CINEMA REBORN 2024 - Peter Hourigan dives back into his first encounters with Jean Renoir to introduce THE GOLDEN COACH (Italy/France, 1952)

It is fitting that in this wonderful season of restorations, Renoir’s Le Carrosse d’Or should have a place. Today the film lover can have access to films from the distant past or from distant places, and in good viewing copies. When my love affair with cinema was being nurtured at Melbourne University (there were no film courses, of course) in the 1960s, you had to rely completely on films brought into the country by the commercial distributors. And on heavy 35mm reels. Rights would expire, and after a few years a film would no longer be available.

In this bleak landscape, one old film sparked a light. European critics had discovered an old Renoir film – Pre-war – La Règle du Jeu (Rules of the Game,  1939).  At its premiere this prescient film had been a failure. Almost immediately producers  had cut it down. And then it had vanished. But in the mid-50s boxes with almost all of Renoir’s original version were discovered. Here was the wonderful event of a film reborn. At a time when retrospectives were unheard of, La Règle  du jeu premiered at the Venice Film Festival.  

Jean Renoir as Octave in his La règle  du jeu 

It made its way to the Melbourne Film Festival in 1962.  An old film among a selection of the best international films of that single year.  And it sparked something in a group of undergrads, members of the Melbourne University Film Society.  God! This film is wonderful! We have to see more films by this guy. 

I was one of those people,  and over the next few years – until I finished my degree and had to go out and earn my living – I was involved in several events tracking down  any of Renoir’s films. We even went to the extremes of importing several there were not available in Australia. That was really an arduous and expensive undertaking. First, track down an overseas source willing to let a print come to Australia. Freight costs meant we were only considering 16mm copies – we could never have afforded the freight for a 35mm theatrical copy. We had to learn how to navigate the customs and censorship regulations. But we did pull together a two-week public season of ten films. We were amazed that we did it. But we were more amazed as we came to know this incredible filmmaker, who refuses to be pigeon-holed. 

   Left-wing Popular Front comedies in the thirties. Prescient social and political analysis of pre-war European society. American B-grade (in budget only) films during the second world war, when he was living in USA in exile, post-war entertainment riches like French Cancan.  

Duncan Lamont, Anna Magnani The Golden Coach

One of the jewels we came across was THE GOLDEN COACH, courtesy of a reasonable 16mm print from the French Embassy. We thrilled to its vivid colour, the magnetic power of Anna Magnani in a role so different from the harrowing neo-realist roles we’d associated her with, a fascinating structure that blended theatre and realism. 

Perhaps some of the minor roles didn’t have actors with the same ability to live in their roles as Magnani– but they were adequate and we came to love that adequacy as part of the fabric of the film. We were also entranced by the glorious music of Vivaldi. Then his music was still a novelty. The resurgence of the universal popularity it has enjoyed for the last sixty years was just beginning. In his book, My Life and My Films,  Renoir wrote, My principal collaborator on this film was the late Antonio Vivaldi.  I wrote the script while listening to records of his music, and his wit and sense of drama lad me on to the developments in the best tradition of the Italian theatre. 

 This is a film that is, first of all, to be enjoyed.  You can follow up later, writings analysing it in depth. Its balancing of realism and theatre, its total artificiality and its 100% truth. You can reminisce about favourite moments. There’s one line in the film that has stayed with me for years, and I pull it out frequently (even if only to myself) whenever I realise I’ve nodded off during a film or a piece of music.  I’ll leave it to you to recognise that moment.

 I’ll leave the last word to Renoir. In My Life and My Films, Renoir concludes with this, 

                Whether the setting is natural, or imitates Nature, or is deliberately artificial, is of little importance.  I used external truth in so-called ‘realistic’ films like La Chienne and La Bete Humaine, and apparently total artificiality in films like [The Little Matchgirl] and  Le Carrosse d’Or.  I have spent my life experiments with different styles, but it all comes down to this: my different attempts to arrive at the inward truth, which for me is the only one that matters. 

When I was preparing these notes for today’s introduction, I discovered a note on the film that I’d written for MUFS magazine, Annotations on Film for Term 3 1965.  And I guess I was also surprised to see how well I caught the film back then.  

AT CINEMA REBORN - Margot Nash introduces THE GOLDEN COACH (Jean Renoir, Italy, 1952)

I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land we meet on today. The Gadigal and Bidjigal people of the Eora nation and pay my respects to elders past and present. Always was always will be Aboriginal land. 

 

A big thank you Geoff Gardner for asking me to introduce Renoir’s The Golden Coach. Thanks also to Adrian Danks for his excellent catalogue notes. 

 

Jean Renoir (photo from his role in La Regle du Jeu)

I first saw The Golden Coach in the late sixties in Melbourne.  I was in my late teens and trying to make my way as a young actress. I had landed a bit part in a Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible.  I only had a couple of lines and I had to scream a lot, but it gave me access to a series of actors’ workshops George Ogilvie was running for the company. 

 

George had trained in Paris with Jacques Lecoq and the workshops covered mime, comedy and improvisation. He was laying the groundwork for his production of Goldoni’s A Servant of Two Masters, a play which drew on the tradition of commedia dell’arte, with its stock characters like Pantelone, Harlequin and Columbine, its acrobats and slapstick comedy, and its large sections reserved for improvisation. 

 

Commedia dell’arte is also at the heart of The Golden Coach, so I assume it was through George’s workshops that I heard about the screening. 

 

I didn’t know that Renoir was the son of the famous Impressionist painter and I knew nothing of the European post-war new waves of film production offering alternatives to the Hollywood films on offer in Australia.  And I had never heard of, much less seen, Anna Magnani. 

 

I have a vivid memory of climbing the rickety stairs of the International Bookshop in Elizabeth Street Melbourne where the film was screening. It was run by a socialist cooperative and there were overflowing tables of no doubt radical texts, but I was looking for the film screening. It turned out to be in a room above the bookshop, where rows of single wooden chairs faced a screen and there was a 16mm projector up the back.

 

I had never seen a woman like Anna Magnani on the screen before. She wasn’t conventionally beautiful, she didn’t defer to men, and she had a very loud laugh. In the film she plays the tempestuous Camilla, a member of an Italian commedia dell’arte troupe fresh off the boat in 18^thcentury Spanish colonial Peru. As Columbine, she could command the stage. As Camilla she was larger than life, passionate and outspoken. When a man hit her, she hit him back. I wanted to be her. 

 

Renoir claimed the film was not about commedia dell’arte. He had just ‘attempted to follow its style, with its involved complicated situations.’[i]

  

Graeme Blundell, who also participated in the workshops with George Oglivie, describes commedia dell’arte in his memoir as:

 

…a form of theatre descended from the performances of tightrope walkers, tumblers and acrobats, daubed with soot and adorned with phalluses, of ancient Rome’s Attellanae Fabulae. Troupes of popular comediennes roamed the fairs and carnivals of Italy carrying with them a simple portable stage, packed into a cart together with curtains, props, costumes and their immortal masks. The improvised dialogue from a plot line of scenario decided on in advance. Any actor at a loss for words or in any other predicament usually resorted to slapstick. [ii]

 

"...tightrope walkers, tumblers and acrobats..."

Left free to improvise, actors would spice things up by weaving in references to political scandals and intrigues in the cities and villages they visited. It was a ribald and satirical form of comedic theatre and hugely popular. 

 

Adrian Danks refers to the ‘porous boundaries between performance and reality, tradition and modernity, theatre and everyday life’[iii] in The Golden Coach. 

 

Renoir said

… it was a film in which I tried to enclose one performance inside another. I tried, if you like, to erase the borders between representation of reality and the reality itself. I tried to establish a confusion between acting on a theatrical stage and acting in life. I don’t know whether I achieved my goal, but in any case, it was interesting to try it.[iv]

Janet Bergstrom argues that Renoir …constructed the entire film (…,) as if it were a commedia dell’arte performance.' [v]

 

Made in 1952, the film was a French/Italian co-production and, unlike Renoir’s earlier films, it is in English. It is also in dazzling Technicolor. As the film opens, we see the arrival of the coach as well as the arrival of the raggedy commedia dell’arte cart and troupe. We meet Camilla, who, along with the coach, has travelled five months by boat from Italy in order to reach the ‘New World’.  It is a colonial multicultural world where many different languages and accents can be heard. Magnani didn’t speak English, but she learnt to say her lines in English and while Renoir wanted to do an Italian and a French version, he liked the English version and had no part in dubbing the other versions. 

Camilla's lovers - the soldier, the viceroy and the bullfighter

When the Spanish Viceroy falls in love with the tempestuous Camilla, we become privy to the disgruntled political rumblings below the surface that threaten the imperial power of the Viceroy to do whatever he likes. In this case to give the coach to Camilla, a lowly actor. Complicating the story are a handsome soldier, who is Camilla’s lover, and a Spanish bullfighter who also becomes besotted with her. 

 

The question of what the coach symbolises is raised more than once by characters in the film. Looking at the coach, I think of Queen Elizabeth bedecked in precious jewels (no doubt from colonial plunder) riding in a golden coach to her coronation. The coach a symbol of great wealth and imperial power. In the film it is gold that has fed the Spanish colonization of Peru and it is the Spanish Viceroy who has ordered the coach for his own private use as a symbol of imperial prestige. 

 

Some of my favourite shots in this film are the expressionless faces of the Indigenous South American Indians watching the troupe perform. They are almost documentary images of ‘witnessing’ the colonial appropriation of culture and of land, something which continues to this day in the Amazon.

Camilla  onstage
 

While the coach, like money, is, as Danks suggests an ‘object of exchange’, I suggest it is also erotized in this film as a powerful symbol of desire. Desire for wealth and power, but underneath it all the desire for something more, for a better life, and for love. Renoir loved flawed characters and the characters are all flawed and conflicted in the face of the power of gold to satisfy their desires either by acquiring it or by giving it away. 

 

The coach itself was found by the producer, Prince Francesco Alliata, who did actually have royal blood, although he didn’t use his title in the credits.  It had been created for the First Lord of the Kingdom of Sicily, but abandoned two centuries before in a stable in Palermo when Alliata found it and restored it for the film. [vi]

 

Alliata was a young filmmaker and lawyer, and, at one stage, it looked like the film would go spectacularly over budget and not get made.  Visconti had originally been attached and had been paid handsomely for a year to develop the screenplay. Then Renoir took over. He wanted to film the exteriors in Sicily, but seven years after the war the streets had been modernized and there were electric lights and telephone wires. They decided to shoot the entire film in the famous Cinecittà Studios just outside of Rome, which meant the Viceroy’s Palace and the exterior of the Cathedral had to be built, at great cost. 

 

As the production ran into more and more financial trouble, Alliata had a bright idea. Cinecittà had 16 sound stages and a massive area to construct sets. He would produce two low-budget swashbuckling cheapies at the same time, which he did. These films were very successful and paid the bills. It meant The Golden Coach could be finished, but it finished Alliata as a film producer too. 

 

In the opening sequence Camilla asks if the two hours each night on the stage entertaining an audience are enough? If the power to transport an audience, to transform daily life into magic are enough. Her question is answered by her actions at the end of the film. 

 

If you are ever in Sicily and want to see the restored coach, it is on display at the foot of a grand staircase in the palace of the President of the Sicilian Parliament, formerly the royal palace of Palermo.

 

The Coach today. Below is nearby museum description. Click to enlarge

I hope you enjoy the film. It‘s a romp, a comedic farce and made to entertain you the audience and to give you pleasure.

 

Thank you

---

[i] Phillips, James, E. A commedia dell’arte The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Autumn, 1954), pp. 16-24 University of California Press, Autumn

[ii] Blundell, G The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts, Hachette Australia, 2008

[iii] Danks, A. The Golden Coach Film Notes, Cinema Reborn Catalogue pp. 13-17 2024

[iv] O’Rawe, D. The Cinema of Masks: Commedia dell’Arte and Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach in Clowns, Fools and Picaros, Brill, The Netherlands, 2007

[v] Bergstrom, J. Genealogy of The Golden Coach, Film History: An international Journal, Vol 21, Number 3, 2009, pp. 276-294 Indiana University Press 2009

[vi] Bergstrom, J. ibid.

CINEMA REBORN 2024 - UPDATE - THE GOLDEN COACH, ISHANOU, BODY MELT

The stills above are from one of our 2024 crowd pleasers, the wonderful THE GOLDEN COACH from 1952  starring the fabulous Anna Magnani. See it at the Ritz on Sunday 5 May introduced by film-maker Margot Nash or at the Lido on Sunday 12 May introduced by cinephile Peter Hourigan. Peter's passion for the films of Jean Renoir dates back to his undergraduate days in the 1960s when, for the Melbourne University Film Society (MUFS), he curated an early and pioneering imported season of Renoir’s films, some for their Australian premieres. His love affair with The Golden Coach has survived the years since. 

....In the meantime it's just a week and a day until Cinema Reborn 2024 gets going in Sydney and a week after that in Melbourne.  All of our media is in place and you can read extensive notes on all of the films in the program if you click on the Cinema Reborn website.

If you would like to have your own document with the program notes from the website plus some special additional notes on a range of our films you can do so by browsing or downloading the Cinema Reborn catalogue.

We have printed a small number of copies of the catalogue and these will be on sale at the Cinema Reborn Information Desk in the foyer at the Ritz ($5, cash only) and at the box office at the Lido in Melbourne (credit card only).

ISHANOU/THE CHOSEN ONE

Our first ever film from India (stills above) was made by Aribam Syam Sharma in the far northwest state of Manipur, a long way from the major production centre of Mumbai. Several years ago the process of restoring the film was begun by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur and his colleagues at the Film Heritage Foundation in Mumbai. The restoration took two years but in 2023 the film was brought back when it was selected for Cannes Classics and then went on to screen at Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato and MoMA in New York's To Save and Project.

Ishanou will have a single screening in both Sydney and Melbourne and Shivendra has recorded his own introduction to the film. It provides some fascinating insights into the film's subject as well as history of the restoration itself, a true labour of love.

We have posted Shivendra's introduction on YouTube and you can see it if you click here

ISHANOU screens at 10.30 am on Saturday 4 May at the Ritz and at 10.30 am on Saturday 11 May at the Lido. Just click on the theatre name to book tickets.

BODY MELT

Cinema Reborn's first ever late night shock horror experience has a host of fans including Quentin Tarantino who said " I thought the movie was fantastic. I invited a whole bunch of friends over to watch it, and we were like 'Wow, this movie is so cool'"

Then there is film critic par excellence Adrian Martin who has written the program notes for us.  Here's some of Adrian's sober reflection: Brophy is among those practitioners of the film fantastique – like George Romero, Kathryn Bigelow or Larry Cohen – fond of a certain form of allegory that is specific to popular art. Narrative situations provide a prism whereby a series of variations on a central premise are illustrated, demonstrated, explored, contradicted, synthesised. In the popular-allegorical mode, characters are conceived of as variable bundles of traits, tics and appearances that are exemplary in  relation to the chosen field of inquiry. In Brophy’s work, pop-allegory meets the speculative ruminations of the essay-film. 

His key subject has long been the body and our experience of it: life seized as a calculus of bodily effects, stimuli, drives, mechanisms. Horror cinema offers an expressionist statement of what is, for him, a base, physical reality: bodies that devour and decay, consume and expel, peel and ravage. The dialogue reminds us (in its pop-allegorical mode) of such daily realities: a baby inside its mother is ‘the ultimate parasite’; everyone’s hooked on one drug or another. 

Maybe it's a movie to tell your kids about if you want to introduce them to the vast pleasures of Cinema Reborn 2024.  Plenty of seats  free for Friday night walkups at the Ritz  at 9.00 pm on 3 May and the Lido at 9.00 pm on 10 May.

AND IN THE MEANTIME

The Cinema Reborn 2024 page on the website of the Australian Cultural Fund enables our supporters to make a tax-deductible donation. All donations great and small are very welcome. The Australian Cultural Fund page can be found If You Click Here

CINEMA REBORN WEEKLY UPDATE - TRAILER, ITALIAN SELECTION, THE GOLDEN COACH, IL GRIDO

Just to let you know a few news updates about Cinema Reborn 2024.

 

First we can report that advance bookings are running ahead of 2023 and already a few audience favourites are emerging. Most notably the Saturday evening sessions of Days of Heaven and Le  Samourai are already, as far as we are concerned, in the ‘selling fast’ category. We always expected they would be the most popular films. 

 

In Melbourne the Saturday evening session Days of Heaven is going to be introduced by Jake Wilson the film critic for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. In Sydney the Saturday evening screening will be introduced by critic and former director of the Sydney Film Festival Lynden Barber.

 

The Cinema Reborn 2024 trailer

Once again Organising Committee member and highly regarded young film-maker James Vaughan has produced the trailer for Cinema Reborn’s season. You should see it if you attend the Ritz or Lido Cinemas over the next month or so but if you are curious we have uploaded it to YouTube Click on the link to see what James has done. It’s quite a show in 1 minute and 12 seconds.

The Golden Coach

 

Italy at Cinema Reborn 2024

Way back in 2021 we had our biggest crowd ever come out to see Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard. Since that time Cinema Reborn has been grateful for the support we’ve received from the Italian Institute of Culture to screen our Italian selections. This year is no different and we are pleased to have two superb films from Italy. One is a remarkable co-production with France La carrozza d’oro/Le carosse d’or/The Golden Coach starring the great Anna Magnani (above) and directed by Jean Renoir. The other is Il Grido/The Cry directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. This year our Melbourne screenings of these two great films are being supported by the Melbourne office of The Italian Institute of Culture

 

Renoir’s film, a story of a troupe of travelling players in 17^th century South America and the mayhem caused when the local Viceroy, the local bullfighter and one of the actors all fall for Anna Magnani’s leading lady Camilla, has been called by Francois Truffaut “the noblest, most refined film ever made…maybe Renoir’s masterpiece.”

 

Il Grido

Il Grido, made in 1957, was the first of the master’s films to demonstrate the distinctive style and content that would become the signature of his illustrious career. It was the Antonioni film made immediately before he became an overnight sensation with his famous trilogy. Some say that on reviewing today it’s just as good as any of them.  

 

By some coincidence this will be the second time that both Renoir and Antonioni have had their restored works screened at Cinema Reborn. In our first season we screened Renoir’s The Crime of M.Lange and in 2021 we screened Antonioni’s Le amiche/The Girlfriends.

 

…and don’t take our word for it

To read a report on Cinema Reborn, here’s what critic Silvi Vann-Wall published about us in  Screen Hub

 

Charitable Donations

And as always… Cinema Reborn’s work over the years has long been sustained by the generosity of our donors who help us make up the shortfall between our income and the costs of obtaining and screening our program. The Cinema Reborn 2024 page on the website of the Australian Cultural Fund enables our supporters to make a tax-deductible donation. All donations great and small are very welcome. The Australian Cultural Fund page can be found If You Click Here

 

 

CINEMA REBORN ANNOUNCES ITS 2024 PROGRAM AT THE RANDWICK RITZ AND HAWTHORN LIDO

 

For its sixth edition, Cinema Reborn will screen 17 classics on the big screen at Ritz Cinemas in Randwick (1-7 May) and Lido Cinemas in Hawthorn (9-14 May). It will be the first time that Cinema Reborn’s program will be presented in Melbourne after five seasons in Sydney, where its audience has grown every year. 

 

Since 2019, when Cinema Reborn was first presented at the Ritz Cinemas Randwick, a tremendously supportive relationship has developed between the Ritz Cinema’s management and staff and the remarkable team of film-makers, critics, archivists, scholars and cinephiles who devote themselves to presenting Sydney’s annual season of restored classics. The expansion to the Ritz’s sister cinema in Melbourne, the Hawthorn Lido, is a natural outcome of the audience growth in Sydney and the clear interest to bring Cinema Reborn’s program to a new audience in Australia’s second largest city.

 

On behalf of Lido and Ritz Cinemas, Head of Marketing Jaymes Durante said, “It has been a privilege to help present Cinema Reborn at the Ritz over the years, and it brings us immense pride to bring the festival to Melbourne for the first time in 2024. Through Cinema Reborn, our audiences will be treated to a world-class offering of important restorations and rarely screened cinema treasures which will enrich our city’s cultural offering and will surely become a milestone event in the annual film calendar.”

 

The vast majority of Cinema Reborn’s films are restored in 4K Ultra High Definition, the current pinnacle for film restoration. This year’s selection comes from Italy, France, the UK, USA, Mali, India, Syria, South Korea, Belgium and Australia.

Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967)

International classics include Le Samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967); The Golden Coach (Jean Renoir, 1952); La Captive (Chantal Akerman, 2000); I Know Where I’m Going! (Powell/Pressburger, 1947) and Il Grido (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1957).

 

From Hollywood, Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959); Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978); and The Suspect (Robert Siodmak, 1944).

 

There are two World Premiere restorations at Cinema Reborn 2024: Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939),and Australia’s own Three to Go (Brian Hannant, Oliver Howes, Peter Weir, 1971).

 

Also from Australia, Body Melt (Philip Brophy, 1993); Journey to the End of Night (Peter Tammer, 1982) and Light Years (Kathryn Millard, 1991).

 

 

Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)

From South Korea, Sopyonje (Im Kwon-taek, 1993); from Syria, The Dupes (Tewfik Saleh, 1972); from Mali, Yeelen (Souleymane Cissé, 1987); and from India, Ishanou (Aribam Syam Sharma, 1991).

Yeelen (Souleymane Cissé, 1987)

For more information 

Cinema Reborn's website already contains a set of pungent and insightful short notes on the entire program. Over the next few weeks, the website will publish essays on each of our 2024 titles, written by some of Australia’s best known film scholars, critics and cinephiles. As well, a number have been written by highly regarded international critics and commentators. Bookmark https://cinemareborn.com.au and keep checking for newly-posted pages on each of our titles. Regular news updates will be posted on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

 

Information about Cinema Reborn’s program is also now available in a 16-page booklet free on the shelves of the Ritz Cinemas Randwick and the Lido Cinemas Hawthorn. 

 

Venues

The Ritz Cinemas’ and Lido Cinemas’ websites each contain pages devoted to Cinema Reborn, with comprehensive notes on each film we are screening and ticketing links. 

 

Admission Prices

Cinema Reborn charges standard cinema ticket prices for all sessions, including opening and closing night selections. Ritz and Lido Movie Club Members are eligible for member’s discount. Details of Club membership and the concessions on offer are at the Ritz Club Membership Page and at the Lido Club Membership Page

 

Bookings Now Open

To make a booking at the Ritz Click here and to make a booking at the Lido Click here.

 

CHARITABLE DONATIONS

Cinema Reborn’s work over the years has long been sustained by the generosity of our donors who help us make up the shortfall between our income and the costs of obtaining and screening our program. The Cinema Reborn 2024 page on the website of the Australian Cultural Fund enables our supporters to make a tax-deductible donation. All donations great and small are very welcome. The Australian Cultural Fund page can be found If You Click Here