I’m back at Il Cinema Ritrovato for the third time, which might be, in fact, the first – I finally understood that 2021 and 2022 were exceptional years, that, due to the early and/or late complications of the pandemic, rendered the festival into a special gathering of the few. Now, the festival is back in business, so I could witness a full version of Ritrovato, without any space and time to speculate about the better days (an economic tout va bien, together with a generalized political pessimism) which, like any other type of situation that is rendered concrete, was a little bit below expectations: the queues were longer, the discussions with filmmakers were shorter, the original texts from the catalog grew more scarce; but the applause was still roaring.

And it would’ve been impossible for them not to be, since along with its 37 editions, the festival has turned into a conscience of sorts for cinephilia: it shows enough films to overfill a history book (over 450 films, only this year) and is still hungry, caught between its self-pride and the frustration of endlessness – thus, a conscience in its truest of senses. To spend even a single day at Ritrovato can truly be providential, at least in terms of this anti-illusionist epiphany.

The postcard, an image of war

Although the festival had a whole selection of war films – or rather, anti-war films –, I can hardly imagine an idea more interesting to put to the screen than Jean-Luc Godard’s, from a video recording of one of the classes that he held in 1978 at the Concordia University of Montreal, three of which were screened in Bologna. 

In the last of the three, the only one I could catch, a Godard-turned-hologram in the fixed frame of the camera talks about his The Carabineers (1963) as an attempt to make a film about all wars, starting from “a very thorough documentation”: that is, postcards, like the ones that soldiers would send to their girlfriends. Coming back from a war that they didn’t yet know had been lost, and which they had gone to fight strictly for the money, the two protagonists of the film bring home a handbag full of unsent postcards: cats, landscapes, monuments, portraits, etc., exported images, “official and naive” (Serge Daney), with an “anonymous mise-en-scene, a standard point of view” (Serge Toubiana). For Godard, the postcard had become an image of war – a landscape and portrait turned territory –, just as, in his own words, tourism was just another way to wage war: and it just so happens (?) that this idea, not yet fully formed, was heard for the first time in about 45 years in a room full of tourists, of the spoiled brats of “international” hospitality.

Last year, like any good tourist, I even sent a postcard from Bologna, the photo of one Alessandro Canova, with a black and white contrast so violently edited that it much rather seemed to be a precise pencil sketch: three old women, seemingly returning from the Sunday service, walking under an arch. It’s not the official and naive landscape that Toubiana describes, but rather, a very similar one, just more perverse: an empty composition with a false subject, for whom only the background matters. Because, essentially, tourism is a careless positioning of oneself in various backgrounds: to search for a subject, a meaning to them is above one’s power as a tourist, and to buy a postcard that pretends to have a subject beyond its background is nothing more than a ruse – and I fell for it.

In the Pier Paolo Pasolini Piazzeta, the courtyard of the Bologna Cinematheque, several dozen Scopitone videos played on 16mm magenta film (the color of chemical degradation) – made in the 1960s for the experimental small screen of a new jukebox model of the time. The screening was supposed to continue the tradition of the square, where, year after year, technically impeccable projections are held in their original format: 9.5mm, 16mm, 35mm, etc. But it wasn’t meant to be, a fact that was evident from the very first magenta stills: after running through a couple of reels, the organizers had to announce that the projector was unable to cycle through all of the 61 (!) videoclips that had initially been programmed for the night. Even so, people laughed, clapped, and let their eyes dance to those surreal, cheap, and imaginative images, as a reminder of the lost spontaneity of film stock.

Of the two to three dozen films that played, the most interesting to me was Gilbert Bécaud’s video for “Nathalie” – the song of a tourist in Moscow that falls in love overnight with Nathalie, a blonde woman who is his guide. It was shot in the Red Square, and the director, a complete unknown, understood the mise-en-scène of tourism: Nathalie shows him the central splendors outside the frame, while Bécaud stares on, longingly – the touristic landscapes are always sure, always easy to stare at empty-headedly, but when he turns around and meets her gaze, his reaction start to shake. She looks over the Red Square and he sheepishly glances at her, while a handful of indifferent shots take in the roofs of the surrounding buildings. This is how his self-positioning within this landscape sounds a bit like this: “Moscow, the plains of Ukraine / And the Champs Elysees / We got them all mixed up (…) / Still I know that one day in Paris / It is I who will serve as her guide / Nathalie, Nathalie”.

For those who have the eyes to see, there are other types of landscapes than those in postcards, which are much more popular nowadays: media landscapes, sometimes lacking any other real point of reference than the cultural one, those iconic images that seem to be both so close yet faraway, incapable of still being subjects, per se – the decisive kiss in the half-light, the news anchor, the plastic monster that destroys our town, the harsh stare of a sheriff in a Western movie, the costumes in any reenactment of the Passion of the Christ, and so on.

In this sense, Joe Dante is a great landscapist: his 1969 The Movie Orgy, originally seven hours long, yet re-edited long the years until it reached a duration of almost five, is an immense, and ironically unsparing collection of standard imagery from American pop culture, ranging from B movies, pornos, TV commercials, war propaganda, and talk shows. A child of subculture, the film was never fixed exactly in order to retain its performative nature – to see it from one end to another would be redundant, since it has no ends, and that’s why its editing was an open work of art for such a long period of time, for each and every screening in a dank garage. Presenting it before the screening, Dante even seemed somewhat ashamed at the fact that the spectators would see not just a digital version of the film, but an outright restored one: so he invited people to get bored and to rebel, to exit the screening and to make fun of it. But, in contrast to the Scopitone screening, the audience, much more savant, did not rise to the occasion: filmology killed the film. 

Genius filmmaker, or just a tourist?

It’s self-evident that any positive discussion about Robert Flaherty must continue on a sour note – his documentaries were unfaithful, profiteering, romantic reenactments of Western fantasies about the “other world”. Like Nanook of the North (1922) and The Man from Aran (1934), Moana (1926) was the result of a tacit agreement between Flaherty and the locals: the latter were to return to a time immemorial for many, to play out a role, an essential idea that would encapsulate metaphors about nature and culture. Following the commercial success of Nanook, the filmmaker spent a year on the island of Samoa with his wife and their three daughters in the hopes that audiences would get a taste of his documentaries. It was not to be, as Moana (1926) soon became a financial failure and, in time, an acknowledged masterpiece of silent cinema.

But the story doesn’t end there: fifty years later, Monica Flaherty, one of the daughters, returns to the island with Richard Leacock to record a possible sound reconstruction for a re-release of the film, Moana with Sound (eventually released in 1981 and hardly distributed). Nearly fifty years later, filmmakers Sami van Ingen and Mika Taanila, the former being Monica F.’s great-grandson, made a documentary about her expedition, using the recordings, footage, and almost diaristic photographs she, Leacock, and Sarah Hudson made. This is not a polemic endeavor that wishes to fervently defend R.F.’s unstable reputation as a documentarian (although his daughter unsuccessfully tried to find an answer on the part of the locals a few times) – to say the truth, it’s a film that is not that vocal enough, whose directors are trying to self-efface their own presence –, but it does offer profundity to the interactions that the Flaherties had with the locals: one that was clearly unequal in terms of power balance, yet perfectly respectful, lengthy, curious and creative.

Last year, marking the centenary of Nanook, Francesco Rufini wrote a powerful text about the creative contribution of the Inuits to film – and you can see how the same was true of Moana, and later Moana with Sound. However, the question remains: why did Flaherty’s daughter insist to sonorize her parents’ film, to complicate the question of cultural and historical authenticity even further, given that the result is completely laughable, from what I’ve seen? And, secondly – why are the directors of this new film so seemingly convinced of the authenticity of their own film, after investing so much energy in demonstrating how unstable this concept can be when it comes to cinema? 

Călin Boto

Film critic and journalist. He is an editor at AARC and writes the ”Screens” features for Art Magazine. He collaborates with many publications and film festivals as a freelancer and he is strangely attached to John Ford's movies.