Journal of Film Preservation N° 56 - FIAF

Miracolo di Bologna
Peter von Bagh
It’s Spring, and the planning for the 1998 edition of Bologna’s Cinema
Ritrovato is already well along, and I’m just wrapping up my report on
the wonder 1997 exhibition. Gian Luca Farinelli, Vittorio Martinelli,
Nicola Mazzanti, Mark-Paul Meyer and Ruud Visschedijk (that is, the
dual team of Bologna and Amsterdam) have provided us with a model of
creative cooperation among film archives. The miracle of Bologna’s retrospective
is not only the selection of films, but also its unique vision
which presents a unified program and provides a strong historical context
for rediscovering the original relations among films. For a long week
in July, the city of Bologna, from the Piazza Maggiore to the Cortile to
the Cinéma Lumière, becomes a laboratory for the meticulous and
extravagant presentation of silent film.
Eight days into the festival, it’s Friday evening at 10. We are seated outside,
in the Cortile, just off the Piazza Maggiore. As the lights go down,
we are shown Eugenio Perego’s Napoli e una canzione. Two guitarists
improvise an accompaniment drawn from Italian and Neapolitan standards
of the pre-war years. The film is virtually unknown to contemporary
cinema history, and yet it becomes something incredibly beautiful,
one of the most overwhelming experiences of popular cinema that I have
ever had. The story is naive, full of feeling, and surprisingly reminiscent
of Viaggio in Italia.
But this marvelous evening doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Not only have we
been watching films all week, but we have also been uniquely prepared
by Cinema Ritrovato’s three day symposium on silent cinema that preceded
the main exhibitions. The work of archivists and academics came
together in an unusually productive way, so that a concrete and coherent
view of early Italian film began to emerge from the misconceptions,
myths and memories about the silent era in Italy. The critical masterworks,
stars and genres and the characteristic styles of Italy’s formative
period of the motion picture began to take shape at the symposium. As
this work continues, it will be possible to restore the silent cinema of
Italy to its place in the history of visual culture.
Friday evening’s performance was for me the most exciting moment of a
festival that was continuously amazing and revelatory (I felt like singing
“I’m in heaven...” like Stanley Donen on Oscar night). There was the fantastic
early version of Pinocchio with Polidor, the slapstick from André
Deed, and the beautiful Monichelli film. We were able to see parts of I
topi grigi (1918), one of the great serials of the decade, and perhaps the
boldest example of Pastrone’s mise-en-scène, his Tigre reale of 1916. The
screening of Gabriellino D’Annunzio’s 1921 film Il nave was a revelation.
This strange example of cinema mythography, with its stylized sets, its
costumes and models, its bizarre narrative of cruelty and some wild
39 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998