As always, navigating the Locarno Film Festival is a daunting task, especially if you’re hoping to gain a somewhat accurate overview. This year’s lineup included a who’s who of contemporary auteur cinema (Wang Bing, Hong Sangsoo, Radu Jude), invited us to bet on debut works, and featured a retrospective that could reorder an entire section (not just a shelf) of film history. The ambition to offer a radical panorama of the hidden possibilities within the art of moving images governed this year’s edition as well.

It has been a hundred years since Columbia Pictures was founded. Initially a modest player in the mainstream cinema landscape, Columbia brought to light, through the eclecticism of its catalogue, the formidable idea of ​​being “poor” (relatively speaking) in Hollywood and compensating for the lack of resources with an abundance of ideas. The 2024 “Retrospettiva” was dedicated to them, featuring a range of representative or exotic names (the earliest being Roy William Neill’s 1929 Wall Street, and the newest, Budd Boetticher’s 1959 masterpiece Ride Lonesome), taking us on a leaping journey from the dawn of sound cinema to the convulsive twilight that marked the massive restructuring of the studios. This thirty-year-long second “day” of Hollywood – following the first, that of pioneers and early stars, evoking the silent era – coincided with the heyday of classic cinema, that of established and seemingly inexhaustible genres, and of cinephilia as the main gateway into the essence of films. It was a time of exponential growth towards brilliance, the perfection of a certain way of making art (Fritz Lang’s 1949 The Big Heat, the incandescent black diamond of the selection, is a film so stark and violent that it’s hard to bear watching), and the megalomaniacal fireworks that heralded the end.

Ehsan Khosbakht, the author of the recent documentary Celluloid Underground, where he reminisces about his cinephilic awakening in the clandestine world of 2000s Tehran, did a remarkable job curating this retrospective. It was evident that the selection was in tune with the current shift in sensibilities, reflecting the increasing reluctance of enlightened audiences to accept the (sometimes problematic) rules of this increasingly distant era known as the Golden Age, while simultaneously expressing a profound, scholarly love for these films and the craft behind them, which is often brilliant precisely because it masks its genius with phenomenal modesty.

Unlike other major festivals that often include circumstantial restorations at best, Locarno continues to display its ambition to preserve this bridge to the past of cinema (last year, an extensive retrospective honoured popular Mexican films), a past that is not a locked and guarded room from which a few rare objects are occasionally brought to light with reverence, but a live reservoir of the audiovisual medium that changes as our perspectives evolve.

Moreover, “The Lady with the Torch”, after the famous effigy that appears at the beginning of all the studio’s films, rekindled the connection with an ambitious and visionary programming gesture, willing, if necessary, to redraw the map of film history on a maximalist scale – not just selectively, submitting to the safe grounds that are popular today. Rather than pedestalizing the films, such a retrospective, “served” by the majestic 35mm prints of the selected films, is here to bring them back into discussion, to protect them from ceremony and stagnation, but also to dispel some misunderstandings and clichés about them.

One of these misconceptions pertains to the glorious past of cinema, which is often thought to be irretrievable. In a discussion during the festival’s film criticism workshop, to which I participated as well, filmmaker Pedro Costa reiterated this seductive idea of the seriousness that underpinned every film of the past – in contrast to the lamentable level of the present. However, if we were to take the Columbia retrospective as a benchmark, Costa’s statement doesn’t hold up. Not everything we saw was “good”, and not everything we saw was “serious” (too much seriousness, I feel, is not good anyway). The masterpieces were brought into the spotlight, of course – from My Sister Eileen, the 1954 musical remake by Richard Quine, to Nicholas Ray’s Bitter Victory (1957) – but other titles were of interest mainly as indirect documents of the era, if not merely curiosities and rarities worth checking off. Such is the case with The Killer that Stalked New York (Earl McEvoy, 1950), a rather unremarkable directorial effort, notable mainly for the fact that the “killer” here is not an individual, but smallpox itself. A strange bet, the film takes the recent case of a New York epidemic and tries to turn it into a typical film noir, forcing the illness into the villain role. Another problem film, barely an hour long, Under Age (1941) by Edward Dmytryk, starts as a testimony about young women forced to work in degrading positions, as escorts in motel chains across America’s highways, only to end as a cheap libidinal fantasy, with the film voyeuristically indulging in its own crazy premise.

The retrospective also included a revenge-rescue western by Raoul Walsh, Gun Fury (1953), starring Rock Hudson (a mid-tier actor at the time, who became famous later thanks to his collaborations with Douglas Sirk, dissected symbolically by Marxist critics of the ’70s, and due to his death from AIDS). Playing the eternal middle-class American who innocently dreams of settling on his quiet estate but is forced by unforeseen circumstances to postpone his retirement, Hudson is less interesting here than the formal device he is integrated in, with his impassive, almost mineral face. And that’s because the film was shot in 3D: it was, indeed, a rather enjoyable – though more anecdotal – experience to find various items, from knives to rocks, hurled in our direction, towards the camera (the best one, a snake lunging at the lens). Bathed in a bluish-cathodic proto-televisual light, this Technicolor-shot film is a stylistic exercise done on the fly, with Walsh’s well-known expedient dexterity.

A second misconception that such a retrospective can tackle is the impression of monolithism that Hollywood’s detractors (generally people who haven’t seen these films) impose on the production of that context. Another western – one by a much more cunning and thrilling expert, in my view – was part of the same selection: Anthony Mann’s The Last Frontier (1955), probably the least known of his 1950s westerns, a series that began with Winchester ’73 (1950) and ended with Man of the West (1958), two masterpieces that made the director a notable name for a certain kind of punchy, fibrous, and existential cinema. Along with James Stewart and Gary Cooper, Mann rewrites the mythology of the Western on “less is more”, retaining its skeletal structure without frills and rejecting the easy melodramatic excess. In the words of critic Yal Sadat, such Westerns “never cease to depict the world from the heights of the genre, probing souls through the gunsight.” This trueness to the genre’s coordinates, combined with a tiny openness to bloody transcendence, makes these films a colossal moment in Hollywood.

The Last Frontier starts slow (Victor Mature is not quite Jimmy Stewart) but gets better by the end, accumulating darkness and disgust for life until all that’s left on screen is a face contorted by cynicism and barbarism, shying away from a completely idiotic imminent end. Interestingly, the barbarism here (mandatory revisionism) comes from within: an infantry captain sets out to conquer an Indian settlement,  ignoring his subordinates’ pleas and sending the American forces (Mature plays a scout, the man who tests the ground for building strategies – only he’s out of his mind) to certain death. You could say that the film only really begins in its last ten minutes. Mann seems to be the opposite of Ford when it comes to filming large-scale battles, with horses, dust, and all that – he always does it reluctantly, as if it’s a footnote. By then, Mature’s character, by no means a hero, will have squirmed around the army base, annoying and badgering everyone, expending his energy in pursuit of an unattainable goal: awakening reason in those intoxicated by the thought of grandeur.

Columbia Pictures was not known for westerns but for screwball comedies and film noir movies. In Pickup (1951), director Hugo Haas also stars as the lead: a shy, reclusive, and rather old railroad dispatcher, who is targeted by a much younger, attractive woman (Beverly Michaels) eager to swindle him out of money. Haas, who was born in Czechoslovakia and came to Hollywood in the 1940s after a hellish journey through Europe while his family perished in the Holocaust, casts himself in this low-budget film – just a few locations, a few characters, barely 80 minutes long – humiliating himself, somewhat masochistically, in front of a woman who doesn’t perceive his lucidity, letting loose his most atrocious thoughts about himself. Yet it’s remarkable how the film is never bitter or sexualising: it doesn’t end in death or revenge. Perhaps it doesn’t end in forgiveness either – but there’s certainly a touch of almost idealistic irony, a bonhomie, a lightness about existence. In the end, the protagonist receives a puppy to replace the one he had lost. There’s no better consolation than that. The world is terrible, but hope persists.

A thought began to crystallise regarding this wave of films that get better and better (or maybe crazier?), until they reach a splendour in the 1950s that is hard to describe, carrying a kernel of self-destruction. Or rather, a diffuse yet increasingly overwhelming feeling, like an enactment of thought: the feeling that classic cinephilia is not just an isolated moment in the history of film reception, not just one way among others to relate to films – but is equally an intense way of understanding the life around you.

Many years ago, when I was a hermit student, I went through the critical works of Truffaut, Rohmer, Godard, Rivette (especially the latter), devouring them absent-mindedly, in a hurry to move on. Now, at the GranRex cinema in Locarno, I found myself caught in a full discrepancy: the cliffs scattered across the Wild West (not Monument Valley – there wasn’t enough money – but a generic landscape), the helicopter views of New York (the 1950s and the allure of shooting on location), the almost transparent studios, as far from (and as close to) reality as a dream, all this made me think not of America, not of Hollywood – but of Paris. Before my eyes, over the scenes in the films, were overlapping fantasised images of Parisian neighbourhood cinemas – some I’ve been to, others I never knew, as they no longer exist – the stuffy and romantic places frequented by the future directors of Cahiers du cinéma. To a large extent, these were the films they grew up with, contemporaneous with their becoming, formative within a wild and impertinent culture. Compulsively accumulating, they were perhaps the first to fervently teach us to appreciate the nobility in the most degraded or despised artistic work, to love art that does not express itself pompously, by hyper-signalling, to understand that great directors are not demiurges who dominate a set at all costs, but those who manage to slip – as if through a cranny, even under adverse conditions, and especially then – their view of the world.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.