Venice, 24th July 2008
The new series of screenings and restorations of the 65th Venice Film Festival (27 August - 6 September 2008), directed by Marco Müller and organised by La Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta, will be dedicated to These Phantoms: Italian Cinema Rediscovered (1946 – 1975). The project has been realised by the Festival in co-production with the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Cineteca Nazionale, the institutional organization responsible for promoting and restoring the Italian film heritage, with the support of the Ministry for Cultural Affairs.
As part of the Permanent activities and cultural collections that have been rediscovered and restored, the selection of These Phantoms: Italian Cinema Rediscovered (1946 – 1975) represents the ideal continuation of the work started in 2004 and which, for all of the last four years, has successfully revived little-known areas of Italian cinema (Italian Kings of the Bs, The Italian underground, Casanova on the Screen, Tribute to Fulvio Lucisano, Rossellini centenary, Soldati, Visconti, Italian-style Westerns), alongside the international workshops of the Secret History of Asian cinema in 2005 and the Secret History of Russian cinema in 2006.
The These Phantoms: Italian Cinema Rediscovered (1946 – 1975) retrospective is curated by Tatti Sanguineti and Sergio Toffetti and comprises the screening of about 30 films made during the three finest decades of Italian cinema: namely between 1946 and 1975. Film collections and archives continue to reveal titles, films, stories, and directors that the newspapers of the time – dazzled by the productive richness of the finest cinema of the world – relegated to “little reviews” without by-line; films that for a long time have remained just titles in filmographies or dusted down for late-night viewing for some programme, but in general overlooked by even the most attentive of the recent general histories of cinema reviewing Italian film.
These “ghosts”, now revived at the Venice Festival, show us a cinema that follows two closely-linked lines: the capacity to reflect “live” on the history and current events of a changing Italy, from the post-war period to the economic miracle and the social contradictions of that growth; and the great freedom of expression given to the film-makers, often lost between the masters and the potboilers, and who today appear to us to constitute a true “Italian nouvelle vague”.
Among the titles to be revived, it is worth in the first instance noting the “anti-neorealists”: films that use melodrama to focus on the historical and social reality of the post-war years, such as Un uomo ritorna (A Man Returns, 1946) by Max Neufeld – restored by the Cineteca Nazionale and by Ripley’s Film – with an Anna Magnani seeking the death sentence in court for a fascist who had murdered her son; or La città dolente (The Suffering City, 1949) by Mario Bonnard, restored by Istituto Luce, Cineteca Nazionale and Cineteca del Friuli, which presents the refugees fleeing Istria after their lands were ceded to Yugoslavia; or Il grido della terra (The Scream of the Land) by Duilio Coletti (1949, restored by the Cineteca Nazionale) which, using a screenplay by Carlo Levi, tells the story of the drama and hopes associated with the founding of the state of Israel.
Post-war Italy is also the protagonist of the “noir” Una lettera all’alba (A Letter at Dawn, 1948), with Fosco Giachetti as the cocaine baron in a sombre Milan depicted by Giorgio Bianchi as a hard and cold American metropolis, and also of the extraordinary “film on the ruins” of Il cielo è rosso (The Sky is Red, 1950), directed by Claudio Gora from the novel by Giuseppe Berto. Luigi Zampa’s Anni difficili (Difficult Years, 1948), restored by the Cineteca Italiana di Milano with the Museo del Cinema di Torino and the Cineteca di Bologna, a bitter comment on the Italy of the turncoats between fascism and anti-fascism, has also been chosen. Together with Processo alla città (A City on Trial,1949), the reconstruction of a story about the camorra in Naples of the Belle Epoque, and today of great topical interest in the wake of the publication of Gomorra. Maselli’s La donna del giorno (The Doll That Took the Town, 1956), featuring the extraordinary debut of a beautiful Virna Lisi, takes us into the fashion world, anticipating the Italy of the boom years and of the summer holidays presented in Leoni al sole (Lions in the Sun, 1961), pitilessly exposed by Vittorio Caprioli – whose Parigi o cara (Paris, My Love, 1962) confirmed him not only as a great actor, but also as a film-maker worth rediscovering.
(Source: Biennale Cinema)