Classici fuori Mostra: screenings at Giardini della Biennale until 30 August

From July 24^th to August 30^th in Venice, every Friday and Saturday at 9 pm, the Arena at the Giardini della Biennale will present a line-up of restored film classics titled Classici fuori Mostra.

The first edition of the Permanent Festival of Restored Films features twelve masterpieces from the past in the original language version with subtitles in Italian, a selection from a list of the finest and most recent film restoration projects completed by film libraries and production companies around the world. The intention is to introduce audiences to the films that have marked the history of cinema and continue to inspire the work of today’s filmmakers. Special discount tickets will be available for students (discount tickets for students 2.50 euro, subscription for students 20 euro, full ticket price 8 euro, full subscription price 60 euro).

“The growing success of the Venice Classics section – stated the Director of the Cinema Department, Alberto Barbera – which registered the greatest participation of spectators during the last Venice International Film Festival, confirms the existence of an audience that is extremely interested in seeing film classics from the world heritage of cinema. The opportunity to see, again or for the first time, films that have left their mark on the development of the language and aesthetics of the Seventh Art is a valuable one for the public in general, but for students in particular it has an added element of educational enrichment. These considerations led to the idea of a film series titled Classici fuori Mostra, a weekly event that will extend the joy of viewing that a film festival must necessarily limit to a span of just a few days”.

As previously announced, the Venice Classics section of the 77th Venice International Film Festival will be hosted this year, due to the exceptional circumstances,  within the programme of the festival Il Cinema Ritrovato, promoted by the Cineteca di Bologna, which will take place from August 25^th to 31^st in Bologna. The selection of restored Classics, to which new titles will be added, will be screened in Venice in the following months, as the second edition of the Permanent Festival of Restored Films.

24 July

DON’T LOOK NOW by Nicolas Roeg
with Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, Hilary Mason, Massimo Serato; GB/Italy, 1973, 110’
Restored by StudioCanal

“A unique opportunity to revisit Nicolas Roeg's greatest achievement: a brilliant, in many ways unique, conflation of the erotic and the uncanny, with a masterly feel for images and mood that will reverberate in your mind for days. Attractively studded with 1970s high-cultural references, the movie looks nevertheless fresher than ever. It's a ghost story; it's a meditation on time, memory and the poignancy of married love. And it's a masterpiece.” (P. Bradshaw).

Introduced by Luca Guadagnino

25 July

TRIBUTE TO FULVIO ROITER – In collaboration with the Fondazione Roiter and the City of Venice

TO BE FOLLOWED BY:

FAT CITY by John Huston
with Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges, Susan Tyrrell, Candy Clark, Nicholas Colasanto; USA, 1971, 100’
Restored by Sony Pictures Entertainment

“A film that is important for its freedom and sensibility, in which Huston rediscovers Hemingway and updates his vision of losers (in boxing and in a contemporary California town) with an unusual sense of bitterness, arising from his awareness of the complete failure and total defeat of the American illusions of democracy and the pursuit of happiness”(G. Fofi).

31 July

A CIASCUNO IL SUO (We Still Kill the Old Way) by Elio Petri
with Gian Maria Volonté, Irene Papas and Gabriele Ferzetti; Italy, 1967, 99’
Restored by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino

From the novel of the same name by Leonardo Sciascia, one of the first films about the mafia: “perhaps the best film by one of the most lucid directors of socially-committed cinema of the time” (P.Mereghetti). It is also the first outcome of the prolific collaboration between Gian Maria Volonté and the long-underestimated filmmaker of post-Neorealist Italian cinema.

1 August

ALIEN by Ridley Scott
with Sigourney Weaver, Yaphet Kotto, Veronica Cartwright, Ian Holm, Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt; GB/USA, 1979, 116’
Restored by 20th Century Fox

A milestone in science-fiction film from the 1980s. “It doesn’t count much for what it says but it says it beautifully, thanks to its extremely suggestive production design and infallible narrative rhythm. Its main theme is the fear of the unknown, and that is why it delves so deep” (M. Morandini). “Scott’s direction is extraordinary and incredibly modern, gripping the viewer from the first to the last minute, and his decision to make a woman the hero is revolutionary” (P. Mereghetti).

7 August

MIRACOLO A MILANO (Miracle in Milan) by Vittorio De Sica
with Francesco Golisano, Emma Gramatica, Paolo Stoppa, Guglielmo Barnabò, Brunella Bovo; Italy, 1951,100’
Restored by the Cineteca di Bologna and Compass Film

A screen adaptation of the novel “Totò il buono” by Cesare Zavattini, this is “a utopian story that sets a humanistic space of warmth and imagination against the arrogance of a wild modernity” (S. Parigi), which at the time upset the right wing for its subversive implications (the temporary title was “The poor are annoying”) and the left wing because it abandoned the stylistic modules of Neorealism. It won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival.

8 August

RAINING IN THE MOUNTAIN by King Hu
with Hsu Feng, Sun Yueh, Shih Chun; Hong Kong/Taiwan, 1979, 120’
Restored by the Taiwan Film Institute

One of the masterpieces by the Master of martial arts films from Hong Kong: “The plastic beauty of the scenarios and atmospheres in which the topography coincides with the mise-en-scène, often authentic costumes and sets, customs, rituals, combat staged as acrobatic ballet, inspired by the Beijing Opera rather than the martial arts, and many other elements that derive from the imagery of Chinese tradition and recreate it in a grand visual and gestural synthesis” (G. Volpi).

14 August

THE GO-BETWEEN by Joseph Losey
with Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Margaret Leighton, Michael Redgrave, Dominic Guard, Michael Gough, Edward Fox, Richard Gibson; GB, 1971, 110’
Restored by StudioCanal

“The third film in the partnership between Losey and Harold Pinter, and the most complex. It achieves simplicity through the most refined of artifices” (M. Morandini). “Pinter’s script is a meticulous portrait of the education to existence and to pain, counterpointed, with masterful sound and visual editing, by the reminiscences of two elderly people. The scenes of social life are enchanting (group prayer before breakfast, the cricket game, cutting the birthday cake) and offer a vivid description of the habits and customs of a bygone world” (G. Volpi). Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival.

15 August

KANAL by Andrzej Wajda
with Teresa Izewska, Tadeusz Janczar, Wienczyslaw Glinski, Tadeusz Gwiazdowski, Stanislaw Mikulski; Poland, 1957, 95’
Restored by Malavida Films

From one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite directors, a film that “is not, as has been written, about the useless heroism in Poland’s tradition. Wajda’s original perspective stems from his position on the hinge between personal history and national history where the existential facts (moral anguish, the decay of death, fear) become rational, and constantly viewed within a political and civil dimension” (M.Morandini).

21 August

DANS LA VILLE BLANCHE (In the White City) by Alain Tanner
with Bruno Ganz, Teresa Madruga, Julia Vonderlinn, José Carvhalo; Switzerland/Portugal, 1982, 107’
Restored by the Association Alain Tanner and Cinémathèque Suisse

“At the beginning of the film, Ganz points out to the waitress that the clock in the bar is wrong. She answers: “The clock is right. It’s the world that’s wrong”. This feeling that the world is out of place pervades the urban solitude surrounding the protagonist, who uses his camera to record fragments of reality that he sends to his wife, moping around the house as if he expected to be captured by reality, to be absorbed by it” (Frédéric Bas). “Blues over the sea and over Lisbon, a film about time and space (and hence about cinema) in sequences of daydreams” (M. Morandini).

22 August

DETOUR by Edgar G. Ulmer

with Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald; USA, 1945, 67’
Restored by the Academy Film Archive and Film Foundation, in collaboration with the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Museum of Modern Art and Cinémathèque Française, with funding for the restoration provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation

“Made in 6 days, with all the scenes on the street filmed with back projection by a Viennese director, the indisputable master of low-cost Hollywood B movies, it became the most famous cult film in the category of poor cinema” (M. Morandini). “One of those little masterpieces that came out of the more untethered B-movie productions, in which the absence of resources became style, a search for atmosphere and an original angle. In Ulmer’s film, the search for the unusual leads to nightmare and dream, to an absurdity almost worthy of Kafka” (G. Volpi).

29 August

L’APE REGINA – UNA STORIA MODERNA (The Conjugal Bed) by Marco Ferreri
with Ugo Tognazzi, Marina Vlady, Walter Giller, Linda Sini, Riccardo Fellini; Italy/France, 1963, 93’
Restored by the Cineteca di Bologna

“Reported and confiscated by the censors who demanded cuts, changes to the dialogues and the release under a different title, this is a paradoxical grotesque about the family, marriage and the clerical-bourgeois ideology that saturated Italy. Funny and coolly merciless” (M. Morandini).  “Real black humour and a frightening sense of death – of the soul, the body and the senses: one of Ferreri’s most successful films” (P. Mereghetti).

30 August

TONI by Jean Renoir
with Charles Blavette, Jenny Hélia, Célia Montalvan, Edouard Delmont; France, 1935, 84’
Restored by Gaumont

“A world of patriarchs and foremen, a world in which the archaic – money, things, earth – combine with more modern forms of exploitation. Sex is obsession, passion, skin-deep eros, a crossroads of destinies that will lead Toni to pay for a crime he did not commit. This film by Renoir is a splendid proletarian melodrama, powerful and true” (G. Volpi). One of Renoir’s most powerful films from the 1930s.

La Biennale di Venezia would like to thank for their valuable collaboration:
Academy Film Archive, Association Alain Tanner, Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Cinémathèque Suisse, Cineteca di Bologna, Far East Film Festival, Films Sans Frontières, Gaumont, L’Immagine Ritrovata, Malavida Films, Mediaset, Movietime, Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino, Park Circus, Polish Film Institut, Sony Pictures, Studio Filmowe Kadr, StudioCanal, Subti Srl, Taiwan Film Institute, and Twentieth Century Fox.