Il Cinema Ritrovato 2019 Peter Hourigan October 2019 Festival Reports 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...
Marty Finally Comes to Bologna: Cinema Ritrovato XXXII Peter Hourigan October 2018 Festival Reports 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...
Cinema Ritrovato 2017 Peter Hourigan September 2017 Festival Reports 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...
Retrieving the Cinema’s Past: Il Cinema Ritrovato XXXth Edition Peter Hourigan September 2016 Festival Reports 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...
Memories and Confessions of a Visit to Il Cinema Ritrovato Peter Hourigan September 2015 Festival Reports 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...
Wellman, Wajda and Restored Italian Divas: The 28th Cinema Ritrovato Festival Peter Hourigan September 2014 Festival Reports “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...
Moving Out (Michael Pattinson, 1983) Peter Hourigan February 2014 Key Moments in Australian Cinema 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...
A Model Shop for Retrieved Cinema: The 27th Cinema Ritrovato Peter Hourigan September 2013 Festival Reports 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...
The Sun in a Net Peter Hourigan March 2013 CTEQ Annotations on Film 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 ...
Retrieving the Cinema’s Past: The 26th Cinema Ritrovato Peter Hourigan July 2012 Festival Reports 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...
Karl May Peter Hourigan October 2011 CTEQ Annotations on Film 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...
King Ludwig II of Bavaria: Representations in the Cinema 1920–1986 Peter Hourigan March 2011 Feature Articles 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.