Author Peter Hourigan

Ritrovati e Restaurati – Recovered and Restored – is one the programming strands for Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato. These terms, along with “rescued” and “reassessed”, encapsulate what is special about this festiv...

It was not the typical balmy Bolognese summer’s night – I was grateful for a pullover – but the Piazza Maggiore was more crowded than I can remember for any of Cinema Ritrovato’s Piazza screenings, on the first...

It’s an old postcard view of Bologna, the colonnaded street unchanged since this image was made over a hundred years ago, women in long skirts and parasols, the men all in dark suits and heavy moustaches, horse...

For 30 years, Bologna has been the home of Retrieved Cinema – Il Cinema Ritrovato. That idea of “retrieving” cinema is what makes this annual gathering of critics, archivists, restorers and ordinary film lovers...

Suddenly, I realised that this film was impregnated with the gaze of cinema goers from the time of the Occupation – people from all walks of life, most of whom would not have survived the war. They had been tak...

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” (1) Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato festival invites us to explore the past. But it reveals that there are many different worlds in the past, and t...

In a rundown school, a science-teacher, Mr Clarke (Ivar Kants), is at least able to keep trouble at bay in his class of bored, disengaged teenaged boys. His pupils are largely the sons of migrants from the post...

Anouk Aimée, as Lola in Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969), sunglasses against the strong Los Angeles light, was the signature image of this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna’s 27th festival of “retrieved cinem...

At various points in Štefan Uher’s Slnko v sieti (The Sun in a Net, 1962) there are reminders of the many ways we look at the world. We may use smoked glass to look at an eclipse of the sun (and be left with a ...

For over a quarter of a century Bologna has been celebrating the rediscovery and recovery of lost and forgotten films. Its Cinema Ritrovato festival revels not in the very newest pieces of filmmaking, but in th...

The finest deeds of a nation have always emerged from its soul. And however great a writer’s imagination is, he could never force an idea on his people that was not already slumbering in its soul. But beware wh...

From the silent era and onwards to fimmakers such as Luchino Visconti, Hans- Jürgen Syberberg and Christian Rischert, King Ludwig II has long been an enigmatic figure of fascination for the cinema.