Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

Poster of Francesca Bertini
Courtesy of Cinémathèque Suisse
remains a masterpiece even in the fading, soft print that was screened.
But certainly everybody with both versions in recent memory now at
last was convinced of the superiority of the better colour, the better
definition of detail and the precise composition of the full ‘Scope frame
in the restored version, even though it is digitized.
Tom Gunning has been in great form in recent years, and Bologna let
him loose to curate the theme of the year 1903, “a hundred years ago”,
in five shows. The visual pleasures of 1903 ranged from Happy Hooligan
to The Gay Shoe Clerk; trick films prospered in many countries, inspired
by Méliès; the story film and the chase format grew with multiple
shots, famously in The Great Train Robbery; the non-fiction film passed
its first great phase as the Lumière brothers withdrew from the market
and the production of the gorgeous 68mm Biographs ended; and film
comedy was the wildly rising genre. Tom Gunning’s shows were film
history lessons at their best. We look forward to a similar treatment of
the year 1904 in the next Festival.
The Léonce Perret retrospective, having focused last year
on 1911-1913, now opened on to a wider time-span, 1910-
1923, with lovingly restored and reconstructed prints
from the Cinémathèque Gaumont and the
Cinémathèque française, backed up by a beautiful
monograph edited by Bernard Bastide and Jean A. Gili.
With new prints covering the range from comedy to
tragedy and from historical dramas to thrillers the
challenge is imminent to reassess Perret’s status in film
history in the years before the Great War when he was
Gaumont’s house director beside Feuillade. In all genres,
his was a cinema of visual delight and generous
elegance; he is a precursor of Renoir, Ophüls and
McCarey. Perret’s first feature, L’Enfant de Paris (1913),
restored ten years ago, was gratifying to see in context.
The screening of the brand-new restoration of
Koenigsmark (1923), unexpectedly over two-and-a-half
hours long, was missed by most as it overlapped with a
Chaplin gala and will hopefully be reprogrammed.
A completely different Gaumont director was Jean
Durand, from whom films from 1911-1913 were sampled.
Durand was the expert of the wild comedy series of
Calino, Zigoto, and Onésime, and he was also in charge of
Gaumont’s French westerns shot in the Camargue. This
was the age when anything was possible: in Onésime
horloger (1912), our hero sets the clocks forward to get
more quickly to his inheritance; as a result the world
speeds up.
Retrospectives of silent stars have been a Bologna
tradition, and this year Francesca Bertini (1888–1985) was celebrated.
Even though she was always a cult figure, for generations prints were
so scarce that a tribute was hard to mount. Now a new book edited by
Gianfranco Mingozzi sets the record straight regarding the
preservation status of Bertini’s films. Bertini was the true auteur behind
her films, deciding on her screenplays and directors. The centrepiece of
56 Journal of Film Preservation / 67 / 2004