La Ballade d'un fataliste

Hugo Fregonese

 
Hugo Fregonese : la Ballade d'un fataliste

Hugo Fregonese est l'une des figures les plus insaisissables de l'histoire du cinéma. Ses films, ardents et singuliers, brassent fatalité, mythes et violence crue, dans les canons esthétiques de la série B. Cette version enrichie de la rétrospective présentée à Bologne lors de la dernière édition d’Il Cinema Ritrovato rassemble des films réalisés dans cinq pays différents, dont des joyaux en version restaurée (L’Affaire de Buenos-Aires, Quand les tambours s’arrêteront) ou en copies 35 mm flambant neuves (Mardi ça saignera). Il est temps de faire entrer Fregonese, cinéaste errant et secret, dans la cours des grands.

Entouré de condamnés à mort comme lui, un prisonnier noir fredonne une chanson tout en battant la mesure : Black Tuesday. Les autres détenus, tels des lions en cages, font les cent pas au rythme de la musique. Un travelling passe de cellule en cellule, les barreaux dessinent des ombres dansantes sur les visages fiévreux. « Ferme-là, t’entends ? » s’exclame bientôt un prisonnier glacé par ce chant funèbre. Alors que son cri résonne dans les couloirs déserts de la prison, le titre du film emplit l’écran dans un grondement glaçant de musique symphonique. Ainsi commence Mardi ça saignera (1954), chef-d'œuvre resté invisible des décennies durant. C'est aussi l’instant où Hugo Fregonese, fataliste de génie, entre en scène.

One Way Street (Hugo Fregonese, 1950)

One Way Street, part of the Hugo Fregonese tribute, plays at MoMA on September 1, 18:30. It's a fine 35mm print, previously screened in Bologna in June 2022. – EK

After leaving Britain in bitter resentment, James Mason appeared in Hugo Fregonese’s Hollywood debut, somewhat appropriately, a film about life on the run. Mason plays Dr Frank Matson, a shady physician who takes off with a bag full of stolen money and the girlfriend of a gang leader, hiding out with her in Mexico. But fate knocks loudly on the door, echoing one of Fregonese’s major preoccupations: the encounter with death. “For no matter the tears that may be wept, the appointment will be kept,” the film’s opening title card bluntly announces.

Hugo Fregonese: Man on the Run (MoMA retrospective, September 2022)

Blowing Wild

Perhaps history’s most restless filmmaker, Hugo Fregonese directed his first films in his native Argentina in the 1940s and then embarked on a globe-trotting career that took him to Hollywood, London, Paris, Rome, Munich, and eventually back to South America, all the while exploring themes of claustrophobia, entrapment, and imprisonment. This program, originally organized with Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival of archival film, includes a new restoration of Fregonese’s boldly stylized Western Apache Drums (1951) and a new 35mm print of Fregonese’s masterpiece Black Tuesday (1954), a strikingly harsh and violent gangster film featuring Edward G. Robinson in his last thoroughly villainous role and spectacular noir cinematography by Stanley Cortez (Night of the Hunter).

Organized by Dave Kehr, Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art, and Ehsan Khoshbakht, Co-Director, Il Cinema Ritrovato.

The series runs from September 1 to 15 in New York City. More info here.

Interview with Hugo Fregonese

Hugo Fregonese

Films Can't Played Off Too Fast; Public Catch Up, Declares Fregonese

By Richard Bernstein

(The Independent Film Journal, November 1952)

"Phoniness in pictures, as in money, has no real value,” explained Director Hugo Fregonese at lunch. Fregonese has just returned from Europe where he directed the Mike Frankovich production, Decameron Nights, which stars Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan.

“I feel that an audience can sense a formula picture,” Fregonese said. “An audience likes to be surprised. They don't like to see the same film over and over with a different cast.”

Fregonese pointed out that nowadays a film goes through the theatre circuit too fast. Many pictures are worth a holdover and don't get it. Pictures should be exploited like plays for longer runs. Many times a person finally gets time to see a picture and finds that it has gone. By the time word-of-mouth on a film gets around, a film is sometimes not even playing in the city anymore.

The Drifter's Escape: Hugo Fregonese

THE DRIFTER’S ESCAPE: HUGO FREGONESE

A retrospective at Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna (June 25-July 3, 2022)

Curated by Dave Kehr and Ehsan Khoshbakht

As swiftly as some directors changed studios, Hugo Fregonese (1908-87) changed countries. The perfect ‘saddle tramp’ figure, he drifted and made films about drifting and escape. A master of brisk and unsentimental westerns and crime thrillers, with a career spanning over four decades and numerous bases of production – from his home country Argentina, to America, Spain, Italy, the UK and West Germany – Fregonese’s cinema is unjustly underappreciated to the point of obscurity. This is a step in the direction of claiming him as an important figure; one whose cinema of impassioned subjectivity blends the aesthetic of low-budget films with fatalism, myth and raw violence. Fregonese’s name is often associated with the ten films he made during his five-year residency in Hollywood in the 1950s. This programme picks some of the finest from that period to screen alongside films made elsewhere. Forming one of the most coherent cinematic oeuvres that one could expect from a wandering director, this will be one of the major revelations of Il Cinema Ritrovato 2022.