Il Cinema Ritrovato 2020 - Opening Speech

Partly improvised, partly written, delivered on August 25 at Teatro Comunale di Bologna, also known as Bologna Opera House. — EK

As I'm speaking here, there is a film playing at the Jolly cinema. It's called The Star, and was directed by Stuart Heisler. It's about a washed-up movie queen who is looking for love in the ghost city of cinema. She drives along the famous streets where movie stars are supposed to live – but the streets are deserted. The actress, Margaret Elliott, played magnificently by Bette Davis, wants to get back on the big screen at any cost. The process is full of agony, humiliation and false hopes.

Like Davis’s character, most of us – for hours, days or even months – dreaded that it might never happen again. That we would never see a beam of light passing through that tiny hole in the wall. “An invention without a future,” was how one of the father figures of cinema described it. In March 2020 we began to fear that this might finally be the case. An affirmation was needed before things were lost.


There was no secret answer, or life-changing formula: the answer lay in cinema's physicality – as a solid ghost. Presence and projection were the very affirmation we needed.

Numbers do not have the same quality. If you tell me that 100 people watched something online, I don’t know whether 100 people laughed or cried. I'm not even sure if they were in the same room together. Here, even with one spectator – hearing a cry of joy, or a nervous chuckle – I'll be happier because the ghost has become a thing, something real. Statistics are no more than mirages of truth. As Jean-Luc Godard said during a lockdown Instagram live event: the language we use for reading and interpreting these figures should change.
But since we find ourselves in an era obsessed with reducing the world to numbers, please allow me to play the game with an example: in a move to reduce the size of the programme to adhere to the restrictions we faced this year, the Il Cinema Ritrovato catalogue is 25 grams lighter than it was last year.

What do those 25 grams mean? They amount to roughly 100 titles, both shorts and feature films. When taken together, this means centuries of combined film careers. All those outbursts of imagination and creativity, or spells of disillusionment and pain. Misunderstandings and changes. Innovations and revolutions. Lovers and sinners. Those 25 grams could contain a whole universe.

We do of course understand a cinema by numbers: Run it at 16 frames per second. Bring me the second reel. We have 500 seats here… Yet when that thing starts rolling, 16 and 24, 2 and 500, and 37 and 25 percent up or down, become something else. The ghost finds a body. It becomes a tracking shot, moving back and forth into the solitude of siblings, as in Meghe Daka Tara by Ritwik Ghatak – the sublime.

In The Star, before heading out for a night of hard drinking, Bette Davis grabs her real life Oscar statue and says: “Come on Oscar, let’s you and me get drunk.” My colleagues and I invite you to get drunk with the movies at this special edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato – a form of intoxication that can be enjoyed without headaches, or a feeling of guilt in the morning.