Il Cinema Ritrovato 2021 Opening Speech (July 20)

A Place in the Sun at Arlecchino on July 25. (C) Lorenzo Burlando

Short speech made at the launch of the festival at Cinema Jolly, July 20. — EK

We are back but some of our friends are not here.

During the weeks and months that have interrupted lives, movements and careers, I found myself filming the entrances of cinemas. Those that I wasn't able to shoot myself, I asked the people who worked there to shoot for me. These images of the factory, captured at a time when no workers were to be seen leaving, was intense. 

This longest of intermissions that any of us can recall when it comes to cinema might be unique in its universality, but interruption as a cruel reality is hardly new. In fact, it's old enough to have been used many times before as an intellectual and artistic tool of reinforcement.

Through the films we are presenting this year, you'll see a history of the many possible forms of interruption which filmmakers and viewers have experienced – particularly those living and working in the 20th century. At the same time they offer a mirror to what we have felt and experienced in the recent past.

Think of Vampyr, playing next Saturday in the Piazza: a film which marks the beginning of an eleven-year interruption in the career of Carl Theodor Dreyer.

Think of the king of interrupted careers, Orson Welles, whose F for Fake – which will be shown on Friday – broke a five-year silence but also marked the beginning of a longer absence.

Think of Lotte Eisner, who fled Nazi Germany and whose life is the focus of a new documentary which maps her never-ending vacation in exile. 

Eisner reached a place of safety but think of those on the escape route to Marseilles – the title and subject of a German film showing at this year's festival – who weren't able to board the ships to freer worlds.

These are films loaded with symbols and reminders – of time passing, or not passing; of anticipation; disconnection and interruption.

Of those who didn’t make it, think of another filmmaker whose work we present this year: Wanda Jakubowska who ended up in a concentration camp, her career interrupted for almost a decade.

Think of George Stevens, who filmed the liberation of Dachau while being away from Hollywood for more than two years, believing that his career was over and that no one would remember him – ready to drift into oblivion. 

His story may have had a happy ending. But what about the people he employed after his comeback, whose lives were interrupted by the political frenzies of the time. 

Those like Ann Revere who, after appearing in a Stevens film, was blacklisted and couldn't appear in another movie for the next two decades.

Or Stevens's screenwriter, Michael Wilson, who had the same fate: only able to work under false names – as if he, too, was wearing a mask which he couldn't remove until 11 years later.

Il Cinema Ritrovato is devised to abolish all distances between past and present, but suddenly the present found a new shape: it became static, motionless, stretched into eternity. Yet, interruption offers the possibility of creating something genuinely different.

Last year, in this theatre, at the first screening of the festival – a Frank Tuttle film from the 1930s – when the projection started, with just the rattling sound of the projector reaching the ears, I heard a gentle, collective sigh. I had never before heard so many people sighing at the same time. That collective sigh was an acknowledgment of interruption, saying "OK, we got your message Interruption. Now get lost and leave us alone in the dark."