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For the second year running the Hollywood Foreign Press Association enjoyed a special spot in the annual Il Cinema Ritrovato(Rediscovered Cinema)  which takes place in Bologna, Italy. The festival showcases classic, rare and restored movies and has become a must-see event for cinephiles.

The HFPA has sponsored Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation which has restored more than 90 classic films. This year one of those titles, the Japanese masterpiece Ugetsu Monogatari by legendary director Kenji Mizoguchi, was featured in all its original poetic beauty which was honored with the Venice’s Silver Lion in 1953.

The film was presented at the Arlecchino Cinema on the second day of the Festival to a sold out audience after an introduction by HFPA member Elisa Leonelli, herself an alumni of Bologna University, and Margaret Bodde, President of the Film Foundation who praised the  generosity of HFPA for making Ugetsu and many other restorations possible. Martin Scorsese joined on by video message from New York, where he is still busy with his new film Silence.

 “I first saw Ugetsu on TV in 1958”, he iconic director told the Arlecchino audience. “And I have been obsessed ever since by its beauty and poetry. It was very hard to find the various elements to restore and save this masterpiece and I have to thank our friends of the Hollywood Foreign Press for making it happen. We did a 4K digital restoration working from a master positive copy and a negative dupe. We worked at Cineric in New York and I had fantastic help from Masahiro Miyajima, who worked with cinematographer Kasuo Miyagawa for 30 years. I deeply love what Cinema Ritrovato and the town of Bologna is doing by showing these movies in the right way. I visited Bologna and the Cineteca, but not Cinema Ritrovato Festival and I promise to come soon.”

Bologna's Cinema Ritrovato - scenes from a unique festival: (clockwise from top left): a carbon arc projector in action; director Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatari, restored by the Film Foundation with a grant from the HFPA, screens at the festival; Chaplin's Modern Times gets the symphonic treatment; on stage: festival director Gian Luca Farinelli, the HFPA's Elisa Leonelli and Margaret Bodde, president of the Film Foundation.

ARMANDO GALLO/HFPA

Every year the festival’s program expresses the power of film. Almost 500 titles were presented this year, from June 25 to July 3, at the Bologna Cineteca 4-screen complex and in various theaters in the center of this vibrant Italian city. Over 100.000 spectators celebrated the Festival’s 30th anniversary with an international audience: 3.500 festival passes sold to visitors coming from more than 50 different countries. 500 film archivists and FIAF members came from all over the world. 

The historic Piazza Maggiore, a jewel of Italian Renaissance, is the setting for the festival’s free open air screenings. It was very appropriate that Cinema Ritrovato would open June 25th in the Piazza with Charlie Chaplin’s classic masterpiece Modern Times with the accompaniment of a full orchestra. During the week Chaplin’s The Kid (1922) was also shown and its soundtrack, scored by Chaplin himself for the television version of the movie, was rediscovered and performed for the first time in its entirety by the excellent Orchestra Comunale di Bologna. Buster Keaton’s movies had the same inspiring presentation.

Italian film critic and lecturer Giuliana Muscio added that Cinema Ritrovato has been kind of a secret for international aficionados, “But things are changing,” she said. “People now come from all over world. Alexander Payne and George Lucas are just some of the people who restore movies privately and then show them here. On opening night I saw whole families at Chaplin’s Modern Times and heard parents explaining to the children behind me why Chaplin makes fun of the unions and fights for the workers.  It is very important to see the great memories of film of the past to do better for tomorrow.”

"Cinema Ritrovato also creates new audiences for silent films and restored masterpieces with no borders. Again, the HFPA can become a valid sponsor of Cinema Ritrovato; not just for the money you already give, but also having a voice in what needs to be done and restored.” 

The film-maker pays tribute to Luchino Visconti, whose cinematic masterpiece Rocco and His Brothers has been restored to its original glory.

Luchino Visconti was one of the greatest artists in the history of cinema. He had a fascinating life, which was intertwined with many different strands of European art and culture.

Visconti came from the Milanese branch of one of Europe’s oldest families, whose roots can be traced back to the early 13th century. He might have appeared as a character in one of his own films about the aristocracy, such as Senso or The Leopard – that’s the life he was born into. But at a certain point in the 1930s, his passion for theatre, opera and the cinema set him on a radically different path.

Visconti had a kind of apprenticeship with Jean Renoir and worked as an assistant on some of the pictures he made during the period when he was associated with the French Popular Front – Renoir was actually the one that gave him the idea for his first film, Ossessione, an adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice. Visconti’s artistic and political lives became almost one and the same – he started making films and directing theatre during the war years, the same period in which he joined the Communist party and worked with the Resistance.

He has often been referred to as a great political artist, but that’s too limiting and frozen a description. His sense of European history was vast and he knew the lives of the rich and powerful first hand – but at a certain point he became drawn to understand the other side of life, that of the poor and powerless. He had a strong sense of the particular manner in which absolutely everyone, from the Sicilian fishermen in his neorealist classic La Terra Trema to the Venetian aristocrats in Senso, was affected by the grand movements of history.

Visconti directed 14 features in his lifetime, each one extraordinary. Some, such as Senso, The Leopard and Rocco e i suoi Fratelli [Rocco and His Brothers], are among the greatest in the history of the art form. Written by Visconti and his long-time collaborator Suso Cecchi D’Amico (along with the contributions of four other writers), Rocco was based on elements of Ghisolfa Bridge by the Milanese writer Giovanni Testori, but it was also inspired by themes found in Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers and Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Visconti follows the fortunes of Rocco (Alain Delon) and his three brothers Simone (Renato Salvatori), Ciro (Max Cartier) and Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi), who travel with their mother (Katina Paxinou) from south to north in search of a better life. Unlike Senso and The Leopard, Rocco was set in the present, which at the time was in the midst of the industrial and economic boom that transformed Italy during the mid-1960s. The picture is about the effects of life in this new world on the family, which gradually comes apart at the seams.

When Rocco and His Brothers came out, in 1960, a lot of people criticised it for what they perceived as emotional excess. It is operatic, as were all of Visconti’s films, but the remarks about excess made no sense to me. Rocco is Italian culture. I grew up in Italian-American culture, but there wasn’t much of a difference. For us – that is, me and my family and my friends – the physical and emotional expressiveness of the characters in the film, Katina Paxinou’s character in particular, seemed like an accurate and only slightly heightened reflection of the life we knew. We all saw that kind of ‘excess’ on a regular basis.

Rocco is one of the most sumptuous black-and-white pictures I’ve ever seen. The images, shot by the great Giuseppe Rotunno, are pearly, elegant and lustrous – it’s like a simultaneous continuation and development of neorealism. Thanks to Gucci and The Film Foundation and our friends at the Cineteca di Bologna, Luchino Visconti’s masterpiece can be experienced once again in all its fearsome beauty and power.

MARTIN SCORSESE, founder and chair of The Film Foundation, is a director, producer, screenwriter, actor and film historian, and widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential film-makers in cinema history; film-foundation.org

Marlon Brando is also being celebrated at the Cinema Ritrovato festival, dedicated to rediscovered classics.