Il Cinema Ritrovato 2013: Ratings

*****Silver Lode (Allan Dwan, 1954)
*****Rendezvous with Annie (Allan Dwan, 1946)
*****Three Comrades (Frank Borzage, 1938)
*****While Paris Sleeps (Allan Dwan, 1932)
*****Ani imoto (Sotoji Kimura, 1936)
*****Kochiyama soshun (Sadao Yamanaka, 1936)
*****Zaza (Allan Dwan, 1923)
*****Pechki-lavochki / Happy Go Lucky (Vasiliy Shukshin, 1972)
*****The Iron Mask (Allan Dwan, 1929)
*****Akanishi kakita / Capricious Young man (Mansaku Itami, 1936)
*****Fifteen Maiden Lane (Allan Dwan, 1936)
*****Vera Cruz (Robert Aldrich, 1954)
*****The First Days (Humphrey Jennings, 1939)
*****Manhandled (Allan Dwan 1924)
*****The Farmer's Wife (Alfred Hitchcock, 1928)
*****Sakasu goningumi / Five Men in the Circus (Mikio Naruse, 1935)

****Enoken seishun suikoden / Romantic and Crazy (Yamamoto Kajiro, 1934)
****Il Signor Max (Mario Camerini, 1937)
****Beatrice Cenci (Riccardo Freda, 1956)
****Ongaku kigeki horoyoi jinsei / Tipsy Life (Sotoji Kimura, 1933)
****Spare Time (Humphrey Jennings, 1939)
****The Pleasure Garden (Alfred Hitchcock, 1925)
****Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)
****Iyulskiy dozhd / July Rain (Marlen Khutsiyev, 1966)
****The Inside Story (Allan Dwan, 1948)
****The Invisible Man (James Whale, 1933)
****Ikarie XB 1 (Jindrich Polak, 1963)
****East Side, West Side (Allan Dwan, 1927)

***Sekido koete (Eiji Tsuburaya, 1936)
***S.S. Ionian (Humphrey Jennings, 1939)
***L' aine des Ferchaux / Magnet of Doom (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1963)
***Fedkina pravda / Fedka's Truth (Olga Preobrazhenskaya, 1925)
***Anja / The Mystery of Ania Grey (Olga Preobrazhenskaya, 1927)
***Ongaku eiga: Hyakumannin no gasshu / Chorus of a Million People (Atsuo Tomioka, 1935)
***Campanadas a medianoche / Chimes at Midnight / Falstaff (Orson Welles, 1965) w/o

**Champagne (Alfred Hitchcock, 1928)
**Downhill (Alfred Hitchcock, 1927)

*Etudes sur Paris (Andre Sauvage, 1928) w/o
*Szegenylegenyek / Round-Up (Miklos Jancso, 1966)

(italics: known pleasures)

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2013: Rendezvous with Annie, Allen Dwan, 1946

One thing is clear: No money whatsoever should go to the civil war museum...

To make sure of this, to make sure, that the money belongs to the new, not to the old, everything must fall in its new place, not in its old place.

In Dwan's films, people are exchangeable. But that doesn't mean that they are expendable, it only means, that they are subject to change. Often, in Dwan, there's space left open in framing, and this space can be claimed by different people; sometimes by different people over time (and montage), sometimes by different people subsequently in the same shot. This is not a competition; one doesn't get expelled from Dwan's frame. One just leaves when one's impression on the situation has been made (no star close-ups in later Dwan, even Gloria Swanson isn't object to any gaze in the star vehicles of the 20s).

"A space left open" - that doesn't mean that there's something missing in the beginning, a lack that has to be filled. Dwan's compositions are equally harmonious before and after the arrival of the newcomer. The scenes in the cockpit in Rendezvous with Annie are perfect examples: No matter if two, three, or five guys are in the frame - looking through the door, talking, singing, fighting with each other: the sense of companionship is always the same. Dwan's films aren't motivated by (psychic, subjective) lack, by the invisible; but by tensions inside the visible, which are only observable from the outside (people are constantly observing each other, but there are hardly any real point-of-view-shots; very often, the observer and the observed are in the same frame).

The photograph in Rendezvous with Annie doesn't show Jeffrey Dolan, who at the moment the picture was taken bent down in order not to be seen. Now, he desperately wants to be seen, to be acknowledged. A amplification of the photograph doesn't render him visible - but it catches another witness redhanded, with his mistress: another man appears in the frame, in exchange for Jeffrey. And thereby saving him.

Then, there's the thing with the chocolate cake. (More here in German)

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2013: in passing

Ani imoto, Sotoji Kimura, 1935

The film starts and ends in some kind of penal camp: sweating, tattooed men, only wearing loincloth, working at a river; hard to say what kind of work, it seems to involve some kind of rafts, but also stones, which are put inside the rafts. Next to the camp (and somehow connected do it), a family melodrama develops: two sisters, one well-behaved (and almost completely absent from the film), one running wild (and the unrivaled center of attention: getting pregnant, miscarrying, and subsequently not only enjoying her sex life, but also talking about it), a concerned mother, a working-class dad, who wants to beat up the father of the stillborn child, when he finally comes back; but when he sees, that the former suitor of his daughter is upper class, he changes into better shoes and sits down quietly, civilized, over-civilized. There's also a bullheaded son, constantly railing against his "slutty sister", but the film, and finally even the mother, sides with the slut and her psychosexual drive for freedom.

In a way, the film plays it out both ways: it still functions as a fallen woman melodrama (complete with several perfectly timed tracking shots, many of which play with subjectivity in interesting ways), but at the same time it lays bare, by way of its communicational mode, some social foundations of the genre.

There are also some ducks swimming through the film: they live in the stream behind the family home and they get one "big" scene, when they are observed by someone (if I remember right, by the returning upper-class guy) crossing below a bridge, in a pov-shot. In several other scenes, they form part of the background, swimming across the stream, walking across the grass, forming another family next to the human one, maybe figuring also as an ideal in a world broken up first by patriarchy, then again by - and this time, as the slutty sister shows: broken up for very real reasons - modernity.

Sakasu goningumi, Mikio Naruse, 1935

The ducks rather arbitrarily connect this film to Mikio Naruse's Sakasu goningumi, a film made in the same year and by the same studio. In the Naruse, a group of almost identically looking waterfowl appears in one short scene only. Other than that, there's not much room for animals - especially not for non-domesticated animals, because the film is set in and around a circus. A very loosely constructed narrative, Sakasu goningumi follows a troup of travelling performers, who lead an even less settled life than the circus performers - who after all manage to form a union and go on strike. The travelling performers, who usually offer their services as a brass band, jump in and develop a series of naive, amateur acts, that might be seen as a stand-in for the film as a whole.

It's a smart film about the coming of sound, too; many scenes can be described as reactions of the image to sound. One of the most interesting shots (sometimes this one looks more like a collection of interesting shots than like a completely formed narrative feature) shows the subsequent reaction of several girls to a vinyl record: a cascade of gazes, triggered by the intrusion of music.

Sakasu goningumi has a very relaxed feel to it, is structured in a very anecdotical way - and isn't very concerned, when one or two of these anecdotes actually leed nowhere. In the end, even the parting of the performers isn't treated melodramatically - although all is set up for tears and last minute revelations: one girl joins them, another one stays, the film cuts from the one staying behind to the withdrawing group, the gap gets bigger and bigger... and then the film simply ends, with this almost prosaic statement: some girls go, some girls stay.

Silver Lode, Allan Dwan, 1954

Just a few words on a masterpiece deserving much more...

"It's a long way to Discovery" - the fictional town "Discovery", where an alleged murder took place, which in turn destabilizes "Silver Lode", another fictional town, is far away; as is the end of the film Silver Lode and the resolution of the storyline when these words are being spoken. The whole film is as openly reflexive as this dialogue line - the villain, who slanders an innocent man and infuses mob violence, is named McCarty. And at the same time, Alan Dwann's Silver Lode is a straightforward midscale western with several impressive action scenes, a classical character line-up and very effective uses of studio sets.

Silver Lode is a film about community constituting and deconstituting itself directly on the screen: single persons and groups of people replacing / substituting each other in the frame, vying for dominance in and of the image, splitting and ultimately destabilizing its compositions (especially obvious in the early wedding scene with the villain intruding between bride and groom).

From the very first cut - the villanous intruders replacing a group of children on festive main street, decorated for the Fourth of July ceremony - the film announces itself as about society as a whole, and it never betrays that ambition. The first movement through the city, alongside the bad guys, constructs a synthetic social space of society through simple reframings, later in the film, a magnificent tracking shot individualizes this same space as the space of the lone hero as a space against society. 

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2013: Garments

The first film I saw at this year's festival - after sneaking in an ongoing screening - was something called "Coiffures et types de Hollande", a short documentary short from France about hat types and garments (?) from the Netherlands. The print was hand-colored and extremely beautiful - most scenes had at least three bright, forceful colors, mostly applied on the hats and the garments, seldom (if at all) on the background, never on the faces or on other visible body parts. The colors were so powerful that they literally added another dimension to the screen: the pale faces of these dutch women receeded into the background and made way for their ornate framings. One of the women had a shining hairpiece, that was even more extraordinary, as its fluorescent reflection seemed to open up a world strikingly different from the one the woman was placed in (a world almost obliterated by color - but nevertheless a world of the year 1910). In this moment, the best 3d-film I saw this year almost turned into the best science-fiction-film I saw this year.

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At Il Cinema Ritrovato, one could spend the whole festival just watching programmes of short films from the first two decades of cinema... Well, to be more precise, one could, but I don't think I could. For me, in short film programmes there is always the danger of the films cancelling each other out; and for short film programmes of early cinema, this danger seems especially valid, because of the fleeting nature of these images, because of their resistence to the very idea of form. Sometimes I think, that the itself amorphous Youtube-stream is indeed the best possible medium for these early images - although of course, the "stereoscopic colors"-effect described above would be completely lost, there.

Yesterday, however, I did see one of these programmes, the one starting almost directly after Coiffures et types de Hollande, called "Dieci anni di cento anni fa". At first glance, it's standout film was La peine du Talion, a magnificently crafted fantasy about girls with butterfly wings, insects - and a male butterfly hunter who actually gets pinned down with a needle himself at one point. The film was hand-colored, but its colors weren't applied as neatly an the ones in Coiffures et types de Hollande. Instead (and in perfect accordance with the dreamlike structure of the film), they floated across the screen almost like another layer of the image, only loosely connected to the butterfly wings and insect tentacles.

My favorite film, however, was a documentary of only three minutes: I pizzi di Venezia is also a film about garments - but without colors, maybe even without the possibility of color. The first shot shows women in a factory-like room, working. The next shots (which form the main part of the film) show just their hands, working with needles on complex garments ("venezianische Spitzen" - the intertitles are in german language). In a way, the film skips the individual, in jumping directly from the workplace to the (embodied) work. And in the last minute of the film, to the result of the work: one shot shows the finished garment handed over to a male chargehand (?), who accurately checks the product. The last part of the film consitst of some shots of this products: intricate white structures in front of a completely black background. So this film, which feels to me like an almost uncanny condensation of the foundations of modern society, ends with almost pure light projected onto darkness - with some kind of minimal definition of cinema.