a certain point, that as long as everyone hates and sponges off him anyway, he might as well throw his weight around and get what he wants. And you like him all the more for it, seeing that beneath his comfortably upholstered life he is still a fighter. As he moves through the docks and ferries and fish markets, the churches and villas, pastry shops and seedy bars of a provincial city, this story about class envy becomes one about aging and memory.

Neorealism, urban settings, and tough economic realities give ballast to two delightful comedies, including my favorite in the strand devoted to actor-director Aldo Fabrizi. Guardie e ladri (Cops and Robbers, 1951), codirected by Mario Monicelli and Steno, pairs the rotund, irascible Fabrizi (the cop) with the sad-faced, shabbily elegant comedian Totò (the thief). What starts as pure slapstick satire, with the two aging stars huffing and puffing through the slowest chase of all time, becomes bittersweet when the men’s oblivious families get to know each other, and they end up bonding sympathetically over their struggles to support their wives and children on meager incomes amid the tenements and vacant lots of postwar Rome. The witty, effervescent Esa pareja feliz (That Happy Couple, 1953), by Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis García Berlanga, follows a young husband and wife whose romance is eroded by the pressures of poverty. They live in one room, surrounded by promises of shortcuts to happiness via commercial products, technology, get-rich-quick schemes, and the cinema—where they munch sandwiches while watching a dubbed version of Leo McCarey’s Love Affair. (Hilariously, the husband, who works as a grip in a film studio, starts holding forth about tracking shots and back projection as fellow patrons tell him to shut up.) “We love each other. Shouldn’t that be enough?” the wife asks at one point. “That’s only in the movies,” the husband retorts.

Even in movies, “the movies” is shorthand for escapist fantasy. The festival, needless to say, was not all peasants, poverty, war, and social commentary. The second screening I attended in the Piazza was Mauritz Stiller’s Erotikon (1920), which proves that Ernst Lubitsch did not invent the elegant, sly comedy of marital infidelity, and which made me a disciple of the actor Tora Teje, who swans through the film with indolent chic, heavy-lidded amusement, and a ravishing haute couture wardrobe. Another night, I passed through the Piazza during a screening of Jacques Deray’s decadent thriller La piscine (1969), just in time to see Alain Delon drown Maurice Ronet with chillingly casual petulance. I watched 1930s Hollywood movies about lady spies and con men and taxi dancers, filmed on backlots and soundstages: films in which a sense of place was not only absent but beside the point—the stars have no roots, they are creatures of light. And I watched Laurel and Hardy, in Two Tars (1928), unleash their peculiarly methodical mayhem during a traffic jam, starting with a fender bender and concluding with a loopy procession of mauled cars defying the laws of physics, engineering, and rationality.

All films are some combination of realism and fairy tale, illusion and document, and the elements can fuse in surprising ways. Filmed almost entirely outdoors amid the enormous skies, misty grasslands, and ancient forests of Malabar, Govindan Aravindan’s Kumatty (1979) is an enchanting musical fable about nature and childhood, filled with masked rituals, magical transformations, cute dogs, and a boundless sense of wonder. On the other hand, Frenchman’s Creek (1944) is a case study in the depth of feeling that can be evoked by artifice. Director Mitchell Leisen himself designed the opulent sets and costumes, recreating late-seventeenth-century England with rococo flamboyance rendered in jewel-like Technicolor. The sun-drenched California coast stands in unconvincingly for Cornwall, the background for a deliciously incredible story about an unhappily married aristocrat (Joan Fontaine) and her romance with a French pirate (Arturo de Córdova). This strange and dreamlike movie is more an art film than a Hollywood swashbuckler. The pirate ship is an otherworldly utopia, a multiracial haven of music and idle reverie, its captain an aesthete who passes the time drawing birds and considers piracy an art, himself a “poet of precision.” Instead of bodice-ripping, the lovers engage in philosophical debates about the nature of freedom and bond through their shared yearning for untrammeled independence and a transcendent beauty “just beyond reach.” In the end, even this rapturous fantasy affirms its own limitations, the fact that dreams always end upon waking. But for a time, watching it, I was transported—somewhere out of this world.

Now Voyageurs: Il Cinema Ritrovato 2021

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