3 x 1 Bologna

Three Il Cinema Ritrovato visitors each discuss one film they saw at this year’s festival in Bologna that has stayed in their memory.

The Paradine Case (Alfred Hitchcock, 1947)
Jonathan Mackris

Il Cinema Ritrovato favors three kinds of films: (1) new restorations of established classics (The Gold Rush); (2) underseen films by undervalued talents (Gehenu Lamai); (3) films maudits, those still-unloved works that seem, perhaps, to cry out for re-evaluation. As regards Hitchcock, is there a greater maudit among his sixty-odd features than The Paradine Case? Even the director himself disowns it as a producer’s film, the last release of his seven-year contract to David O. Selznick and the one, we are told, that suffered the most interference by the latter. At the same time, it would be wise to be wary of allowing this self-evaluation to sway our opinion, given how much Hitchcock’s view of his work seems influenced at least in part by their box office success. In any case, I went in optimistic. As a great admirer of his first Du Maurier adaptation, Jamaica Inn (1939) – another maudit disowned by the author and the director alike – I hoped The Paradine Case might be another instance of some sort of critical misunderstanding. (Oddly enough, its lone defender that I can find is André Bazin,1 but considering the fact that he was, for the most part, a committed anti-Hitchcockian, the value of this praise is ambiguous.)

The least one can say of a film like this is that the director always makes the right moves, even if the scenes are often wrong. He knows, for instance, how to turn the camera in the most interesting ways, when to cut in a scene and when, instead, to hold a take. Hitchcock’s genius is ultimately a matter of editing, but let that not take away from our appreciation of his supreme talent for blocking. Just look at how he handles the scene between Gregory Peck and his wife (Ann Todd) in their bedroom after he returns home late. It’s typical for Hitchcock to chop up a scene like this and split the room into “his” and “hers” section, as Todd looks him over for evidence of infidelity. But the true master’s touch is the way he prolongs the take of their reconciliation, pushing in and pulling out as Peck mulls over his choices. Hitchcock treats the image as a kind of rhetoric. For this reason, he knows the value of restraint. Later imitators will browbeat their audiences into seeing a character’s pathology but not him. This is not so much a matter of respecting the audience – his delight in torturing them is well-documented – than it is of teaching them how to see. One has to admire how, at the film’s climax, as Peck realizes his own delusions, Hitchcock repeats camera setups from earlier in the film, replacing Mrs. Paradine with Todd. Suddenly, we see through the performance as a performance. “People say that Hitchcock lets the wires show too often,” wrote Jean-Luc Godard of the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much.2 “But because of this, they are no longer wires.” Well, here are the wires.

The Salvation Hunters (Josef von Sternberg, 1925)
Bram Van Beek
Translated by Trevor Perri

When asked why he made The Salvation Hunters in 1925, Josef von Sternberg replied emphatically: “To show that I know something about film.” Although he already had quite a bit of experience as an assistant director in Hollywood, the thirty-year-old Jewish immigrant had never taken the reins as a director himself. Von Sternberg’s urge to prove himself is clearly noticeable in The Salvation Hunters. Although the film was made with a small amount of money, we see a filmmaker at work who wants to show off his technical skills with cinematography that is overflowing with meaning.

Three lost souls, a girl, a boy, and an orphan, find each other in a harbour. They wander around in the shadow of a giant dredger that continuously scoops up mud. With every scoop that’s brought up, the same amount of sand sinks back into the water. For viewers who might still doubt the symbolic meaning, the intertitles offer certainty: “The huge claw was a symbol of the boy’s faith. He believed that all mud could be brought up into the sun.” Their search for the sun takes the trio to the city, but just like the dredging, the hunt for salvation turns out to be a Sisyphean task.

After a disastrous premiere, the film seemed destined for a short life. The fact that The Salvation Hunters was ultimately distributed is thanks to Charlie Chaplin, who believed that von Sternberg’s pictorial style deserved a place in Hollywood. Together with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, his colleagues at United Artists, he brought the film to theatres, helping to launch von Sternberg’s career.

It's not surprising that the film was not well received by critics. In an American film landscape dominated by plot-driven entertainment, von Sternberg’s uncompromising “visual poetry,” as he himself called it, stood out. The first part, set in the harbour, is particularly reminiscent of European avant-garde cinema more than Hollywood. Using shadow and light, von Sternberg composes a true city symphony, in which the leading roles are not played by movie stars, but by a stray cat gnawing on the last bits of a rotting fish tail and a seagull standing on a floating shipwreck.

“Josef von Sternberg, Not Only Dietrich” is the title of the cycle in which The Salvation Hunters was screened at Il Cinema Ritrovato. Yet it seems as if the arrival of the German-American actress is already announced in the interplay of forms that von Sternberg presents. In the fishing nets and ropes that cast their geometric shadows on the quay, we sometimes see Dietrich's veiled face looming. The Salvation Hunters lays the foundation for the poetic abstraction in which von Sternberg would later shroud his muse.

Rapt [The Kidnapping] (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1934)
Gerard-Jan Claes | 2025
Translated by Trevor Perri

Like every year, the Ritrovato festival in Bologna is a story of rediscoveries and revelations. In the second category, one film really stood out for me: Rapt (1934) by Dimitri Kirsanoff, best known for Ménilmontant (1926), an impressionistic masterpiece of silent film. Rapt is set in two fictional Swiss villages that are separated by a mountain ridge, language and religion. When Firmin kidnaps the young Elsi after a conflict, it sets off a chain of dramatic events. The film also boasts two remarkable actresses: Nadia Sibirskaïa, Kirsanoff’s creative and personal partner, and Dita Parlo, known for her iconic role in Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante.

What makes Rapt particularly special is its intriguing mix of styles and cinematic techniques. Aesthetically, the film remains partly rooted in the logic of silent film, with a strong visual narrative and an emphasis on montage. At the same time, Kirsanoff seeks to connect with a more realistic narrative. The lyrical montage sequences with images of glistening water, flowers, animals and clouds passing by in timelapse evoke the poetry of avant-garde film, while ethnographic-style passages meticulously observe the customs of the fictional village communities. The film also moves between old and new in its framing. Wide landscapes in which the figures are placed as if in a tableau alternate with more abstract close-ups that are reminiscent of the visual language of silent film. The narrative unfolds like a picture book in which dialogue often serves as a caption but is at the same time interspersed with a more observational gaze.

This tension is most evident in the use of sound. Rapt discovers sound as an autonomous cinematic element. The score by Arthur Honegger and Arthur Hoérée is a creative collage of music and experimental effects – from direct sound recordings to Martenot waves and manipulations of the sound negative. Sometimes the music follows the rhythm of the montage, sometimes it contrasts with it. In addition, isolated sounds function as signals: a dog barking warns of danger. Often, a single image is accompanied by a single sound: an image of swaying trees is accompanied by an abstract sound of howling wind. In Rapt, sound does not function as a pure “reality channel” that can be turned on or off. Sounds are highlighted and given the status of independent events. They become a reality in their own right, not just an accompaniment to the image.

But sound is also discovered as a new relationship to reality. When Elsi listens to the footsteps on the stairs that can be heard off-screen, this marks a new relationship to the recording, in which film captures not only images but also a more tangible presence of reality. Yet this “shortcoming” of silent film is not fully compensated for. Belief in the new reality value of film has yet to fully develop. It is as if the film itself is startled by its newly found indexicality, as if the characters fear that they exist “too much” and would rather have remained mere images.

A rotating camera suggests psychological turmoil, while the kidnapper seems to creep into the lens and thus threaten us as well. Falling camera movements are interspersed with passages in double exposure; a more iconographic visual language is combined with poetic realism; expressionistic acting alongside “documentary” scenes of working men or playing children. It is in this constant shifting of registers and approaches that Rapt unfolds as a box of toys, inviting us to share in the pleasure of making cinema.

• 1André Bazin, “Pan Shot of Hitchcock,” in The Cinema of Cruelty, trans. Sabine d’Estrée (Seaver Books, 1982), 112-115.
• 2Jean-Luc Godard, “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” in Godard on Godard, trans. Tom Milne (Da Capo Press, 1967), 38.