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| Rouben Mamoulian, Lost and Found |
Free admission screening of the film at Il Cinema Ritrovato, on June 23, 14.30, Sala Scorsese.
When it comes to filmed interviews, Mamoulian is one of the well-documented giants of classical Hollywood. His eloquence and wisdom can be heard in interviews shot for documentaries about his friends (George Stevens: A Filmmaker's Journey, shown at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2021) or horror cinema (The Horror of It All by Gene Feldman and Suzette Winter, 1983). There are films exclusively about him such as Patrick Cazals's Rouben Mamoulian, l’âge d’or de Broadway et Hollywood (2007) which also features brief clips of interviews that Iranian director of Armenian origins, Arby Ovanessian (a guest of Il Cinema Ritrovato 2022) conducted with Mamoulian. Television networks, too, since the revival of his films in the 1960s, have interviewed him as in BBC's Film Extra (1973). However, this French television interview, by one of the fathering figures of television documentaries on cinema, André S. Labarthe, was lost for decades until retrieved and made into the Rouben Mamoulian, Lost and Found. This is the most detailed career interview Mamoulian ever gave on film.
The setting is Mamoulian's Beverly Hills house in September 1965, only a couple of weeks after the Watts riots. No signs of the social upheaval in the house or in the courteous manner of gentle and elegant 68-year-old man who answers to interviewer Hubert Knapp's questions in ear-pleasing French, reminiscing about his colourful life from Tbilisi to Hollywood. He talks at length about musicals on stage and screen and prides himself in early sound experiments he made such as introducing mixing the sound for impressionistic effect in Applause (1929). He rejects style as mannerism and proposes that style is the point of view of the artist toward the world, leaving the door open for reading his breezy camera movements, stimulating editing and effervescent narrative as a particular vision on humanity.
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