Posted by Larry Gleeson

Cinema Ritrovato 2017: Sherlock Holmes, our contemporary

“Elementary Watson!”. It seems that it was Clive Brooke the first actor to recite on the big screen, in  The Return of Sherlock Holmes  (1929), the famous exclamation, apocryphal Holmesian ever uttered by a detective in fifty short stories and four novels that make up the “canon” of the adventures of a renowned “consulting detective”. A phrase that already sets the tone at the Holmes Brooke: pedantic and self-confident, elegant, ironic arrogance to the limit. This is a must see film!

—-Excerpt from Gianluca De Santis article

(Sourced from ilcinemaritrovato.it)

Posted by Larry Gleeson

Severine / Catherine Deneuve embodies the frigidity of a woman altered and ethereal, distinguished and aristocratic, giving vent to her alienation in a distorted and neurotic eroticism. Two years before Belle de Jour, in 1965, Roman Polanski had evoked in Repulsion,  the double life of eroticism in Carol – interpreted, not surprisingly, by the same Deneuve – in an echo and parallel to the game, where Buñuel touches the most ambiguous feminine chords. Moving from its most sublime, almost beatific event to the more sordid and low,  Belle de Jour cages the viewer initially in ecstatic pleasure and dream of the stars and then the brutality of an eros that borders on the grotesque. But what makes it as real and close, is the experience of Severine: the eradication of the drives, the contrast between the ephemeral and the eternal, the soul and the flesh, with the latter always alive and well in the imagination of the director.

Tied to Breton and its manifesto, Buñuel adheres unreservedly to psychic quell’automatismo with which we used to define Surrealism, expressing the reality of thought “outside of all aesthetic and moral concern.” Severine is wealthy, middle-class with a life that slips between normal and depressing folds of everyday life and a husband tormented by the elusiveness of the feminine psyche, incompatible with the ordinary. From subtle analyst of oxymorons, Severine dissonant  and cryptic ‘interpretations reside in the reality beyond the form of reality circumscribed in space-categories, namely in the dream.

Beautiful day moves between the different lovers without distinction in actual reality and the sense of guilt towards the consumatosi husband in a translucent appearing dream: Severine is aware of his abnormality, of his being other than the moral and cognition that takes shape in humiliation and self-pity. The reality and the proliferate dream, are juxtaposed and contrasted without the viewer grasping the steps, elliptical as much as the banter the actors (as stated by the same Macha Méril) were allowed to grasp. The whole affair is shrouded in an aura of timelessness left, like one of the dreams where Severine is chained to a tree, penitent and with a dreamy gaze, taken by an incomprehensible rapture.

—– Elvira Del Guercio

(Source: IlCinemaRitrovato.it)

Posted by Larry Gleeson

The director at the 31st edition of the festival has gone through his career: “the thing, the film on the PCI crisis, was the testimony of a debate unimaginable.”

“When they told me that my films were a reflection of a generation  I felt a certain impatience. Today I see with different eyes. Those first few films I say that if you really, through the story of my personal life, have been able to tell those of an entire generation, I can not ignore this thing as a great privilege. ”

It’s a Nanni Moretti that runs through all his long career that spoke today in Bologna at the 31st edition of the festival Il Cinema Ritrovato, promoted by the Bologna Cinematheque. The festival runs until July 2. The presentation of the book-length interview, The autobiographie dilatée, Entretiens avec Nanni Moretti, curated by critic Jean Gili, was recently published in France by Broché.

They revisited the early moments of his formation and his first film loves: “I used to love the cinema of the Taviani brothers, whose stylistic simplicity I tried to inspire in my early works. I was then a supporter of the film Carmelo Bene and I wonder how I could still reconcile my two passions of aesthetic film as that of Good and the Taviani. Our Lady of the Turks  is one of the movies I’ve seen several times, along with the sweet life and eight and a half  by Federico Fellini. ”

And the memories of Nanni Moretti could not not cross 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the crisis of the Italian Communist Party and Palombella rossa , followed a few months later by The thing, a documentary depicting the debate within the PCI Achilles Occhetto: “I was fascinated by the scope of that debate, that involves not only the leftists, but all Italians. Today such a thing would be unthinkable.”

(Source: ilcinemaritrovato.it)

Posted by Larry Gleeson

A shot, a man who falls to the ground and a car fleeing into the night. And then the dock where she enters the scene, the diva Joan Crawford. In his first plan ‘s novel Mildred Pierce (1945) by Michael Curtiz, one of many, shines all the weight of the film, the pain and the guilt of an impossible love: that of Mildred for her daughter Veda. Based on the novel by James M. Cain, Mildred Pierce (1941), the film marked a Crawford career that earned her her first, and only, Academy Award for Best Actress.

“From this moment on, Joan Crawford will play only roles of strong women, very successful, but with a weak heart and proves of how this talented actress had no weaknesses. There was absolutely vulnerability.” Made possible by the Criterion Collection in collaboration with Warner Bros. the restored version of the film was presented at the Cinema Ritrovato by Park Circus Words, Eddie Muller (founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation). Seemingly, a very lucky role as Kate Winslet won the Golden Globe for her performance in a modern adaptation, Mildred Pierce (2011), the miniseries produced by HBO and directed by Todd Haynes.

In the book, the character of Mildred represented un’atipicità for her time: a housewife divorced with two daughters struggling to establish herself in the midst of the Great Depression. A strong, confident woman who is able to build an empire from nothing, from a waitress in a diner to a businesswoman with a chain of restaurants. Alongside this professional success, we are intertwined in her personal relationships: first of all with the complicated Vedas, the favorite daughter.

These two trends, the social climbing of Mildred and the dramatic relationship between mother and daughter, were dealt with differently in the film and TV series. In the first, an added frame noir (the opening scene of the crime), to suppress the roughness of the book that did not fail to censor, the transposition of HBO is totally faithful to the paper counterpart. In the novel, as in the series, Mildred was obsessed with the social sphere: her first refusals to the menial jobs that are offered, and even when she gets the job as a waitress living in a deep inner conflict, culminating in keeping it hidden from her daughter.

In contrast, the Curtiz film does not dwell much on Mildred as a self-made woman: the sequences that speak to the social climb up the social ladder are put together with quick assembly (the succession of signs of its restaurants), all told with flashbacks from the voice-over narration of Crawford. The Hollywood diva never has a hair out of place, her clothes are always clean, even after cooking, and when we see her dressed in her waitress uniform it is only for a few minutes. Unlike Crawford’s Mildred, Winslet gets dirty. It is her suffering and  consequent cleansing that makes a radical change of look as her business grows.

The movements of the fluidity of Curtiz film takes up the writing style of Cain, linear and structured. As well as the full and conscious sensuality of the protagonist in the novel, the echoes of stealth are visualized on the big screen: the details of the lean and curvy legs (of which more times the literary Mildred welcomes proudly) peeking out from behind a ladder or a swimsuit. Joan Crawford filled the character with eros, by dosing balancing the erotic with the numerous close-ups that literally dazzle the screen. Curtiz delves, but does not say anything openly as did Cain in the book. During the first night of love between Mildred, spoiled heiress, and Monty, unscrupulous lover, the camera moves away, pauses for a few seconds on the lovers’ reflection in the mirror, slipping into the minds of the spectators the carnal act that will be consumed shortly thereafter.

The key to the book, both in shooting films in the series, was not so much a history lesson, as the morbid and destructive relationship between Mildred and Veda. She lives for her daughter: her decision to find a job, even medium-low level is not only dictated by the need to support the family, but especially by the uncontrollable desire to give to her daughter, capricious and insatiable. As Mildred efforts to please her daughter (who is given elegant clothes, piano lessons, evenings in high class dining rooms), Veda is closed inside this world of deception and treachery. She’s a girl-woman unable to see beyond herself that, unlike the mother, aspires to a higher social level without having to dirty her hands.

In the final moments, the emotional charge of the action is still committed to the diva: Crawford’s face is bathed in light in a now infamous frame. The terrible nature of her daughter, a true femme fatale, comes out as well. A play of light and shadow that recants a broken American dream not because of the money, but for love – visceral and unobtainable.

—- Emanuela Vignudelli

(Source: ilcinemaritrovato.it)

Posted by Larry Gleeson

Exhibition, concealment: the oscillation between these two poles gives an account of the adversarial manner in which the female body flows on the earliest silent films. Last night in Pasolini Piazzetta a cinema of attractions was screened by Nikolaus Wostry (Filmarchiv Austria) with a rare example of a projector crank,. Die Kleine Veronika (1930), was introduced by the Austrian archivist and projected from the historic lantern coal by Stefano Bognar.

Evanescent and impalpable, the female body assumes all the typical cultural imaginary forms of fin de siècle. At the center of the fragile images, in which the color on the film merges with the prism of the light beam emitted by the crank projector coupled with a specimen lenses created perfect angles to the formats of the first decade of the twentieth century (and already in disuse since the twenties). And although the dominant figure is that of femininity, as was the case for much of the visual history, it is the first object (not the subject) of the vision. These fragments of early cinema has felt the creep of  change, a scopic potential – the eye of women.

It Les Trois phase de la lune (1905) prior to a moon of honey, then butter, mustard finally depicts the evolution of a couple from marital bliss to the double argument. The female figure is that of the classic wife, in which civilian clothes and facial expressions of the grotesque comedy play on the stereotypes of the spouse who eventually becomes tame through surliness and petulance. Yet, the position of the body, supporting actor versus her husband, and the look that shows no signs of fall are already the first timid signs of a new way of being in the world.

If La Fée aux Pigeons (1906) recovers the fairytale topos of the fairy as purely ornativo tool, yet of great scenic impact (wonder to behold the lightness of pigeon feathers and peacock, as well as the delicate blend of pastel chromatic notes). The last two sketches to induce a more complete reflection on the perception of the female body. Die Zaubereien des Mandarins (1907) is registrable in an interstitial place between a playful kind of entertainment and pornography: a male character, oriental dress, the appearance and disappearance of a few, half-naked, girls through a silk umbrella. Here the nudity is pure surface, pure onstration, pure objectification: the very absence of a minimum voyeuristic  gander though (which would imply a vision in some forbidden way, transgressive, hidden) argues in favor of an interpretation in key pornographic terms, yielding emptiness from within their own pure charge of desire resulting in a patina on the film.

Much more ambiguous Das Eitle Stubenmädchen (1907), where a maid, busy dusting a study in which stands a statue of a naked young woman begins a dialogue with its double-stone, until some sort of identification opens the door to  for her to undress entirely and simulate the same pose. The arrival of the owner abruptly interrupts the act of liberation, and the girl runs away scared from the owner-satyr. If this last scene winks to male desire, the stripping is the result of a spontaneous choice, awareness, a desire to exit from a subordinate role (that of the maid, characterized by a certain type of clothing) to one outside of the schemes, as the gesture is also loaded with a decidedly disturbing potential (the theme of the double, the metamorphosis almost pigmalionic, the medusiforme look that petrifies).

But if here nudity seems to suggest a possibility of liberation from social role, it not as happens in Die Kleine Veronika , where the female identity is told through the use of a dichotomous paradigm: on the one hand, the young country girl, pure and innocent, and carefree that runs in the middle of nature; on the other, the aunt, Viennese by adoption, whose wealth is soon discovered to be the result of prostitution. The theme of perverting cities against women is typical of a certain way by which the European modernism has given an account of the complex process of empowerment of women.  The film then declines sharply, pedagogical, and very (too) predictable.

However, also because of the experimental musical accompaniment and sometimes noise guitarist, it can be interesting to watch the movie as a small women’s fashion sense and imaginary construction. The first sign that Veronika receives an impending trip to Vienna is the dress sent by the Aunt: a white dress, modern, soft lines, far away from clothing with which she arrives at the station (oversize sweater, plaid skirt). They are the aunt’s clothes to fascinate Veronika, clothes from the Art Nouveau patterns with showy pearls and fine underwear. The body skin changes, and this change, however, alludes, by contrast, to nudity (never performed) alluded to in continuation, experienced by the same Veronika, then causing the protagonist in a nearly fatal disturbance. We are in 1930, the Roaring Twenties are coming to an end: and the body of women is still far from not being made the subject of conditioning, of coercive and with guilty nudity.

—- Beatrice Seligardi

(Source: ilcinemaritrovato.it)

Posted by Larry Gleeson

Jacques Rozier was perhaps one of the most emblematic of the Nouvelle Vague directors. Want the Sun(1962) remains his most famous work and it is with this and with the former Blue Jeans (1958) that earns the esteem of Jean-Luc Godard.  Godard is helpful to attend the filming of Contempt during which can devote himself to the realization of two interesting short films, Paparazzi and the parties des choses: Bardot et Godard (1963).

It is curious to read that on the set of the film despite the confidentiality of the place where there is Villa Malaparte, another director, Peter Fleischmann, is filming a short documentary about his meeting with Fritz Lang, also in Capri and called by Godard himself to interpret as he is struggling with a modern version of the Odyssey. A set quite busy as well as the attraction of numerous paparazzi hoping to immortalize Bardot in bikini, these are best sellers shots, but Brigitte “is not kind” with them, with the stern look borrowed from classical statues of dummy Lang film, accuses the intrusiveness of the paparazzi who defend themselves while extolling the dangers of their work and the hours and hours spent in the sun hiding in the rugged rocks of the lush landscape where the villa is situated.

In Paparazzi Godard and local law enforcement protect it from prying eyes peering at a safe distance on an elusive diva at home in the island paradise, the ideal place to put aside the iconic image that Rozier insistently scrolls before our eyes with coated interludes in which alternate, rhythmically-infinite covers on which stands the portrait of a modern woman: “illogical, disarming, mysterious, regal.” These are the words used by Rozier in his The parties des choses: Bardot et Godard, another short film shot in Capri in which the director does not dwell exclusively on hunting prey until the last BB, a magnificent shot. The attention now moves to the whole team, probing Godard’s method, “the party of things” or how the director benefits from the elements of the surrounding reality that often interfere in the working of Contempt, a vision of ever default creative process but continually changing. Rozier focuses on the evolution of a product film without diminishing its artistic value, long-awaited and discussed, which stars Brigitte Bardot and Jean Luc Godard, two interpreters, paradoxically at odds, in contemporary cinema.

Jacques Rozier with Jean Vigo , created in 1964 for the television episode Cinéastes de notre temps, sheds light on the short but intense work of another filmmaker through the testimony of its employees, in contrast to the two previous works on Contempt, here the documentary is part of the canonical forms, the originality of the work is inherent nell’atipicità of the subject matter. Jean Vigo has no need of engaging the editing rhythms, its irony, particularly scathing in Paparazzi, emerges from interviews, friends and actors, who worked with Vigo and remember that experience with emphasis and transportation. And this is what strikes the viewer, despite the precarious health conditions of the director, the satirical backbone in the way of Nice, which moves Vigo and infects a bit – all being evoked in the story of these unique experiences. Gilles Margaritis stated: “All those who worked with Vigo Vigo had something,” as if to underline the common feeling of the crew, a shared sense of humor which, according to Jean Dasté hung over every disagreement smothering the bud.

This comedy over the top, heir perhaps the famous phrase “Je vous dis merde!” Imprinted from Vigo father on the cover of La Guerre Sociale (shooting in the film Zero for Conduct ), provides, for example, the presence of a real “cats pitcher” on the set of L’Atalante \, a key figure to create havoc on the scene, and writing a humorous song full of puns, deliberately banal, intoned by a street vendor, a necessary choice because of every film requires a catchy tune.

The documentary puts not only into light the playful aspect of the realization of Vigo film, but also the economic and the questionable choices distributors face. It happens to L’Atalante distributed by Gaumont, who decides to change the title of the film on the success of a popular song the Chaland qui passe, sung by Lys Gauty (adaptation of Tell me about love, Mariù ), a controversial and unacceptable commercial choice for Vigo, who on his deathbed has distanced himself from his latest film that he no longer recognizes.

— Cecilia Cristiani

(Source: ilcinemaritrovato.it)