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Bologna will be transformed into a film museum on Saturday as a nine-day festival dedicated to restored, rediscovered and neglected films – some more than a century old – begins in the northern Italian city.
Now celebrating its 40th anniversary, Il Cinema Ritrovato, or “rediscovered cinema”, has evolved from its beginnings into a powerful international convention attracting a new generation of cinephiles.
Last year’s edition, which included a revival of Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 film The Gold Rush, drew 140,000 people, who packed into Bologna’s Renaissance square, Piazza Maggiore, and other historic sites in the city to watch the old films.
In an interview with the Guardian, Gian Luca Farinelli, who founded the festival and is now one of the four directors, compared the event to “walking through ancient ruins”.
A similar number of visitors is expected this year. But it wasn’t always like that. Farinelli took the idea of the festival at the age of 19 with two friends from his film club, Michele Canosa and Nicola Mazzanti, after being introduced to the Cineteca of Bologna, a film library created in 1963 which today has a laboratory recognized as one of the most important in the world for the restoration of films and documents.
While researching the Cineteca’s archives, the three friends “started to discover many things that we didn’t know”, said Farinelli. “We wanted to find an audience to show these gems to.”
It found an audience just before Christmas in 1986 when the first edition was linked to another film festival held at the Cineteca’s Lumière cinema.
Enno Patalas, a German film historian and pioneer of film restoration, brought the 1931 films M and Metropolis, both directed by Fritz Lang, to the event.
“From the beginning it was clear that this was an amazing garden,” said Farinelli, who since 2000 has been director of the Cineteca. “We also realized very quickly that there was a breakdown Italy – no one was an expert in restored films, so this is how we created the laboratory (of the Cineteca).
Although it grew a little bit every year, Il Cinema Ritrovato remained the center of high-quality cinema until 1995 when the festival changed to a summer venue. “This made our work better known,” Farinelli said.
The constant presence of many film directors from around the world, among them Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Wes Anderson, as well as the Italian director Alice Rohrwacher have also helped to increase his reputation.
In recent years, attendance has increased dramatically. “The other amazing thing is that we’ve seen the young audience explode,” Farinelli said. “For young people, old movies are very amazing. Yes, they know the planets (racing) and all the series, but in Bologna they find that movies have a long history. They also find the joy of watching movies together in the square with other people.”
More than 500 films from international cinema will be shown The festival is over 40 years oldfrom silent films to 1980s Hollywood greats and restored films that were buried long ago.
“This year we’re going to show a variety of movies that no one has talked about before, so it’s like seeing a movie for the first time,” Farinelli said.
Among them is A Spring for the Thirsty, a 1965 black-and-white surrealist film by Ukrainian director Yuri Ilyenko that was investigated by the Soviet authorities for “psychological disturbances” before its release in 1987. This will be its first important screening after being painstakingly restored in the Cineteca laboratory.
“I’ve seen a lot of movies in my life, but seeing this was amazing — I’ve never seen a movie like this,” Farinelli said.
Retrospectives will be dedicated to Italian director Luchino Visconti, including the restoration of Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), as well as theater legends Barbara Stanwyck and Josephine Baker.
Farinelli said: “When you organize a festival, you only hope that it will grow. But what is very special about Il Cinema Ritrovato is that it has grown and kept its principles – that is, to go deep and show films and to combine, enrich and contradict the history of cinema.”
