IL CINEMA RITROVATO - Pre-festival screenings slowly slip the event into gear...

Laurel & Hardy in Two Tars 

Il Cinema Ritrovato slowly slipped into gear since last Monday with some screenings at the remarkable Modernissimo Cinema If you had been in Bologna since Monday you could have seen among others King Vidor's The Big Parade, Ernst Lubitsch's One Hour With You, Lewis Milestone's Of Mice and Men and Luigi Comencini's Il Tempo Che Ci Vuole and evening screenings in the Piazza Maggiore of Comencini's Le Avventure di Pinocchio, David Cronenberg's A History of Violence and George Stevens' Woman of the Year. 

Yesterday they kicked off the selection from 1905 with a dozen short films. It was introduced, at length in Italian by Mariann Lewinsky and in English by Karl Wratschko. Karl let us know they had watched 'every film made in 1905' to make the selection and in case you think that was daunting, if they had decided to screen everything made that year it would take less than a day to get through them. The first program devoted to he strand Cinema in 1905, was focused on actualities, a little violent slapstick comedy (Les Farces de Toto Gate-Sauce), and a recording of a steeplechase horse race. That film, all seven minutes of it, clearly (from the varying numbers of horses approaching each fence) was an amalgam of the races of the day but did include four actors pretending to respond to various events. In a way that reminds us that the very first film made in Australia, The 1896 Melbourne Cup, featured not merely the first recording of the day but also the first acting performances and staging of scenes in an Australian movie. (That occurs when a man rushes into shot waving his hat and suddenly the crowd pick up his cue and wave theirs as well.)

That program was rounded out by a restored 1928 Laurel & Hardy Two Tars, part of a concerted effort to restore all the silent films made by the pair. There are DVD releases of the 1927 films they made and the 1928 films will be out soon. Two Tars is one of their films that quickly descends into ever escalating violent retribution. The pair pick up a couple of girls (funny jokes with a chewing gum dispenser) but the mayhem moves up many notches as they get out on the road and car after car is slowly demolished mostly by hand. Subtlety had yet to appear in their comedy. Pratfalls were the go...

Coline Serreau

That was followed by the first film in the series devoted to a retrospective of films by Coline Serreau. Serreau was introduced by Mariann Lewinsky who noted it was the first time she had ever introduced a living film-maker. Very important. Serreau's Chaos (2001),  was not known to me and apparently not to many in the audience. The film was screened on 35mm with subtitles under the screen which might indicate that it hasn't circulated widely. A frenetic and often very funny film about family and domestic relationships which become entangled in a case where a bunch of pimps beat a prostitute into a coma and slowly an incredibly complicated revenge comedy gets moving as a family of grandmother, father, mother, son plus son's array of girlfriends start to revolve around the rehab of the prostitute, her extraordinary back story of drug addiction, family violence and exploitation....very edgy fun throughout. 

In the evening in the Piazza there was a screening of Henri Decoin's 1951 Simenon adaptation La Verite sur Bebe Donge,  a film that fits into two strands - a new restoration and a nod to an exhibition devoted to Simenon which will also include a talk by Simenon's son....