Unforgotten Ancestors: Il Cinema Ritrovato 2024

Horwath’s method of teasing out links and resonances risks seeming contrived, but comes off gracefully. It made me reflect on the way recurring themes seemed to emerge uncannily as I ran from one screening to another in Bologna, watching films from different countries and eras. With hundreds of movies to pick from, Il Cinema Ritrovato is a choose-your-own-adventure experience, laced with inevitable regret about what you missed. I found myself watching an array of films about the tensions between tradition and modernity, and how we all live on the shifting sands of time. These themes were spelled out in a program devoted to the Japanese director Kozaburo Yoshimura, who made a series of melodramas set in postwar Kyoto where the tenuous survival of ancient crafts forms a backdrop against which women struggle between new opportunities for independence, entrenched systems of sexual exploitation, and the unruly demands of the heart.

Yoshimura’s films present variations on themes, like a set of woodblock prints. Two of them star Machiko Kyo as a scheming, unscrupulous seductress who turns out to have a flinty spine, and a wounded soul. In the noir-tinged black-and-white drama Clothes of Deception (Itsuwareru seiso, 1951), she works for her family’s struggling geisha house, and gradually reveals her embittered and disillusioned take on a profession she sees as little more than glorified prostitution. Things turn even darker in The Naked Face of Night (Yoru no sugao, 1958). Here Kyo’s character, Ikemi, is a performer committed to preserving traditional Japanese dance, but she is scarred by childhood poverty and being forced into sex work at age twelve. The overheated plot plays as All About Eve multiplied, as the ambitious, manipulative Ikemi coldly steals her mentor’s lover and career, only to wind up with a protégée who does the same to her. But the most haunting passage in this primarily color film is a black-and-white interlude set during sultry night at a rural inn. An elderly woman begging with a samisen—the instrument traditionally played by geisha—performs a plaintive folk song before being humiliatingly ejected by the inn’s owner. Ikemi is shaken by this ghost from the future, who warns of the sad fate awaiting female performers once they can no longer trade on their youth and sexual currency.

The heroine of Undercurrent (Yoru no kawa, 1956), a gifted textile designer from a family of fabric-dyers, falls in love with a married scientist; the heroine of A Woman’s Uphill Slope (Onna no saka, 1960), who inherits a confectionery known for making traditional sweets, falls in love with a married artist. These widescreen color films are visually sumptuous to a degree that occasionally overwhelms their stories. Undercurrent is drenched in color, from swaths of freshly dyed fabrics and dye-stains on the heroine’s hands to the scarlet banners of May Day marchers and the red fruit flies the scientist is breeding. In A Woman’s Uphill Slope, the gloomy, unlit interior of an old wooden house is splashed with orange and blue light from a nearby neon tower; the heroine sports a fire-engine-red sweater and slacks as she peddles a traditional summer delicacy served in delicate mother-of-pearl vessels. Yoshimura and his frequent screenwriter Kaneto Shindo can be a bit unsubtle both visually and verbally (“Tradition is important, but innovation is also important!” the confectioner chirps at one point), but their embrace of complex female characters who are outspoken in their desires and excel in their professions is all too rare in any era.

Even rarer are films centering on middle-aged women. One of the best performances I saw in Bologna was by Françoise Rosay in Jacques Feyder’s Pension Mimosas (1935), a slow-building, grippingly unpredictable drama that revolves around the relationship between Rosay’s character, Louise, and her godson Pierre (Paul Bernard). When the film opens, Louise and her husband are raising the young Pierre, whose father is in prison, at their small hotel near a casino on the Côte d’Azur. The couple is bereft when their foster son is reclaimed by his parent, and continue to support him as he grows up into a charming wastrel, a gambler who takes a beating from gangsters for his pursuit of the boss’s mistress. The motif of gambling runs through the film, starting with a darkly funny scene in which casino employees are quizzed on how to handle a customer’s suicide on the premises.

The curious thing is that everyone who sees Louise and the grown-up Pierre together assumes he is a gigolo and she is his patroness. His lover, Nelly, who immediately recognizes the older woman’s hostility toward her, tells Pierre that his godmother is in love with him. But is she? Or is her unhealthy obsession maternal? It remains tantalizingly ambiguous, thanks to a subtle and intricate plot and Rosay’s emotionally charged yet skillfully guarded performance. The film conveys much through details such as the forty-something Louise’s stylish wardrobe and immaculate coiffure, or the luminous expression with which she talks about her early career as a singer (Rosay started out as an opera singer before she began acting in films and married Feyder, with whom she often collaborated). Some kind of thwarted desire aches beneath her proud exterior, but whether it is for a child, a lover, or artistic glory is never clear. Recklessness, addiction, and delusion lurk beneath the shiny surfaces of this world, and a denouement mined with savage dramatic irony does nothing to settle these disturbing undercurrents.

With apologies to Tolstoy, unhappy families are often much alike across different periods and cultures. Films about clans disintegrating under the strain of generational conflicts were one focus of Cinemalibero, an annual showcase for world cinema that is always a highlight of the festival, often premiering discoveries that go on to wider release and acclaim. The universal story of women rebelling—at times in vain—against stifling patriarchal repression emerged in radically different styles, from the caustic but elliptical absurdism of Ossama Mohammed’s Stars in Broad Daylight (Nujum An-Nahar, 1988), which uses a Syrian family as an allegory for life under dictatorship, to the distanced formalism of Marva Nabili’s The Sealed Soil (Khak-e Sar bé Mohr, 1977), about a woman in rural Iran. Both films were banned in their home countries.

The family in Nirad Mohapatra’s Māyā Miriga (1984) dissolves slowly, in tandem with the gradual decay of their shabbily elegant, apricot-colored villa, which languishes in a lush garden on a sleepy suburban street. The whole film is weighted with a sense of lassitude; people spend much of their time reclining in the heat. A landmark of Odia filmmaking, Māyā Miriga follows an educated, landowning family with four adult sons. Some excel academically and professionally while others flounder, but all dream of escaping the family compound, even after the house is fixed up and furnished with a fridge for the arrival of one son’s bride, who promptly flees. A baby is born; an old grandmother dies; people bicker and air their resentments under their breaths. The oppressiveness of tradition—especially for women, who are constantly being ordered to bring tea and snacks—is sharply observed, but the mood is elegiac, with a tapestry of music and birdsong casting a spell around this place as it lapses into the past. Playing with his infant granddaughter, the aging patriarch wistfully asks, “Will you go away? Will you really leave us?”

Migration from villages to cities, from poorer countries to richer ones, is the quintessential modern story: uprooting, displacement, adaptation. Introducing Pietro Germi’s The Path of Hope (Il cammino della speranza, 1950), programmer Emiliano Morreale reminded the audience that Italy, now a destination for migrants, was not so long ago a place people left. Especially Sicily, where the film opens with an arresting tableau of women in black shawls framed heroically against a dazzling, bleached wasteland. They are waiting for their men to emerge from the belly of the earth, where they are futilely occupying a sulfur mine to protest its closure. From this stark, primeval landscape of stone and stucco, a group of villagers sets off as migrants: by bus, boat, and train, to the disorienting urban chaos of Rome, along country roads by foot and in the back of trucks, finally to the snowy mountains on the border of France. They are cheated by smugglers, harassed by the police, exploited by farmers, and attacked by striking workers who view them as scabs and interlopers. Germi, the subject of a compact retrospective at this year’s festival, was reviled on both the left and the right in Italy for his idiosyncratic politics; here, he is critical of communist agitators and organized labor, but also of callous capitalist systems and government bureaucrats. The migrants themselves are warmly individualized, with an array of romantic subplots woven through their journey. But the images of families hiking along roads with their bundles and sleeping on crowded trains are, in essence, indistinguishable from those we see in the news every day.

Montxo Armendáriz’s Tasio (1984) is about someone who refuses to make this journey or submit to the demeaning exploitation of laborers. Filmed on location in the mountainous region of Navarra in northern Spain, the movie is a fictionalized portrait of a real person whom the director had met while making an earlier documentary in the area. Adamantly refusing to work for wages after early experiences of being cheated by employers, Tasio ekes out a living by trapping animals—constantly risking arrest and fines for poaching—and as a charcoal-burner. The film opens and closes with the image of a large mound of earth in a forest clearing, with tendrils of smoke escaping from small vents to hint at the slow-burning fire within. Tending the charcoal piles is dangerous, but the recurring scenes of this activity suggest continuity as well as the cycles of destruction and renewal, the way life relies on death. Tasio is an admirable man of principle, charismatically portrayed by Patxi Bisquert, but the film is unsentimental about his way of life. As we watch terrified animals struggle frantically in his snares, it is hard to avoid the thought that all creatures live by preying on others. “Smart animals avoid the trap,” Tasio says, defending his methods while refusing to participate in hunting parties for the sport of the wealthy.

Made after the end of the Franco dictatorship in Spain, the film includes few overt references to the fascist era during which it is set. But its portrait of a man’s stubborn resistance to authority and his ability to quietly carve out a space of personal freedom gives it universal resonance (and made it a good fit for the Cinemalibero lineup) even as it remains rooted in a specific piece of earth. This was a film I had never heard of, by a director I had never heard of, and I was spellbound from start to finish by its clarity and simplicity, its earthy naturalism, and the love for its subject that burns steadily at its heart.

Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Tini zabutykh predkiv, 1965) also opens in a forest, where woodcutters are chopping trees. Within the first few minutes, the camera has thrillingly ridden a falling trunk to the snowy earth, where it kills a man; a few scenes later, an axe plunged into another man’s chest splashes the screen with blood, from which ghostly red horses emerge and gallop away. The film sets out to imagine a premodern world with all the liberties of experimental cinema, and the result is so vivid and visceral, most other movies look staid and anemic beside it. The pivotal work between Parajanov’s early films in the socialist realism mode and the poetic formalism of his best-known film, The Color of Pomegranates (1969), Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors combines a sensual, tactile record of the natural world with the visionary and fantastic. Lichen, moss, wood, and dirt fill the screen in extreme close-ups. We watch people herding sheep in fog-shrouded mountain pastures, molding sheep cheese in wooden buckets, and harvesting hay. The film documents the colorful costumes, gray-shingled houses, and folk customs of the Hutsul Rusyn people living in the Carpathian Mountains of western Ukraine. But everything is heightened like a fever dream, pitched just beyond rational explanation.