The Cinema Ritrovato in square Maggiore june 22nd-30th, 2024

The Cinema Ritrovato – the thirty-eighth edition! – where once again we will celebrate the irreplaceable experience of collective film-viewing. Besides the three open air spaces – Piazza Maggiore, Arena Puccini and Piazzetta Pasolini – no fewer than eight cinemas will host the nearly five hundred films in the programme: restored masterpieces and hidden gems of every era, provenance and format. In addition to the usual two screens of the Lumière, DAMSLab, Cervi and the Europa, Arlecchino and Jolly cinemas, this year will also include the Modernissimo, which last November was returned to its former splendour and to the city following a long and complex reconstruction project which will conclude during the festival itself with the opening of the new entrance in the middle of Piazza Re Enzo. The Modernissimo project had to be conceived and realised, and it needed institutions which could support and finance it, but without the public which filled the cinema Lumière for over forty years, without the international audiences of Cinema Ritrovato which demonstrated its prestige, without a community that believes in the cinema and its history, today the Modernissimo would not exist. With gratitude and pride, and in the company of an extraordinary roster of international guests, we await you for another memorably journey through space and time in order to rediscover the history of the cinema

CINECONCERTS

It all begins in Piazza Maggiore, known all over the world as a cinephiles’ temple. Thursday 20 June, My Cousin (1918), the only surviving film featuring Enrico Caruso, who plays two roles, will be screened with a new score composed by Daniele Furlati and performed by a musical ensemble from Teatro Comunale di Modena, including a sequence where we will hear the voice of the great tenor. On Monday 24, Kote Mikaberidze’s Chemi bebia (My Grandmother, 1929) will be accompanied by the Finnish trio Cleaning Women and an explosive and overwhelming score!
On Thursday 27, we pay homage to Carl Davis, the composer and orchestra conductor who passed away last year. For half a century, he and his music contributed to cultivating a passion for silent cinema throughout the world. The first of the new restorations, curated by MoMA, Victor Sjöström’s masterpiece The Wind (1928) will be accompanied by its celebrated musical score, performed by the Conservatorio G.B. Martini di Bologna Orchestra, conducted by Timothy Brock. On 6 July, Maestro Brock will also conduct the Teatro Comunale di Bologna Orchestra in a performance of the famous score composed by Nino Rota for the Federico Fellini masterpiece Amarcord (I Remember, 1973), organized in collaboration with Sugar Music.
The Cinema Lumière will welcome the many musicians who are going to ensure a worthy accompaniment to all of the silent films. There will also be numerous events enriched by live concerts at Cinema Modernissimo which, following its restoration and reopening, will host festival screening for the first time, including a programme of avant-garde(ish) shorts, accompanied by the
internationally-renowned drummer Valentina Magaletti (Saturday 22); Monday 24 will see an ensemble of Finnish musicians, together with a Foley artist, accompany Silent Trilogy (2012-2023), a trilogy of silent shorts by Juho Kuosmanen; on Tuesday 25 it will be the turn of an entirely Bolognese group (Valeria Sturba, Tiziano Popoli and Vincenzo Vasi); while on Friday 28 Victor
Sjöström’s He Who Gets Slapped (1924) will be embellished by the sounds of an exceptional quartet (Laura Agnusdei, Simone Cavina, Antonio Raia and Stefano Pilia).
The magic returns to Piazzetta Pasolini, with two evenings illuminated by the 35mm carbon arc projector, while on the closing night of the festival a very rare 16mm carbon arc projector will make its debut, brought to Bologna for the occasion by our friends at Lichtspiel in Bern for the screening of a number of predecessors of the videoclip.

RECOVERED AND RESTORED

This year, even more so than in previous editions, we received hundreds of proposals for new and fascinating restorations. At the end of a lengthy selection process, we drew up a festival programme in which each and every spectator will be able to attain a state of cinematic bliss. Among the most anticipated events, the return, as never before seen, of a monumental and “invisible”
work par excellence, Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (1927), of which we will screen part one (3 hours and 40 minutes). The collaboration between Warner Bros. and Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation has brought about the restoration of some timeless classics of US cinema – The Searchers (1956) by John Ford and North by Northwest (1959) by Alfred Hitchcock – in 70mm, the
“glorious” format that doubles both the width of the film and the pleasure of seeing it on the big screen. That said, we will be keeping our passion for vintage 35mm Technicolor alive, with some extremely rare prints that the Academy Film Archive has released to be screened exclusively at our festival. We will also be celebrating one hundred years of Sony Columbia, a production
company that has traversed (and made) the history of cinema. If you have the impression there are going to be too many Starred and Striped films, let us reassure you: you will also be able to watch the definitive restored versions of works by Yasujiro Ozu, Hans Fischinger, Carlo Rim, Akira Kurosawa, Carlos Saura, Jacques Demy, Antonio Pietrangeli, François Truffaut, Miklós Jancsó,
Seijun Suzuki, Peter Zadek, Ester Krumbachová, Marco Bellocchio…
For the third year running, Pratello Pop will open the doors of Cinema Europa (where the festival was born 38 years ago) to cult and “alternative” films. Within the vast selection of silent films on offer, we would like to draw your attention to the Gaumont restoration of a 12-episode serial from 1916, Judex by Louis Feuillade, and a selection of Laurel and Hardy shorts from 1927, finally restored by FPA Classics.
Curated by Gian Luca Farinelli

To download the complete program click here>>>