Il Cinema Ritrovato 2015: Model Shop, Jacques Demy, 1969

It took me two days after revisiting Jacques Demy's Model Shop to realize, that the hotel I stayed in bears a striking resemblance to the eponymous etablissment in the center of this masterful LA-neo-noir: Like the front office and the studio room in the film, the lobby and the rooms of the hotel are linked by a contorted, rather narrow corridor, made up of several right angles. In Demy's film, this passageway is linked with both the mechanics and metaphysics of photography and with erotic intitiation (maybe with the sexual act itself) and it stands in marked contrast with the flat outline of Los Angeles architecture. The inside of the "Model Shop" just doesn't match its outside - this disparity might just be the most important driving force in the film. Of course, the protagonist quickly finds out that the disparity doesn't relate to any dark, exotic mystery. Model Shop is one of the greatest films about fetishism for that very reason: Its central fixation can't be reduced to any fixed object, not even a missing one.

Of course, Model Shop would never work in a city like Bologna, where architectural splendour is always a given.

(Rereading my first blog post - in german - on Model Shop: Oh my, I really do have changed in the last few years. Where the hell went my fucking political consciousness?)

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2015: Ejima Ikushima, Hideo Oda, 1955

The film registers a quiet breakdown of social order that starts with a forbidden gaze: a harem woman witnessing an older, more priviledged woman having sex with her lover. The older woman can't stand herself beeing exposed even to this one gaze (that isn't even dublicated by a cinematic one - we just see how the door slides open and how the face of the witnessing woman freezes in shock), and urges the younger one to start an affair with a Kabuki player.

Next to the tale of the cheerful, city-bound orchard sisters this was probably my favourite among the early japanese colour (yellow leaning, actually) films screened in Bologna. Its formal mastery, the patient style and the melodramatically charged use of classical japanese architecture are matched by an intriguing narrative premise: after hefty (+ largely offscreen) clan infighting, the country is left with a much too young shogun, and the prospect of a rule by proxy of several years. A written title announces trouble: this basically never worked out in history. But this time, the abscense of the potent, male ruler doesn't result in civil warfare, but in a much more subtle, ambivalent uproar in the court's woman's quarters.

Actually, in the subtitles, these woman's quarters are calles "harem", though it isn't really clear if the women confined in these thoroughly feminised spaces are normally supposed to sleep with the shogun and his subordinates. At least that doesn't seem to be their only or even principal duty. It's more important that they learn how to sing, play the Samisen, be tender, and feminine in a decidedly non-threatening way. For example, they should not, under any circumstances, leak liquids out into the male world. This is exactly what happens in Ejima Ikushima, though, in a scene rather late in the film, when a group of harem women visit a Kabuki performance and poors sake all over the place. 

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2015: Hana no naka no musumetachi, Kajiro Yamamoto, 1953

I travel to the Cinema Ritrovato for many reasons... not the least among them are films like this completely unknown, wonderful japanese comedic melodrama about two sisters trying two get away from their rural hometown - and especially from the family business: growing plants, that are beuatiful to look at but that a terrible hustle to mend (like movies). Plus, they hardly bring any money in (like some movies). One of the many great ideas in a film that never even tries to achieve masterpiece status and is all the more relaxed and open-hearted for it: The rack used to raise the plants is just a little bit too low for a person of normal height to stand upright under. So everyone who works their has to stay (and especially walk) slightly stooped. To be sure: This is used only as a subtle comedic device, not at all as a means of social critique - but it still infuses the film with a constant sense of bodily tension.

The film was screened in a section dedicated to early (that is, with one exception: 1950s) Japanese colour films. While the main, rural setting switches back and forth between sumptuous landscape shots and agricultural coercion (that is also beautiful to look at), the real heights of colour stylization are reached in a few shorter scnenes that take place in the city of Tokyo. Or rather in the workplace of the older sister (the younger one, Momoko, brightens up the screen in every single shot and is one of the greatest supporting charakters I've seen in a while): a big hotel with genuinely psychedelic interieurs. Here, all (humble) attempts not only at pictorial, but also at psychological and narrative realism quickly vanish. The dream factory takes over... but dreams can be cruel, too.

Un colpo di pistola, Renato Castellani, 1942

Like Freda's Aquila nera and Il cavaliere misterioso which were screened last year, Un colpo di pistola takes place in a decidedly pre-sovjet Russia, an airistocratic winter wonderland filled with powdered wigs, fickle women and lots of (dispensable) horse carriages. Castellani's film might in some level be a more modest affair, driven more by the narrative force of its literary source (Pushkin) than by pure spectacle. But it feels equally rich in detail - Castellani's use of objects is especially great, one early scene involving a telescope is nothing short of magnificent.

What is it with Russia and Italian cinema of the 1940s? (I don't know... but anyway:) When the protagonist, Anickoff, first sets eyes on the love of his life, Masha, she plays the piano in her living room and sings a song in her mother tongue - this song, which will return twice, is the only intrusion of the russian language in the whole film, the dialogue itself is in italian from beginning to end. This is the way Anickoff likes to see her: Put in her place, surrounded by other women, busy with producing ineffective and timeless art of the sort that is somehow enhanced by its unintelligibility. (Russia means: exotic adventures, beauty, melodrama - but no real consequences, no dialogue.)

For the most part of the film, Masha doesn't obey. She breaks out of the space/frame he had designated for her - in fact in some of the scenes she virtually floats through space, the camera refusing to anchor her in the ground. The scene with the telescope is one example, another one takes place at a picnic, in which Anickoff quickly looses control ... and not only of "the gaze", because the film is much more complex than that from the start. (In fact, in the very first scene, Anickoff himself becomes the object of a playful gaze when he is being seen on a frozen lake, skating away from the camera, towards dangerously thin ice... should we really call him back or should we do away with him from the start?)

In the end he will triumph anyway: she will sit again (and again: alone) at the piano, singing a song in russian, while the gate of his mansion finally openly announces his intentions of beeing her prison guard. One of many great things about Un colpo di pistola, though, is the lack of closure this faux happy end brings with it. The various lines of flight the film opens up between the first and the last piano scene aren't negated by the ending - in fact, for most of the time it seems that the patterns of repetition and variation, that make up the structure of the film, would be alltogether too complicated for a rather simple-minded maniac like Anickoff. His triumph in the end it isn't exactly by chance, of course, but it also isn't self-evident. And this changes everything (at least I think so... obviously I'll have to see this one again).

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2015: Part Time Wife, Leo McCarey, 1930

A small, completely charming remarriage comedy that feels in many respects like a dry run for The Awful Truth. Even (or rather: especially) the dog looks much more rugged and has only one single trick up his sleeve: doing absolutely nothing.

The dog (who has great scenes, to be sure; some of them are rather shocking) is so lethargic that the film needs a human orphan to support him. And while I'd argue that McCarey did right to pass on this role (=the non-biological child as matchmaker) in The Awful Truth, the boy (Tommy Clifford) has at least one beautiful scene in Part Time Wife. He comes into the film as the caddy of the seperated husband (Edmund Lowe). After his first rather unsuccessful strokes Lowe gets angry at the cheeky boy and sends him away. A long shot witnesses Clifford slowly moving away from Lowe and from the camera. Lowe decides to call him back, but he needs several attempts to find the right tone of voice (not too angry, not too begging, especially not too confident). But finally the boy stops, turns slowly around, paws the ground like a horse - and comes back.

The best thing about the scene is McCarey's refusal to cut to a close-up of the boy, his decision to let it play out through Lowe's voice and Clifford's gesture only. The assumption that this refusal might have something to do with early talkie staging conventions doesn't negate McCarey's genius. Rather, it exemplifies his perfect mastery of sound cinema (which, of course, also comes into bloom fully in The Awful Truth, which at times almost feels like a treatise on, or rather a vindication of noise).