Bologna: Il cinema ritrovato 2024 (1)
Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in "Morocco" by Josef von Sternberg (1930)
Ever since the oldest university in Europe was founded in Bologna at the end of the 11th century, the capital of Emilia Romagna with its almost 100,000 students has been one of Italy's intellectual and artistic centres.
The Cineteca di Bologna, internationally renowned for its professional restoration of classic films, forms a special cultural nucleus of the city. The "Il Cinema Ritrovato" festival was founded 37 years ago around the Cineteca. It was born out of the question: what use are the most beautiful classic films if people cannot see them? In the beginning, it was almost exclusively silent films that were shown here. Since then, the spectrum has expanded significantly and the film programme now extends back to the 1980s. You could say that the festival has the charm of a gourmet buffet for lovers of classic cinema, analogous to the city's opulent culinary offerings.
A central focus this year were the films of Marlene Dietrich, the only German international cinema star who has remained an icon of female self-confidence on the big screen to this day. The little-known UFA film "Die Frau, nach der man sich sehnt" (The Woman You Long For, directed by Kurt Bernhardt, who later made a career in Hollywood as Curtis Bernhardt) from 1929 was also shown, and it was not least this film that brought the blonde actress to the attention of Josef von Sternberg.
Marlene Dietrich plays a 'femme fatale' who effortlessly turns men's heads. As soon as the rich business heir Henri Leblanc sees her at the train window, he falls hopelessly for her. Her feelings hurt, his spurned fiancée retreats to the sleeping compartment and throws herself onto her pillow, crying. Fritz Kortner with a monocle acts as the jealous man at Marlene's side and her partner in crime. Made shortly before "The Blue Angel", the film does not need to shy away from comparison with the famous classic and impresses with its unsentimental sarcasm.
This was followed in the USA by the Joseph von Sternberg films such as "Morocco", "Shanghai Express" and "Blonde Venus", which established Marlene's fame as a major Hollywood star. Her appearance in a hat and black suit in "Morocco" made her a legend in the lesbian-queer scene, fêted in Suzanne Vega's famous song "Marlene on the Wall" from 1986.
"A Foreign Affair" by Billy Wilder marked a special place in Marlene Dietrich's filmography; it was partly shot in bombed-out Berlin of 1948. Marlene plays Erika von Schlütow, a seductive singer with a Nazi past who performs in an American-Russian nightclub with the telling name Lorelei. Thanks to an affair with an American officer, she successfully escapes denazification until Jean Arthur turns up as an uptight congresswoman from Iowa, hell-bent on shining a light on the dubious morality of the American troops. But in the long run, even she cannot resist the temptations of the black market and champagne.
Since her service in entertaining the American troops, Marlene was considered in Germany. a traitor to her fatherland. Billy Wilder's sarcastic view of Berlin in the immediate post-war period, in which neither the defeated Germans nor the American victors look particularly good, was not at all well received in Germany at the time. A Polish Jew from Hollywood rubbing salt in the wounds of our wounded nation! Bloody hell!
As a kind of bonus track, there was a selection of Marlene's "home movies" from the 1930s and 40s in which she can be seen with her lovers Erich Maria Remarque and Jean Gabin, among others. She had got to know the latter in Paris before the war. After the German invasion, they met again in Los Angeles, where they not only rode out together. It was a passionate affair and the great love of Marlene's life and ended when Jean Gabin volunteered to join de Gaulle's troops, France Libre, to fight against the Germans.
Thanks to a subtle gesture by the festival organisers, the restored version of the famous Gabin classic "Pepé le Moko" was also shown in the Bologna programme. The film by Julian Duvivier from 1938 shows the young Gabin as an elegant gangster and womaniser in the Kasbah of Algiers. The police can't catch him as he keeps eluding them in the maze of the streets and rooftops. Eventually, his passion for a woman and the jealousy of another become his undoing.