Il Cinema Ritrovato 2025
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When Katharine Hepburn died in the summer of 2003, the Los Angeles Times’ Mary McNamara turned to Molly Haskell for comment. “There is something very admirable in the way she conducted her life,” the author of From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies told McNamara. “She was not afraid to portray over-the-hill romances. She did not seem that invested in her looks. As she got older, she got on with it, kept on working . . . Now everyone loves her, but it’s important to remember that they didn’t always.”
That same year, Haskell elaborated on that reminder in a piece for the Guardian. In 1938, not long after Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby flopped, the Independent Theatre Owners Association famously took out a full-page ad in the Hollywood Reporter declaring Hepburn—along with Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, and others—to be “poison to the box office.” Hepburn, “who was abrasive, brash, full of herself, terrifyingly androgynous (and the daughter of a card-carrying suffragist in feminism’s first wave), had to pay for her insolence in movies that contained their own backlash,” wrote Haskell. In George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story (1940), “her ‘fire and ice’ heroine is castigated by every character in the movie for being too haughty, too frigid, and somehow made to take the fall for the flaws and missteps of everyone around her.”
For this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato, which opens on Saturday and runs through June 29, Haskell has curated the program Katharine Hepburn: Feminist, Acrobat, and Lover. “There was a reason her career spanned sixty-seven years and boasted a still-record number of Best Actress Oscar nominations (twelve) and wins (four),” writes Haskell. “Her career was more varied than she’s given credit for but it’s especially her screwball comedies (of which there’s a touch in all her best work) that she shines. Unique and irreplaceable, we are able to appreciate in our own time this woman who was so ahead of hers.”
The program features Bringing Up Baby—in 2021, Haskell wrote in Sight and Sound that “in Hawks’s telling, the screwball couple was never more in love than when hating each other with unbridled passion”—and two other pairings of Hepburn with Cary Grant, Cukor’s Sylvia Scarlett (1935) and Holiday (1938). On Sunday, Haskell will discuss the great Kate with Imogen Sara Smith.
Launched in 1986 as a symposium on film preservation, Il Cinema Ritrovato now attracts around 130,000 attendees a year from dozens of countries. Screen’s Lee Marshall asks Gian Luca Farinelli, the director of the Cineteca di Bologna and one of the festival’s four codirectors, about a few of the highlights in this year’s program. Farinelli mentions a new 70 mm restoration of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) slated to be projected onto the giant screen in Bologna’s Piazza Maggiori; a fiftieth-anniversary presentation of Ramesh Sippy’s director’s cut of his 1975 action-packed blockbuster, Sholay (1975); and Vernon Sewell’s 1962 B-movie, Strongroom, which Farinelli calls “extraordinary—a masterful example of how to keep an audience glued to their seats for eighty minutes.”
The festival’s 2025 edition will offer retrospectives devoted to the work of Lewis Milestone—as curator Ehsan Khoshbakht puts it, his career “bridged silent cinema and the 70 mm spectacles of the 1960s”—overlooked Italian director Luigi Comencini; French actor, writer, and director Coline Serreau; and Austrian actor-turned-director Willi Forst. Documentaries include portraits of David Lynch, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Stanley Kubrick, Eric Rohmer, Sergei Parajanov, Gene Kelly, and the filmmaking team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory.
While one Mikio Naruse retrospective rolls on in New York through the end of the month and another is set to open in Berkeley on July 3, curators Alexander Jacoby and Johan Nordström will focus on the films Naruse made for the newly established P.C.L. film studio and its successor, Toho, between 1935 and 1939. There will be programs spotlighting films made in the years 1905 and 1925 and others that will whisk viewers off to 1920s Odesa or into the long dark nights of Scandinavian noir.
Cinemalibero, curated by Cecilia Cenciarelli, features eleven restorations of films from around the world made between the early 1960s and mid-1980s sprung from the struggles of the marginalized. And the catch-all program Recovered & Restored will most definitely have something—if not more than a few things—for everyone: Hitchcock, Chaplin, Eisenstein, Lubitsch, Borzage, Truffaut, Preminger, Cronenberg, Friedkin, John Ford, Michael Mann, Billy Wilder, Satyajit Ray, Edward Yang, King Vidor, Frank Tashlin, Yasuzo Masumura, Charles Burnett, Miloš Forman, Bertrand Tavernier, Abel Ferrara, Bob Rafelson, Mario Bava, Wojciech Has, Stephen Frears . . . and Betty Boop.
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