One of the blessings of Bologna, in northern Italy, is that it knows how to ride a heat wave. The city, which is the capital of the Emilia-Romagna region, is rich in porticoes—elegant arcaded structures that line the streets and allow the panting pedestrian, at any point, to flee the sunlight’s blaze and seek shade. In all, according to Unesco, Bologna boasts more than thirty-eight miles of porticoes, and they promote a pleasing illusion that you are simultaneously inside and outside. A tip for anyone designing a metropolis from scratch: start with a portico, and take it from there.
On Thursday, June 26th, the temperature in Bologna reached more than ninety-eight degrees. Stepping out, into the glare, was like hitting a wall. Even as dusk descended, people lined up to gulp from public fountains (another blessing), to fill their water bottles, or to splash their bare skin. Far from thinning out, the crowds grew denser as the hours passed, borne toward the Piazza Maggiore, the main square of the city’s historic center, as if on a tide. There, beside the shiplike hulk of the Basilica of San Petronio—which is a work in progress, the foundation stone having been laid in 1390, and which somebody really should get around to finishing one of these days—was a vast white screen. Rows of ticketed seating were ranged before it, like pews in a nave. Alternatively, you could lounge, for free, on the marble steps of the basilica, or grab a table outside at one of the restaurants on the opposite side of the piazza. The best ice-cream parlor, around the corner, stayed open till midnight, allowing you to cool your throat with an almond-milk granita. (It comes with a spoon and a straw, so that you can slurp it up as it softens. Pleasure, in these parts, is a serious business.) In short, here was a halcyon arena for a thoroughly normal experience: going out to the movies.
Bologna is the site of an annual festival called Il Cinema Ritrovato—literally, “refound cinema,” although for movie buffs a more fitting translation would be “paradise regained.” Run under the auspices of the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, a major film archive, it specializes in the shock of the old: films that have been forgotten, overlooked, undervalued, truncated by studios, or damaged by time, and that are asking to be brought back into the light. Resurrection, as often as not, means restoration, and one of the festival’s many missions is to showcase, and to explore, the painstaking ways in which wounded films can be healed. Some of the healing is undertaken locally, at a restoration laboratory owned by the Cineteca. Basically, if movies were people, whether foreign or Italian-born, Bologna is where they would choose to live.
The festival has been running since 1986. Back then, it was a quiet, five-day affair, taking place in December, and Gian Luca Farinelli—a founder of the event and now one of its four co-directors, as well as the over-all director of the Cineteca—reckoned that he was personally acquainted with most of the folks who turned up. Not until 1995 did the festival switch to summer, and with the change of season came a chance to show movies in the open air. The first film to be screened in the Piazza Maggiore that year was the 1922 “Nosferatu,” with the long-fingered, sleep-ravaging Max Schreck as the vampire. Think of watching that alfresco, beside a sacred edifice, while trying to digest your tortellini in brodo. Over time, the festival has swelled, and in 2025, for its thirty-ninth incarnation, it sprawled languidly across the last week of June. At ten venues around the city, outdoors and indoors, more than four hundred films were shown, drawing a hundred and forty thousand spectators, some of whom even Farinelli may not have known.
The movies on offer in Bologna this year spanned a hectic century. I caught everything from a burst of short films by the great French pioneer Georges Méliès, dating from 1905, to “A History of Violence,” David Cronenberg’s equally eruptive masterwork of 2005. (The equivalent leap in painting would take you from Picasso’s “Boy with a Pipe,” a rich bloom of his Rose Period, to Gerhard Richter’s “September,” a veiled meditation on the events of 9/11. Is the path from the playful destined to lead to the murderous?) There was a series devoted to the American director Lewis Milestone, including the sound and silent versions of his most famous project, “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930). Brighter by far was a bouquet of Katharine Hepburn movies; if you want to know where on Earth people will line up for last-minute tickets to “Sylvia Scarlett,” her 1935 cross-dressing comedy with Cary Grant, at half past eleven on a Monday morning, the answer can only be Bologna.
Why, then, did the screening of June 26th stand out? Because of its perfect symmetry. A hundred years earlier, to the day, Charlie Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush,” which he wrote, directed, and starred in, had its première at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, in Hollywood. To mark the centenary, it was screened once again at Grauman’s, with playbills costing twenty-five cents, as they did back in 1925, and at more than five hundred other cinemas worldwide, from the Arman Kino, in Almaty, Kazakhstan, to the Grand Theatre in Shanghai. (The Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke had himself photographed in front of a boot, with a greedy grin, holding a knife and fork: a tribute to the movie’s most nourishing scene.) Viewers in Kyiv had a choice of two venues, Zhovten and Kino 42, in which to see the film, thus demonstrating that the Chaplinesque spirit of defiance is alive and kicking. Best of all, “The Gold Rush” was screened, to an audience of thousands, in the Piazza Maggiore.
“The Gold Rush” belongs in Bologna, because it is there, in the laboratory at the Cineteca, that it has recently been restored. Such was the lustre of the results, at the evening showing, that there was no sense of our being in the presence of the antique; for all practical purposes, we were watching a new release. There was also a live accompaniment—Chaplin’s own score for the movie, restored, adapted, and conducted by Timothy Brock, with the Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna. Among those applauding at the end was Carmen Chaplin, one of the director’s granddaughters, and even heretics, whose faith in Chaplin is fickle, will have been swept along. You couldn’t help wondering what Chaplin might have made of such an occasion. Given that his appetite for the adulation of the masses knew no bounds, would he not have stood and wept in euphoric gratification? As a matter of fact, no. He would have taken one glance at the screen and called his lawyers.
There is no such film as “The Gold Rush.” That is to say, there is no one pure ur-movie, unblemished and incontestable. When first released, in 1925, it was a silent picture, lasting ninety-five minutes and concluding with a kiss. It seemed complete, dramatically satisfying, and not to be tinkered with. Chaplin, however, being as natural a tinkerer as he was a tramp, returned to the film and, in 1942, brought forth a new version, with multiple trims, his musical score, and, most controversial of all, a spoken narration. The speaker, of course, was Chaplin himself. In a strange puritanical gesture, the kiss was cut.
In itself, such revisiting is hardly unusual. In the autumn of his life, Henry James went back to many of his novels and short stories, submitting them to revisions sufficiently far-reaching to keep scholars happily squabbling forever. Chaplin, unsurprisingly, was made of tougher stuff. Not content with producing the later version of “The Gold Rush,” he set about insuring that the earlier one was blocked to public view. An affidavit from the mid-nineteen-fifties clarifies his plan:
I decided that the old silent version of 1925 was no longer to be used, and ordered the destruction of the original negative and fine grain thereof.
No Mob boss, cheerfully decreeing that an inconvenient witness be rubbed out, could be more resolute. It’s as if Henry James had made the rounds of leading booksellers, shotgun in hand, and told them that any first editions of “The Wings of the Dove” still flapping around would be blasted out of existence. And what was served up to us now, in the Piazza Maggiore? The 1925 movie, with the music of 1942. Don’t tell Charlie.
That affidavit was among the documents shown during a panel discussion on the morning after the triumphant screening of “The Gold Rush.” It’s fair to say that there is no lack of documentation; the Cineteca is home to the Chaplin Project, which has digitized the filmmaker’s personal archive, permitting online access to more than a hundred and eighty thousand pages of Chapliniana. If you badly need to consult a telegram of 1916 from his half brother Sydney (“Charlie in very depressed condition for past two weeks”), you know where to go. The archive, however, is only part of the project; its primary responsibility has been to restore all of Chaplin’s films. The little fellow made more than eighty of them, which suggests that the depression didn’t weigh him down too long.
One of the earliest duties of any restorer is to round up the copies or portions of a film, in a variety of states, that have been scattered far and wide. For the latest restoration of “The Gold Rush,” this entailed reaching out to United Artists’ Japanese division; the Bundesarchiv, in Germany; the British Film Institute, in London; MoMA and the gem film library, in New York; the Blackhawk collection, at U.C.L.A.; and the Filmoteca de Catalunya, in Spain. From the first of these sources came a duplicate negative (“dupe neg,” in the lingo of the trade), which supplied almost seventy-seven per cent of the material. From the last of them came a positive print, which provided a mere .07 per cent, lasting fewer than five seconds—the lone anchovy, so to speak, that you lay atop your spectacular sandwich, having raided the fridge for every possible ingredient.
The hunt for movies that are missing, believed lost, or absent without leave is one of the more demanding thrills of the restorer’s mission. It can be a matter of salvation. Cecilia Cenciarelli, a co-director of the Bologna festival, remembers flying to Taipei in 2009 in search of films by the Taiwanese director Edward Yang, who had died in 2007. There she found reels of “A Brighter Summer Day” (1991), one of his finest films, left in an office in a “big black garbage bag. The elements were there, covered in mold.” The movie had become, as Cenciarelli said to me, “an urgent patient,” and the job of resuscitating it was shared by the Cineteca and the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, which was created by Martin Scorsese in the year of Yang’s death. The same partnership dealt with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s “Memories of Underdevelopment,” a startling Cuban movie from 1968—“It grabs my heart every time I watch it,” Cenciarelli says. Colleagues in Cuba told her that it was “liquefying under our eyes.” The regime of Fidel Castro was still in place, and just getting the movie out of the country was an adventure. A guy with a visa had to fly the decaying reels to Mexico City, taking up three seats on the plane.
A more recent trouvaille was in Chile, where, in January, 2023, a cinema researcher named Jaime Córdova was alerted to reels of film that were sitting in a warehouse and waiting to be trashed. He rescued them and, during a cursory inspection of the contents, found images of Abraham Lincoln. Further inquiries established that the movie was “The Scarlet Drop,” from 1918, which was directed by John Ford and hitherto considered lost. It stars Harry Carey, a stalwart of Ford’s films and, before that, of D. W. Griffith’s. Restored in Chile, “The Scarlet Drop” was shown this year at the festival in Bologna, its zest unimpaired, although one of its five reels is missing. Maybe that will turn up, too, before long, in Helsinki or Manila. The quest goes on.
So, what awaits the urgent patient—the movie that is plucked from imminent death? If possible, intensive care. In Bologna, this means a spell at L’Immagine Ritrovata, the laboratory that adjoins the Cineteca. To take a tour of the place, as I did in late May, is to be met by a confounding breadth of activities. You begin by observing skilled manual labor and wind up, an hour or so later, in twilit and temperature-controlled rooms, listening to a soft chorus of beeps and hums. To master the mysteries of film restoration, I guess, would consume your life.
My first port of call was a workbench commanded by Marianna de Sanctis, who wore white gloves, like a conjuror or a croupier. In front of her were two rotating spools, the size of paella dishes, fixed flat upon the bench; by turning a wheel at her side, she wound a reel of negative film from one spool to the other, pausing to examine its condition. The scrutiny was made easier, here and there, by placing the strip of film on black velvet, against which the negative showed up as positive. And, oh, the thousand natural shocks that film is heir to! Scratches, tears, and “perforation loss”—sprockets missing on one or both sides of the frame. Some injuries could be treated with tape, including a special perforated kind. “Of course, we have to put the tape on without any bubbles or dust,” de Sanctis said. “Repair is important, but also we have to try to avoid too much intervention,” she told me. “The less we do, the better.”
The film that she was attending to as we spoke was “Bitter Rice” (1949), which was due to be screened at the festival, in June. Starring a teen-age Silvana Mangano as one of a host of women who are dispatched to the rice harvest in the valley of the River Po, the movie is a near-mythological item in the resurgence of Italian cinema after the war. At the laboratory, multiple reels of the film, each in an old metal can, were piled in stacks. Labels stuck to each can indicated, in English, the state of the contents. The one for the reel on which de Sanctis was working, for instance, told a sad story of degradation. An “X” was inked in the last of three little boxes: “Slight/Physical Decay,” “Average Decay,” and “Strong Decay.” Another box marked where on the reel the trouble lay: “Head,” “Centre,” or “Tail.” If only mortal decline could be registered with equal efficiency, we would all be saved an awful lot of fuss.
To follow the workflow at L’Immagine Ritrovata is to be reminded afresh of the tangibility of film, not to mention its fallibility. Nitrate film stock, which was used in the industry from the eighteen-nineties to the mid-twentieth century, and which was responsible for many of the most beautiful movies on record, is also insanely flammable. Beauty comes at a cost. Acetate film, which succeeded nitrate, is far more stable, though not without its flaws, and I was delighted, in Bologna, to learn about “vinegar syndrome,” which is not, as you might suppose, a fancy excuse for a bad temper but a reference to acetate’s tendency to shrink, buckle, and give off a sour acid smell. Whether the acidity level rises if the footage in question contains an image of W. C. Fields I am, as yet, unable to ascertain.
Curing these maladies is a delicate task, with a set of tools and potions to match. De Sanctis was armed with Q-tips, glue, isopropyl alcohol, lemon oil, and eucalyptus oil (handy for removing any adhesive residue from the surface of a film); a separate room, devoted to slowing or reversing chemical deterioration, gave me an odd sense of having wandered into a witch’s kitchen. Little rolls of film, no bigger than hockey pucks, sat inside a large glass pot, under a lid, together with silica gel. A label on the front read “Desiccation treatment.” Different threats—damp, humidity, heat, old age, and so on—call for different defenses, and another pot was labelled “Softening treatment (camphor).” I was frankly disappointed not to come across a brain in a jar.
After the gluing, the taping, and the chemistry lesson, it was time for the washing—or, to be exact, for an introduction to the BSF Hydra. This is a magnificent beast, made by a British company, Cinetech, and its job is to clean film. To the movie-maddened eye, it resembles one of those machines that you see in the background of a Bond film, at the core of a villain’s lair, being operated by a random scientist in a white coat. (Needless to say, the poor sap can expect to be vaporized, thanks to 007, in a giant fireball.) The cleaning is done with a noncombustible solvent, plus a complex array of capstans, rollers, and “soft nap Dacron buffers,” zipping through as much as a hundred feet of film per minute. At L’Immagine Ritrovata, the Hydra also represents a border: the line at which the care of film as physical stuff, by hand, approaches its end. Beyond lies further alchemy, as film is transmuted into digital form.
The first of the digital chores is scanning. Enter a room suffused with dark-blue luminescence, as if you were diving in a grotto, and you are greeted by the Arriscan, another benevolent monster, which emits regular pulses of light. Up to five frames per second can be scanned, and there is an exciting option called “wetgate,” which sounds like a scandal involving a congressman in a hot tub. In fact, as Cenciarelli explained to me, it has a salutary effect: “The emulsion is so scratched, and the lines are so deep, that basically it’s scanned very slowly under liquid that fills in those wrinkles, like wrinkles on human skin.” Botox for movies!
Next up is comparison (which entails a frame-by-frame analysis of the sources, in low-resolution digital files), followed by digital cleaning and retouching. The latter, in place of solvents and soft buffers, deploys costly software programs that sound like cheap perfumes—Phoenix, Diamant, and “Revival by Blackmagic.” Still to come: 2K and 4K color correction, mastering, subtitling, sound restoration, and a glass of sweet wine to go with your dessert. And don’t forget the Arrilasers, machines that allow digital images to be recorded onto 35-mm. film, thus allowing you, in style, to come full circle.
Of all these stages in the process, color correction is the one most likely to baffle the lay intruder—the untutored innocent who doesn’t understand, say, what the hell colors have to do with a black-and-white movie, and why they may need correcting. The truth is that subtleties of tonal range, not least brightness and contrast, can be adjusted by the corrector-in-chief. At the laboratory, I watched Simone Castelli, who sat at a wide console, facing a screen on which appeared a scene from “Tout Ça Ne Vaut Pas l’Amour” (1931), a comedy directed by Jacques Tourneur. (Eleven years later, in Hollywood, he made “Cat People.” Quite a jump.) In the center of the console were three domed knobs; as Castelli turned these, ever so gently, with the finesse of a safecracker, the impact of the images was altered. The black of a man’s jacket grew funereally dark. This brief modification was enough to ruffle the conscience of a film critic. When we praise a movie for being visually rich and, for good measure, savor that richness for its deliberate emotional intent, are we doing anything more than reacting to a tweak? What does it say about the force of a film that it can literally be dialled up and down? As Cenciarelli said of the restorative process, “After all those years, there are so many philosophical bells that ring.”
For expert advice on these niceties, I assumed, no authority would be of greater assistance than the director of the film that is being restored, if he or she is still alive. Wrong. Céline Pozzi, a manager at L’Immagine Ritrovata, laughed at my naïveté. Directors, apparently, can be a problem. “For example, Wong Kar-wai. He had this special neon look on his films, and he wanted to change it and get away from that cold light,” Pozzi told me. “He said, ‘I’m not the person I was at the time. I’ve changed. I have the right to change the film.’ ” Shades of Chaplin in 1942. All the more reason, Pozzi added, to get a movie scanned: “Preservation is always the base of everything. Then you can have discussions. If you are clear in your aim about the restoration, that’s the most important thing.”
One person who has pondered these conundrums as much as anybody is Ross Lipman, who was the senior film preservationist at the U.C.L.A. Film & Television Archive for seventeen years. He now runs his own company, Corpus Fluxus, and has recently written a book, “The Archival Impermanence Project,” about the methods and the implications of restoring film. The title may have the tang of a prog-rock album, but the book is witty, minutely detailed, and braced by common sense—a welcome gift in an often obsessive environment. The funniest bit is a footnote, in which Lipman directs us to a tiny corner of professional dissent. “At a fundamental level, even the light passing through the projectors has changed, as modern 35mm projectors use xenon bulbs with different characteristics than traditional carbon arcs,” he writes. “Carbon arc enthusiasts in fact represent a highly specialized subgroup within the extended archival film community.” I like to think of fights breaking out in projection booths as rival gangs, the Xenons and the Arcs, come to bitter blows.
The moral of these quarrels is that the past really is another country, and that we can never live there. At best, we can pay a courtesy call. That is why, if you have any interest in the collision of old and new, in any field of endeavor—architecture, archeology, sexuality, table manners—I recommend “The Gray Zone,” a particular chapter of Lipman’s book. He defines the zone as “that uncharted territory where a preservationist needs to make decisions when there is no definitive guide left by the filmmakers.” In such circumstances, he adds, authenticity is impossible. He prefers to ask if a restoration is faithful.
Lipman is graced with a talent to enthuse. He was in Bologna, at this year’s festival, partly to lecture on a restored version of “Killer of Sheep,” Charles Burnett’s modest, barely plotted, yet devastating portrait of nineteen-seventies working-class Black life in Watts. The movie was shot for a pittance, on 16-mm., over a number of years, on the streets of South Central Los Angeles; few members of the cast were professional actors. It finally had its première in 1978, and you might presume that what was screened then would logically be the truest and the most dependable version of the film. That might be so, Lipman argues, for high-end Hollywood products, but not for a low-budget independent movie like Burnett’s:
In this case, emulating an old release print is preserving the work not of the filmmaker but whoever worked the night shift at Deluxe Labs on a given night in 1975.
It was by returning to the original camera negative that Lipman found a wealth of visual information; the face of a boy being chided by his father, in the movie’s opening shot, stood out more lucidly than before. Lipman was thereby able to draw the movie out of the gray zone—perceptibly so, as he proved in Bologna by showing two versions of certain sequences side by side. Flat, drizzly grays, not least in shots of sidewalks and roadways, acquired a bite and a depth that they had previously lacked. “We are adding nothing to the film that wasn’t there already,” Lipman said to me. “We are rendering it better.” The extra clarity suits the characters, whose feelings, though verging on despair, are anything but flat. (The movie is as much about children at play as it is about adults at work.) Should you wish to see the fruits of that rejuvenation, “Killer of Sheep” is now on Blu-ray, in the Criterion Collection, although, if you get the opportunity to catch it at the cinema, do not hesitate. To judge by the screening that I attended in Bologna, the movie should carry a health warning: as it ends, to the sound of Dinah Washington singing “Unforgettable”—a song not heard in that spot until the recent restoration—you may be reduced to a wreck.
The most remarkable thing that I saw, and listened to, at the festival arrived on a Sunday afternoon in the Sala Mastroianni, one of the smaller screening venues. Bearing the title “Le Raid Paris-Monte Carlo en Automobile,” it was among the batch of Georges Méliès movies—squibs and sketches, blissfully distant from our modern conception of a feature film. Made in 1905, crammed with comedy players, and hand-tinted with blurts of rough color, the film purports to show a car being driven by King Leopold II of Belgium, who is depicted as a fool behind the wheel. (He was known for immeasurably worse crimes, too, as any historian of the Belgian Congo can confirm, yet somehow that knowledge sharpens the farce.) At one point, we see a policeman being run over, flattened, and then inflated back to life with a pump.
The print of the film came from the Cinémathèque Française, and was accompanied with brio by a pianist, John Sweeney—but not by a pianist alone. Research suggests that some of Méliès’s work had been buoyed up by a boniment. The word is untranslatable, but it means something more than a commentary or a narrative. Rather, it’s a kind of ecstatic patter, near to the brink of Dada, and in the case of “Le Raid,” in Bologna, it was delivered with whoops, ululations, and ineffable glee by the actress Julie Linquette. Here was son et lumière with a vengeance, and it induced a weird historical vertigo: Were we not being spun back in time and granted a chance, however brief, to hook up with the original audience? Did we not drink in this fizzy little movie as they had drunk it, a hundred and twenty years ago?
To ask such questions is to confront the most nagging issue that arises, intractably, from all efforts to restore or reconstruct. You can play a Bach cantata on original instruments; you can perform it in the Thomaskirche, in Leipzig, say, where it was first heard; but whether you can swap places with its first auditors is another matter. Without their Lutheran piety, and their immersion in the liturgical calendar of the church year, can one ever hope to grasp the place that a cantata occupied in their mind’s ear, as it were, and in the pattern of their lives? Likewise, in a lighter mode, I can kid myself that I enjoyed “Le Raid” just as a Parisian would have done in 1905; as likely as not, though, we were laughing at different jokes.
Doubts of this sort in no way lessened the merriment of Bologna; if anything, they galvanized it, as we hurtled from one throwback to the next. In a courtyard strung with lights, at a late-night showing of “ ’A Santanotte,” a Neapolitan film from 1922, I kept glancing away from the fervid melodrama to admire the projector behind me: a steampunk dream, built in Milan in the nineteen-thirties, which appeared to be made from a trash can, half a dozen alarm clocks, and two bicycle wheels. It emitted a bright plume of smoke, as if miniature furnaces were being stoked within. The whole festival was a maelstrom of time travel, and the more specific the destination, I discovered, the more heady the plunge into the past. Nothing was more rapturous, for example, than a Czech film called “Erotikon,” and the rapture was spiced by the realization that we were the first audience to see it in its proper form since an initial showing in February, 1929. By the time of its public release, in the summer of that year, it had been censored. Only now, lovingly restored, was it free to unfurl the full, gasping glory of its title.
What boosted the thrill was the setting. “Erotikon” showed at Modernissimo, an underground movie theatre a few yards from the Piazza Maggiore. A cinema had existed there since 1915, and, a little more than a century later, it was reborn, in a fond flourish of Art Deco. In a lyrical conceit, showtimes are announced on a departure board, as if a movie were something that you run to catch, like a train. In the auditorium, each of the red velvet seats is crowned with a movie-gilded name, in gold. Steven Spielberg abuts Meryl Streep. For “Erotikon,” I sat on Ennio Morricone (Stefania Sandrelli, alas, was already taken), though the most enviable perch, surely, is the one marked “Fratelli Marx”—a single seat for all four brothers, squashed together. Werner Herzog I would tend to avoid, unless you want to get eaten by a bear halfway through the screening. The Modernissimo runs a year-round repertory program, and the prices are a steal. On a regular day, a student will pay less than five and a half dollars for a ticket.
That’s an important bargain, because Bologna is a student hub, and then some. College education began there in 1088; no university in the world has been functioning, continuously, for so long. By tradition, Bologna has been referred to as “learned and fat,” in homage to its blend of scholarship and gastronomy. It is also lauded as la città rossa, or the red city—first, because of its distinctive brickwork, and, second, because of the leftist hue of its politics. In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, it was a stronghold of the Italian Communist Party. One of the authorities’ stated aims was the preservation of Bologna’s historic center, the idea being that to preserve was not to ossify but to invigorate, for the benefit of the inhabitants. As for buildings, so for venerable films. The argument for a collectivist culture endures, according to Farinelli, the director of the Cineteca. “Bologna is a kind of laboratory, almost an experiment,” he told me, adding that, believe it or not, local schoolkids are educated in the history of cinema. Even a mayor from a center-right party, elected in 1999, was a passionate movie buff; he urged Farinelli to lay on more screenings in the Piazza Maggiore. Some towns have all the luck.
There is a murky risk that old movies will attract old people, who, as a rule, like nothing better than to rummage through their recollections of being overwhelmed by something half a century ago. Yet the audience at “Close Encounters” and “The Gold Rush” was by no means composed of nostalgists alone. So youthful, indeed, was the atmosphere at the festival that I seriously considered checking into the Cineteca laboratory and having my sprockets glued. It was in 2010 or so that Farinelli began to notice a shift in the average festivalgoer. “There was more attention from a younger audience,” he said, “whether it was from the university or, in general, from more openness toward the cinema.” Could it be that their needs were not being met in the multiplex? After Covid, the trend became more pronounced—“a renewed interest in film, actual celluloid film.” It was, he told me, “as if digital was now in the past.”
There is another major bonus of Il Cinema Ritrovato: no baloney in Bologna. “No red carpets,” as Farinelli says. No stars are required to dress up and parade for the cameras or to answer fumbling questions from the press; no juries haggle over prizes; and, above all, there is no obligation to observe the highly suspect principle that the latest thing is bound to be the best. Yet something else is in play. At the majority of film festivals, you can’t help asking: What do they know of movies who only movies know? In Venice, say, it would take so little initiative to break off from motion pictures and treat your tired eyes to the balm of pictures that don’t move—some of the loveliest ever painted. But almost nobody does. In Bologna, however, the films feel embedded in the bustle of the place, competing for sensory attention. Everything around you stakes an equal claim.