Unforgotten Ancestors: Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024

The first time I saw Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (1927) was on a boxy old television via a VHS tape. Even then, the extravagance of Gance’s ambition to put on-screen the surging tides of history and the flicker of thought in a human eye, all through what the director called “the music of light,” set a high-water mark for my idea of what cinema can be. I had yearned ever since to see it again, while following the never-ending saga of restorations and disputed screenings of the mangled epic (now clocking in at 562 minutes). All of this supercharged my excitement when I took my seat this past June in the balcony of the Cinema Modernissimo in Bologna—a subterranean theater itself recently restored to its art-nouveau splendor—to watch part one of the Cinematheque Française’s new restoration of Napoléon. The film is now as legendary among cinephiles as its self-mythologizing subject, so even a screening of the first half was a major event, and a centerpiece of this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, the annual feast of restorations and rediscoveries that turns the medieval city of Bologna into a cinematic time machine.

Gance swoons unabashedly over the eagle-eyed emperor (Albert Dieudonné), contriving artful coincidences to foreshadow his destiny and sublime set pieces to illustrate his heroism. Applause and shouts of rapture broke out after some of the most electrifying scenes, like the first singing of the Marseillaise, or a hell-for-leather moonlit chase on horseback captured in a hurtling traveling shot. But what saves the film from being merely a gargantuan spectacle of hagiography is the dazzling variety of techniques that Gance deploys to visualize the relationship between an individual and the sweep of history. The renowned “double tempest” sequence cuts together Napoleon’s escape from Corsica aboard a small boat that is swept up in a violent storm, and a tumultuous meeting during the French Revolution that culminates with the camera swooping trapeze-style over the crowd so that they heave like waves. Gestures, gazes, and physical details loom as large as battles; sometimes the intimate and the panoramic are layered on the screen through superimposition. The prologue dedicated to the emperor’s boyhood—the most moving section of the film—opens with a massive snowball fight, cutting back and forth faster and faster between kinetic action and close-ups of the budding general (the soulful, riveting Vladimir Roudenko), a still point in the maelstrom. The effect suggests his almost mystical power over events, as though—like a film director—he could turn his visions into reality, and make us all live within his dreams.

Seeing the past brought to life on a screen is now commonplace, and our sense of history is hopelessly entangled with the movies. Among the documentaries shown in Bologna this year was Alexander Horwath’s ambitious essay film Henry Fonda for President (2024), which weaves together biography, American history, and Hollywood movies, peeling apart fact from fantasy but also relying on the premise that rhymes and echoes can reveal submerged truths. Horwath traces connections between the actor’s films—recurring themes of injustice, embattled conscience, and loss—but also jumps from the films to the real histories they (mis)represent. The film cuts across time, visiting present-day sites that bear the traces of lynchings, migrant camps, or the genocide of Native Americans, and also zeroes in on clusters of simultaneous events. It was pure coincidence that the 1981 Academy Awards ceremony at which Fonda was to receive an honorary Oscar was postponed because of an assassination attempt on President Reagan by a man obsessed with Jodie Foster (who had appeared in a TV commercial with Fonda a few years earlier), but this provides a rich case study in the fraught relationship between Hollywood fantasy and real life. Throughout the film, Horwath uses Reagan’s soothing, God-on-our-side triumphalism as a foil for Fonda’s near-pathological honesty and skepticism; Fonda bluntly said that listening to Reagan’s speeches made him want to throw up. The film builds a persuasive case that the actor known as an American archetype was really a powerful demythologizer of America and a living embodiment of “reasonable doubt.”

Top of page: Napoléon; above: Henry Fonda for President

Horwath’s method of teasing out links and resonances risks seeming contrived, but comes off gracefully. It made me reflect on the way recurring themes seemed to emerge uncannily as I ran from one screening to another in Bologna, watching films from different countries and eras. With hundreds of movies to pick from, Il Cinema Ritrovato is a choose-your-own-adventure experience, laced with inevitable regret about what you missed. I found myself watching an array of films about the tensions between tradition and modernity, and how we all live on the shifting sands of time. These themes were spelled out in a program devoted to the Japanese director Kozaburo Yoshimura, who made a series of melodramas set in postwar Kyoto where the tenuous survival of ancient crafts forms a backdrop against which women struggle between new opportunities for independence, entrenched systems of sexual exploitation, and the unruly demands of the heart.

Yoshimura’s films present variations on themes, like a set of woodblock prints. Two of them star Machiko Kyo as a scheming, unscrupulous seductress who turns out to have a flinty spine, and a wounded soul. In the noir-tinged black-and-white drama Clothes of Deception (Itsuwareru seiso, 1951), she works for her family’s struggling geisha house, and gradually reveals her embittered and disillusioned take on a profession she sees as little more than glorified prostitution. Things turn even darker in The Naked Face of Night (Yoru no sugao, 1958). Here Kyo’s character, Ikemi, is a performer committed to preserving traditional Japanese dance, but she is scarred by childhood poverty and being forced into sex work at age twelve. The overheated plot plays as All About Eve multiplied, as the ambitious, manipulative Ikemi coldly steals her mentor’s lover and career, only to wind up with a protégée who does the same to her. But the most haunting passage in this primarily color film is a black-and-white interlude set during sultry night at a rural inn. An elderly woman begging with a samisen—the instrument traditionally played by geisha—performs a plaintive folk song before being humiliatingly ejected by the inn’s owner. Ikemi is shaken by this ghost from the future, who warns of the sad fate awaiting female performers once they can no longer trade on their youth and sexual currency.

The Naked Face of Night

The heroine of Undercurrent (Yoru no kawa, 1956), a gifted textile designer from a family of fabric-dyers, falls in love with a married scientist; the heroine of A Woman’s Uphill Slope (Onna no saka, 1960), who inherits a confectionery known for making traditional sweets, falls in love with a married artist. These widescreen color films are visually sumptuous to a degree that occasionally overwhelms their stories. Undercurrent is drenched in color, from swaths of freshly dyed fabrics and dye-stains on the heroine’s hands to the scarlet banners of May Day marchers and the red fruit flies the scientist is breeding. In A Woman’s Uphill Slope, the gloomy, unlit interior of an old wooden house is splashed with orange and blue light from a nearby neon tower; the heroine sports a fire-engine-red sweater and slacks as she peddles a traditional summer delicacy served in delicate mother-of-pearl vessels. Yoshimura and his frequent screenwriter Kaneto Shindo can be a bit unsubtle both visually and verbally (“Tradition is important, but innovation is also important!” the confectioner chirps at one point), but their embrace of complex female characters who are outspoken in their desires and excel in their professions is all too rare in any era.

Even rarer are films centering on middle-aged women. One of the best performances I saw in Bologna was by Françoise Rosay in Jacques Feyder’s Pension Mimosas (1935), a slow-building, grippingly unpredictable drama that revolves around the relationship between Rosay’s character, Louise, and her godson Pierre (Paul Bernard). When the film opens, Louise and her husband are raising the young Pierre, whose father is in prison, at their small hotel near a casino on the Côte d’Azur. The couple is bereft when their foster son is reclaimed by his parent, and continue to support him as he grows up into a charming wastrel, a gambler who takes a beating from gangsters for his pursuit of the boss’s mistress. The motif of gambling runs through the film, starting with a darkly funny scene in which casino employees are quizzed on how to handle a customer’s suicide on the premises.

Pension Mimosas

The curious thing is that everyone who sees Louise and the grown-up Pierre together assumes he is a gigolo and she is his patroness. His lover, Nelly, who immediately recognizes the older woman’s hostility toward her, tells Pierre that his godmother is in love with him. But is she? Or is her unhealthy obsession maternal? It remains tantalizingly ambiguous, thanks to a subtle and intricate plot and Rosay’s emotionally charged yet skillfully guarded performance. The film conveys much through details such as the forty-something Louise’s stylish wardrobe and immaculate coiffure, or the luminous expression with which she talks about her early career as a singer (Rosay started out as an opera singer before she began acting in films and married Feyder, with whom she often collaborated). Some kind of thwarted desire aches beneath her proud exterior, but whether it is for a child, a lover, or artistic glory is never clear. Recklessness, addiction, and delusion lurk beneath the shiny surfaces of this world, and a denouement mined with savage dramatic irony does nothing to settle these disturbing undercurrents.

With apologies to Tolstoy, unhappy families are often much alike across different periods and cultures. Films about clans disintegrating under the strain of generational conflicts were one focus of Cinemalibero, an annual showcase for world cinema that is always a highlight of the festival, often premiering discoveries that go on to wider release and acclaim. The universal story of women rebelling—at times in vain—against stifling patriarchal repression emerged in radically different styles, from the caustic but elliptical absurdism of Ossama Mohammed’s Stars in Broad Daylight (Nujum An-Nahar, 1988), which uses a Syrian family as an allegory for life under dictatorship, to the distanced formalism of Marva Nabili’s The Sealed Soil (Khak-e Sar bé Mohr, 1977), about a woman in rural Iran. Both films were banned in their home countries.

The family in Nirad Mohapatra’s Māyā Miriga (1984) dissolves slowly, in tandem with the gradual decay of their shabbily elegant, apricot-colored villa, which languishes in a lush garden on a sleepy suburban street. The whole film is weighted with a sense of lassitude; people spend much of their time reclining in the heat. A landmark of Odia filmmaking, Māyā Miriga follows an educated, landowning family with four adult sons. Some excel academically and professionally while others flounder, but all dream of escaping the family compound, even after the house is fixed up and furnished with a fridge for the arrival of one son’s bride, who promptly flees. A baby is born; an old grandmother dies; people bicker and air their resentments under their breaths. The oppressiveness of tradition—especially for women, who are constantly being ordered to bring tea and snacks—is sharply observed, but the mood is elegiac, with a tapestry of music and birdsong casting a spell around this place as it lapses into the past. Playing with his infant granddaughter, the aging patriarch wistfully asks, “Will you go away? Will you really leave us?”

Māyā Miriga

Migration from villages to cities, from poorer countries to richer ones, is the quintessential modern story: uprooting, displacement, adaptation. Introducing Pietro Germi’s The Path of Hope (Il cammino della speranza, 1950), programmer Emiliano Morreale reminded the audience that Italy, now a destination for migrants, was not so long ago a place people left. Especially Sicily, where the film opens with an arresting tableau of women in black shawls framed heroically against a dazzling, bleached wasteland. They are waiting for their men to emerge from the belly of the earth, where they are futilely occupying a sulfur mine to protest its closure. From this stark, primeval landscape of stone and stucco, a group of villagers sets off as migrants: by bus, boat, and train, to the disorienting urban chaos of Rome, along country roads by foot and in the back of trucks, finally to the snowy mountains on the border of France. They are cheated by smugglers, harassed by the police, exploited by farmers, and attacked by striking workers who view them as scabs and interlopers. Germi, the subject of a compact retrospective at this year’s festival, was reviled on both the left and the right in Italy for his idiosyncratic politics; here, he is critical of communist agitators and organized labor, but also of callous capitalist systems and government bureaucrats. The migrants themselves are warmly individualized, with an array of romantic subplots woven through their journey. But the images of families hiking along roads with their bundles and sleeping on crowded trains are, in essence, indistinguishable from those we see in the news every day.

Montxo Armendáriz’s Tasio (1984) is about someone who refuses to make this journey or submit to the demeaning exploitation of laborers. Filmed on location in the mountainous region of Navarra in northern Spain, the movie is a fictionalized portrait of a real person whom the director had met while making an earlier documentary in the area. Adamantly refusing to work for wages after early experiences of being cheated by employers, Tasio ekes out a living by trapping animals—constantly risking arrest and fines for poaching—and as a charcoal-burner. The film opens and closes with the image of a large mound of earth in a forest clearing, with tendrils of smoke escaping from small vents to hint at the slow-burning fire within. Tending the charcoal piles is dangerous, but the recurring scenes of this activity suggest continuity as well as the cycles of destruction and renewal, the way life relies on death. Tasio is an admirable man of principle, charismatically portrayed by Patxi Bisquert, but the film is unsentimental about his way of life. As we watch terrified animals struggle frantically in his snares, it is hard to avoid the thought that all creatures live by preying on others. “Smart animals avoid the trap,” Tasio says, defending his methods while refusing to participate in hunting parties for the sport of the wealthy.

Made after the end of the Franco dictatorship in Spain, the film includes few overt references to the fascist era during which it is set. But its portrait of a man’s stubborn resistance to authority and his ability to quietly carve out a space of personal freedom gives it universal resonance (and made it a good fit for the Cinemalibero lineup) even as it remains rooted in a specific piece of earth. This was a film I had never heard of, by a director I had never heard of, and I was spellbound from start to finish by its clarity and simplicity, its earthy naturalism, and the love for its subject that burns steadily at its heart.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Tini zabutykh predkiv, 1965) also opens in a forest, where woodcutters are chopping trees. Within the first few minutes, the camera has thrillingly ridden a falling trunk to the snowy earth, where it kills a man; a few scenes later, an axe plunged into another man’s chest splashes the screen with blood, from which ghostly red horses emerge and gallop away. The film sets out to imagine a premodern world with all the liberties of experimental cinema, and the result is so vivid and visceral, most other movies look staid and anemic beside it. The pivotal work between Parajanov’s early films in the socialist realism mode and the poetic formalism of his best-known film, The Color of Pomegranates (1969), Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors combines a sensual, tactile record of the natural world with the visionary and fantastic. Lichen, moss, wood, and dirt fill the screen in extreme close-ups. We watch people herding sheep in fog-shrouded mountain pastures, molding sheep cheese in wooden buckets, and harvesting hay. The film documents the colorful costumes, gray-shingled houses, and folk customs of the Hutsul Rusyn people living in the Carpathian Mountains of western Ukraine. But everything is heightened like a fever dream, pitched just beyond rational explanation.

Premiering in a new restoration from The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was part of a series marking the centennial of Parajanov’s birth, which focused on his early films made between 1954 and 1966, mainly at the Dovzhenko Film Studio in Kyiv. Though he later dismissed these works, it is easy to see his love of music, ritual, artifice, and fantasy applied to conventional genres and formulaic stories, as in the charming romantic comedy of collective farm life The Top Guy (1958), and the operatic fantasia of World War II Ukrainian Rhapsody (1961). It is also easy to imagine why he would disown these films, since his departure from socialist realism and his association with Ukrainian dissidents led to his imprisonment for four years, ostensibly on charges of homosexual activities, and his exile from filmmaking for fifteen years.

A love story provides the through-line and emotional charge in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Ivan and Marička (Ivan Mykolajčuk and Larysa Kadočnikova) are childhood sweethearts despite their feuding families, rolling in a field of wildflowers and splashing naked in a stream. As a young woman, Marička drowns before they can marry, and for a time Ivan’s grief drains the screen of color. But in this world, spirits do not vanish and death goes hand in hand with renewal; a funeral is followed by wild revelry. The grace said before a holiday meal includes an invocation to “Admit to the feast missing souls,” and in answer a spectral face appears at the window. Isn’t this also the mission of Il Cinema Ritrovato, to bring missing souls to the feast?

It is tempting, while watching this film, to speculate that cinema plays the role for us that myth, folklore, and magic played for our ancestors: showing us ghosts and heroes, mysteries and horrors. But Parajanov’s dancing, racing, flying, and swimming camera argues something even more passionately: that cinema is freedom.