Bologna: Il Cinema Ritrovato (3)
Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (David Hinton; © 2024 P & P Film Limited & British Broadcasting Corporation)
There are some well-travelled cineastes and regular festival-goers who call Bologna their favourite festival. The atmosphere is relaxed and democratic, there is no VIP area, no stars who have to be shielded from the common people. Participants come from 70 countries, as is proudly noted. Tickets and accreditations are affordable, especially for students, who make up the majority of the audience. Entire film studies courses travelled from Germany to Bologna for the field trip.
The programme also includes several documentaries on individual filmmakers, such as David Hinton's film essay "Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger", which has also been shown in Berlin and Cannes. Martin Scorsese gives a very personal account of his relationship with Michael Powell, whom he greatly admired. After successful films in the 1940s and 1950s such as "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp", "The Red Shoes" and "The Tales of Hoffmann", the director was all but forgotten in England and lived in seclusion in a remote cottage in Kent.
Scorsese and his friends Francis Ford Coppola and Brian de Palma had discovered the films of Powell and Pressburger during their studies and were full of enthusiasm. They wondered what was behind the mysterious duo, who were jointly responsible for the screenplay, direction and production of their films. As a child, Scorsese had seen some of their films on television, all of them, including the ones in colour, in black and white. Because the Hollywood studios did not sell films to television at the time, it was mainly English productions that were shown there.
When he won an award at the Edinburgh Festival in 1974, Scorsese went in search of Michael Powell, befriended him and brought him to New York. Although he no longer made films, Powell became a mentor for Scorsese's projects. His editor of many years, Thelma Schoonmaker, fell in love with the reserved Englishman and the two became a couple.
"Made in England" was released in German cinemas at the end of June and can now also be seen on MUBI.
Another documentary in Bologna was "Jacques Demy, le Rose et le Noir" by Florence Platarets and Frédéric Bonnaud, which traces the life and filmography of Jacques Demy with numerous personal documents. The French director, who only made 13 films and died at the age of 59, was famous for his colourful, extravagant musicals. "Les Parapluies de Cherbourg" (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964) won the Palme d'Or in Cannes. The restored version was presented in Bologna on the Piazza Maggiore by Damien Chazelle, who described the film as the inspiration for "La La Land".
German critics were anything but enthusiastic when the film premiered 60 years ago. The magazine "Katholischer Filmdienst" (Catholic Film Review) was at least impressed by the "stylised colours, forms and movements of the unpretentious everyday story", while the "Evangelischer Filmbeobachter" (Protestant Film Observer) considered the "Filmsingspiel" (musical) to be "remarkable" despite its "sentimentality". In his "History of Film since 1960", the eminent German cinema historian Ulrich Gregor complained in a rather sour tone about the "romantic clichés... (the) tendency towards sentimentality", which turned the film "into a saccharine kitsch that is difficult to digest". US critics with a background in musicals, on the other hand, reacted very favourably. "Les Parapluies de Cherbourg" was nominated for several Oscars.
In any case, most failed to notice the film's dramatic background, the French Algerian War, which causes the youthful love affair to break apart. "My films are disguised. The true pessimism of the story is often hidden behind the colour and music," as Jacques Demy said. In "Une Chambre en Ville" (A Room in the City, 1982), it is a harbour workers' strike in Nantes in which police officers and strikers confront each other singing.
The harsh reality of the Italian post-war period can be seen in the films of Pietro Germi, to whom a retrospective was dedicated. In "Il Camino della Speranza" (The Path of Hope, 1950), whose screenplay was co-written by Federico Fellini, Germi shows the social impoverishment of a Sicilian village following the closure of the local sulphur mine. A trafficker promises the people work and prosperity in the coalfields of northern France. In Rome, he disappears with their money and forcing them to make their way north alone. They are hunted by carabinieri and striking workers when they sign on with a large farmer near Parma. Without money or papers, they finally reach the French border, where they have to cross a snow-covered pass. Surprising parallels emerge between the impoverished Sicilians of the past and the refugees of today.
In "Il Ferroviere" (The Red Signal, 1955), Germi combines elements of neorealism with a dramatic family story. The director himself plays the train driver Andrea, who almost causes an accident when he overlooks a signal. Abandoned by his union, he becomes a strikebreaker and socially outcast. At home, he tries in vain to command his family, but his pregnant daughter is not prepared to marry the man he has in mind. "Il Ferroviere" paints a sociologically precise picture of proletarian life in post-war Italy. Communist-oriented film critics called the film populist and sentimental and accused Germi of lacking class consciousness. A real worker could not be a strikebreaker. One reason for Germi's lasting marginalisation in the canon of Italian neorealism.
In view of the 480 films (including short films) in the Bologna programme, many more could be mentioned, such as the restored version of the "Godzilla" film from 1954 (directed by Ishiro Honda), which is called "Gojira" in Japanese and has a surprisingly serious and political message with its references to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or James Cagney, who in "The Roaring Twenties" by Raoul Walsh (1939) comes out of the First World War as a soldier and ends up unemployed on the streets before becoming a large-scale alcohol smuggler in the wake of Prohibition. After taking revenge on his unscrupulous partner Humphrey Bogart, who betrayed him, he dies alone in the snow, much like Warren Beatty in "McCabe & Mrs Miller".
Perhaps the atmosphere in Bologna is so relaxed because, although there is a wealth of classic films to discover, the festival is not subject to the compulsion to present premieres and films that have never been seen before. In Bologna, the festival relies on the curiosity and intelligence of the audience. "Viewers are not just consumers," says Guy Borlée, who coordinates the "Il Cinema Ritrovato" programme, "they also have a heart and a brain."