Il Cinema Ritrovato 2016 - Malombra, Mario Soldati, 1942

Like Piccolo mondo antico, Malombra is a film set in a grandiose, but a bit crowded aristocratic house, which is itself squashed between the beautiful, but deadly see, and the stolid, un-romantic mountains. A claustrophobic space with no escapes, a space of directionless hauntings and self-induced psychosis.  Also, of course, a space of late, musty fascism. The reality of the second world war and the twilight of the Mussollini era is never directly alluded to, but it seems to penetrate all walls, clothes, the flesh itself.

A revenge film in which the hunter's consistently much more confused and scared than the hunted. A mystery film about ghosts unsure who to haunt, and why. But with an absolute, unflinching will to haunt. A literary adaption about an author caught up in a trap he might have set himself. Maybe also a film about a director caught up in his own ornamental stylization. I really don't know what to make of this after just one viewing, it might just be a masterpiece of lurid escapism. On the other hand I longed for the energy of something like Freda's Aquila nera almost all the time.

A piano muffled by the secret messages clamped between its strings might still produce beautiful music, sometimes...

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2016, day 2

A House Divided, William Wyler, 1931

The first (and maybe greatest) masterpiece of the festival. A house divided by a back-breaking staircase. Down below is the space of paranoid, bleak, motherless family life, up there, in the bedrooms, is the space of dreams and sex. Or rather the fantasma of sex. Because the marriage of the sturdy, brutal fisherman (Walter Huston) with his delicate, shy mail-order bride (Helen Chandler) must never be consumed. Says the bride, says the fisherman’s sun (Douglass Montgomery), says the audience. The premise is simple and forceful, not so much dependent on storytelling, but rather on the relationship of three bodies towards one another.

---

Everything, including Huston, is tightly controlled, and framed: A funeral in the beginning, dark silhouettes in front of the foaming ocean; a funeral in the end, a bark turned upside down rocking in a studio ocean, a strapped body invisible below surface.The first funeral is all ritual, the second one a rather absurd descent into a completely un-mythical private hell. Maybe for all its twisted madness and perverse claustrophobia, A House Divided is also a - rather disillusioning - film about enlightenment.

The Good Fairy, William Wyler, 1935

Only the second film of Sullavan I’ve seen after Borzage’s Three Comrades, and already I’m enchanted. Once again, she plays the sole woman between several men, but this doesn’t spell disaster. She’s an object of adoration, but not a trigger of jealousy. Not a fetish, but a friendly cipher, and very much alive, in every single scene. The film works so well precisely because the script doesn’t really try to define her, but let’s her run loose while the men around her keep bumping into each other, while failing to get closer to her.

Marnie, Alfred Hitchcock, 1964

This is, of course, all about trying to (and gloriously failing to) define Tippi Hedren. I’d seen it only once before, but although I remembered just a few scenes in detail, I felt at home in every frame. The beautiful technicolor print just added an extra touch of madness here and there.

Piccolo mondo antico, Mario Soldati, 1941

After the great start with Dora Nelson I had high hopes for the Soldati series. Unfortunately his other films screened in Bologna didn’t quite catch on with me in the same way. This one is carried along fust fine by two great leads (the versatile Akida Valli and the charmingly drousy Massimo Serato), the astonishing scenery of Lake Como (the whole drama set between the dangerously alluring sea and the merciless mountains), and a few beautiful setpieces of carefully stylized melodrama (the rain-soaked Valli giving in to monetary temptation while her daughter drowns in the sea)... but the “bad countess” fighting against the couple is a rather ugly stereotype without any redemption. Also there’s a lot of clumsy stuff in between, and almost in every scene a few older, bearded guys tag along with no reason at all, but to comment on the plot in rather obvious ways. There clearly is a bitter and forceful tale of downward mobility hidden somewhere, but it never quite materialises.

Stella Dallas, Henry King, 1925

The Vidor version being so close to me I had a hard time relating to this at the start. I never got completely over some casting decisions, but nevertheless, this is a touching film throughout, and a few scenes near the end are beyond beautiful. Belle Bennett standing at the side of the bed of her daughter she knows she has to give away soon… her face (and hair) coming apart bit by bit… the whole scene immobilized, almost completely frozen, sometimes for a whole minute… the weight of a single gesture, when she stretches her hand towards her daughter… the countershot of the daughter, sleeping in her nightgown, spreading her body on the bed without any restraint... two women, one completely free, the other completely bound...

Il Cinema Ritrovato 2016, Day 1

Dora Nelson, Mario Soldati, 1940

A film with a character called “Il falso principe” just has to be a good entry into the festival.

---

Dora Nelson is a comedy of mistaken identity which never quite turns into the all out farce the script seems to promise. While the film is continually funny, Soldati deliberately and almost artistically avoids the payoffs and pitfalls of his premise. Dora Nelson is unobtrusively stylized and often shot in rather sophisticated long takes, which allow to observe intricate character interactions in real time - Assia Norris’s look of inquiry towards Carlo Ninchi while climbing the stairs; the “falso principe” sitting on the swing while talking to his cronies; the lovelorn neighbor and the taxi driver bonding while boozing (and driving) etc.

---

All blond women end up at the movie studios sooner or later, someone says at some point. In order to stay in the limelight, someone else says at another point, American actresses get divorced, while Italian actresses tell everyone they’re princesses. This difference forms the basis for an intricate play of mirrorings, which nevertheless stops short of the free-wheeling comedy of liquefied identities american films of the time eyplore. Indeed, the main point about Assia Noris's double role, isn't the (biological) sameness of two women but their (social) dissimilarity. Dora Nelson is a film about / entrechenched in a vertical society. Comedy isn’t used to level the playing field, but to find / construct cliffs and trenches in rather unusual places.

--------

Pavel Korchagin, Aleksandr Alov & Vladimir Naumov, 1957

A soviet epic of harsh, ecstatic narrative and emotional ruptures. In one shot the hero decides to join the cavallery, in the next he already rides towards the enemy. Some shots stand almost completely on their own: a group of naked men, deliberatly sharing a canvas, like posing for a painter. The mise en scene is extremely agile and almost constantly defined by height difference: looking up (towards a woman’s leg), staring down (from a high rise; then looking up into heaven); crawling around in a moving train, where several bodies are stratified into a parcour that almost resembles an art installation; bumping into each other while carrying a whole closet on the back. The revolution unfolds earth, actions, social relations - but only as long as itself unfolds. Once victorious, it freezes into calcified structure: the Bolshoi.

---

Vasiliy Lanovoy, the main actor, wouldn’t be completely out of place in a stalinist propaganda piece, but at the same time his somewhat haunted posture and his juvenile narcissism anticipate european new wave actors like Leaud. My strongest association was Guillaume Depardieu in Pola X, though: ferociously limping on into his own private world, while the world around him moves into a completely different, if equally neurotic direction.