Saturday 11 November 2017

Il Cinema Ritrovato in London#1

Assunta spina
Catholics have the Vatican. Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mecca. Cinephiles have Il Cinema Ritrovato. It's the name of a unique film festival which has been running now for 31 years. The annual setting for the festival is Bologna which boasts majestic architecture, great food and the oldest university in Europe, helping to turn the location into a film set.

The festival, hosted by Cineteca di Bologna, screens films from all over the world. It is dedicated to film history, but in a way that will fully convince anyone that the past is a vital part of the present – or as Henri Langlois said about Chaplin, it is the future. Il Cinema Ritrovato brings to an international audience films which have rarely been seen, films that have never been seen in decent copies and films that may have been seen before, but never in the city's main piazza with 4,000 passionate viewers in attendance and a philharmonic orchestra providing musical accompaniment. The festival never ceases to amaze visitors.New restorations, new prints, and remarkable discoveries on an almost daily basis are characteristic of this annual eight-day affair, a 500-film marathon that Sight & Sound magazine recently called "The Shock of the Old."


Close-Up in collaboration with Il Cinema Ritrovato presents a programme touching on two of the festival's distinctive strands: women’s cinema and film restoration – both have added new chapters to film history and brought enormous pleasure to cinephiles in recent years.

Programmes one and two showcase the art of Italian divas (Lyda Borelli and Francesca Bertini) and the star as the auteur. Programmes three and four present recently restored films from the legendary L'Immagine Ritrovata labs in Bologna: Humberto Solás' key work of Cuban revolutionary cinema, Lucia, and a Moroccan classic, Trances documenting the music of Nass El Ghiwane of which Martin Scorsese said "it’s deepened my sense of the mystery of being alive."

-- Ehsan Khoshbakht


Calendar

Title

Date

Time

Book

Assunta spinaTuesday 28.11.177:30 pmBook
Ma l’amore Mio Non Muore!Wednesday 29.11.177:30 pmBook
LucíaThursday 30.11.177:00 pmBook
TrancesFriday 01.12.177:30 pmBook

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