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.

Martin Scorsese must be one of the most omnipresent filmmakers today. As well as an impressive roster of cinema productions, he has made documentaries, shorts, television pilots, and advertisements. He has prod...

With the recent release of the European Foundation Joris Ivens’ 5 disc-DVD set, Peter Hourigan takes the opportunity to look back at the career and work of one of the most famous of documentary filmmakers.

A ten-feature box-set from the Slovak Film Institute has Peter Hourigan delightedly continuing his exploration of the cultural heritage of a national cinema that has been widely overlooked since the division of Czechoslovakia.

Peter Hourigan offers an appreciative evaluation of these two silent-era classics recently released on DVD by Flicker Alley.

For the West, the “Czech New Wave” label unintentionally elided what was in fact a productive mix of Czech and Slovak filmmakers. Recent DVD releases from the Slovak Film Institute help reclaim their cultural identity.

In 1952, non-Anglo-Saxon migrants were such a strange phenomenon that the Australian Government’s Film Division, Department of the Interior, for the Department of Immigration felt the need to sponsor a feat...

By the mid-1960s, two near-down-and-outs came together. One was Michael Powell. Despite having made (many with Emeric Pressburger) some of the greatest – and best-loved - British films of the 1940s (The Lif...

After six months in India you’re not even quite sure that two plus two is four. – Louis Malle (1) In 1967, Louis Malle was established as a major international filmmaker, a decade after his first fiction film...

I am a Negro. Paul Robeson began his 1958 book, Here I Stand (1), with that simple but absolutely unambiguous declaration. Concert singer, actor, All-American footballer, political activist, yes, but for Robes...

At this hour the melancholy intelligence of the assassination of Mr. Lincoln, President of the U.S., at Fords Theater was brought to this office. - District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department Blotter, ...

The decade around 1920 in Swedish cinema is almost always called its First Golden Age, a period dominated by two directors, Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjöström. Both were directing films by 1912 and, within abo...