Spring 2023 - Il Cinema Ritrovato ON TOUR @UMD

The Battle of Algiers (Italy, 1966), 121 mins, B&W
English, Arabic, French, Italian , with English subtitles.
Distributed by Janus Films and The Criterion Collection.

Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo

One of the most influential political films in history, The Battle of Algiers, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s. As violence escalates on both sides, children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, women plant bombs in cafés, and French soldiers resort to torture to break the will of the insurgents. Shot on the streets of Algiers in documentary style, the film is a case study in modern warfare, with its terrorist attacks and the brutal techniques used to combat them. Pontecorvo’s tour de force has astonishing relevance today.

Restored by the Cineteca di Bologna and Istituto Luce – Cinecittà, at the laboratory of L’Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with Igor Videocine Produzioni, Surf Film Srl, Casbah Entertainment Inc. and CultFilms.

Gillo Pontecorvo

Born in Pisa, Italy in 1919, Gillo Pontecorvo worked as a foreign correspondent in Paris, as an assistant to Yves Allegret, and as a documentarian before gaining attention with the Academy Award nominated, grim concentration camp melodrama Kapo (1960). His most evocative and perhaps best-known film remains The Battle of Algiers (1966). Shot in a grainy, neo-documentary style and featured non-professional actors, the film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival as well as receiving a Best Foreign-Language Oscar nomination. When it was widely released in the USA in 1969, Pontecorvo netted dual Academy Award nods for his direction and as co-author of its original screenplay. Over time, though, and through its championing by director Jonathan Demme, Pontecorvo's first fictional work, The Wide Blue Road/La Grande Strada Azzurra (1957) has undergone re-evaluation and is now considered a forerunner of the New Wave, especially in its social and political themes. That film received its belated US premiere in 2001. Pontecorvo's only subsequent feature of note was Burn!/Queimada! (1969), another critique of colonialism set in the 19th-century Antilles. Perhaps because of its upscale production values and star cast--which included Marlon Brando--the film lacked the edge of Pontecorvo's earlier work. He made a one-shot return to features a decade later with Ogro/Operation Ogre (1979) and continued to create shorts into the 1990s. Pontecorvo died in 2006. 

Source: TCM

Manila in the Claws of Light (Philippines, 1975), 125 mins, color
Tagalog with English subtitles.
Distributed by Janus Films and The Criterion Collection.

Directed by Lino Brocka

Lino Brocka broke through to international acclaim with this candid portrait of 1970s Manila, the second film in the director’s turn to more serious-minded filmmaking after building a career on mainstream films he described as “soaps.” A young fisherman from a provincial village arrives in the capital on a quest to track down his girlfriend, who was lured there with the promise of work and hasn’t been heard from since. In the meantime, he takes a low-wage job at a construction site and witnesses life on the streets, where death strikes without warning, corruption and exploitation are commonplace, and protests hint at escalating civil unrest. Mixing visceral, documentary-like realism with the narrative focus of Hollywood noir and melodrama, Manila in the Claws of Light is a howl of anguish from one of the most celebrated figures in Philippine cinema.

Restored in 2013 by the Film Development Council of the Philippines and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in association with The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project , LVN, Cinema Artists Philippines and Mike De Leon. Restoration funded by Doha Film Institute. 

Lino Brocka

Catalino Ortiz Brocka, known as Lino Brocka, was one of the Philippines’ greatest auteurs. He was born in Pilar, Sorsogon in 1939. His father Regino, who was a huge influence on Brocka, teaching him Math and English as well as the Arts, was killed in a political murder when Brocka was still young. Brocka, along with his mother and brother, had to flee to live with his mother’s sister. Brocka developed a strong interest in films during his youth, particularly American films. He won a college scholarship in the country’s leading academic institute, the University of The Philippines. Initially majoring in pre-law, he dropped the course to study literature instead. After dropping out of college, he converted to Mormonism and devoted himself to missionary work, traveling to a leper colony in Hawaii. He then traveled to America and worked menial jobs in San Francisco for a brief period of time before turning down a chance for American citizenship, opting instead to return to the Philippines to revive his interest in filmmaking. He joined the Philippine Educational Theatre Association where he met its founder Cecille Guidote, which led to the making of his first film, 1970’s Wanted: Perfect Mother, a box-office hit based on The Sound of Music. From then on, Brocka’s films became more personal, his filmography depicting the plights and suffering of the Filipino people. Some of his best works are Insiang (1978), a revenge tale of a girl’s rape by her mother’s lover, which became the first entry by a Filipino filmmaker at the Cannes Festival, earning him the prestigious Palm d’Or. Manila: In The Claws of Darkness (1976), Jaguar (1980), and Bayan Ko (My Country, 1984) were also nominated for the award, further cementing his reputation as one of the greatest directors of South East Asia. He died in 1991.

Source: The Culture Trip

Thamp̄ (India, 1978), 129 mins, B&W
Malayalam with English subtitles.
Made available by The Film Heritage Foundation in partnership with The World Cinema Project of The Film Foundation.

Directed by Aravindan Govindan

Aravindan Govindan’s Thamp̄ is a poetic, allegorical film, that gently explores the transience of human relationships and the rootlessness of the marginalized through the ripples created in the bucolic existence of a village on the banks of a river by the arrival of a roving circus troupe. In cinéma-vérité style, Aravindan rounded up a troupe of actual circus artistes and traveled with them to the village of Thirunavaya on the banks of the Bharathapuzha river. On the first day, the circus was set up and all the villagers were invited to watch the show. Aravindan said in an interview, “We did not have a script and we shot the incidents as they happened. . . There were a lot of people who had not seen a circus before. We shot their responses as they were watching. After the initial hesitation, they forgot the lights and the shooting and got completely involved in the circus.” For three days, the circus is the center of attention of village life, but soon the villagers lose interest and move on to the preparation for a local festival and the circus troupe packs up and trundles away leaving no trace. Alienated from his own milieu, a young man from the village clambers on to the departing truck, hoping to escape his discontent by joining the circus troupe in their drifting existence. The beauty of the film lies in the reflective silences, the deeply observational, but delicate gaze of the camera, juxtaposing the pathos of the circus performers as they go about their everyday tasks and more starkly in impassive close-ups as they speak directly to the camera, against the innocent wonderment of the captivated village audience, in black and white imagery that stays with you long after the big tent has folded up.

Restored by Film Heritage Foundation, The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, Cineteca di Bologna, and L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory, and in association with General Pictures, National Film Archive of India and the family of Aravindan Govindan. 

Aravindan Govindan

Born in 1935, Govindan Aravindan was one of India’s greatest filmmakers and a leading light during the golden age of Malayalam cinema in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a man of many talents — painter, cartoonist, musician, theater director and filmmaker. The autodidact's films were marked by an entirely original approach to cinema. He has been described as a poet-philosopher with a vision, and he made mystical, transcendental films that showed deep compassion for the eccentric, the marginalized and the alienated. In a career spanning 1974 to 1991, he made 11 films and 10 documentaries with almost all of his works receiving national or state awards. He died in 1991.

Source: The Film Foundation

Ciné-concert: Buster Keaton Celebration

All films restored by Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Cohen Film Collection at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory.

The Blacksmith (USA, 1922), 22 mins, B&W, silent
Restored by the Cineteca di Bologna.
Distributed by Lobster Films.

Directed by Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton

Buster Keaton shoes horses and repairs cars, with mixed results.