How can one tell the story of a historical archive of 40,000 film titles, the oldest in Italy, founded in Milan in 1947, in just 90 minutes? The undertaking is not simple because there is a risk of not honoring those who began this film collection clandestinely in 1935—during the fascist dictatorship in Italy—which continues to this day. This anthology does not contain our great masterpieces, nor the films restored and saved from oblivion, but rather the obsessions, fears, and shyness of those who direct this archive today, carrying it into the future.
First obsession: loss of color. Color in cinema has always existed. Before the invention of Technicolor, color was spread on positive copies, making them beautiful, unique, but also extremely fragile with respect to time and wear. Coloring films is a complicated, tiring artistic gesture destined for imperfection: we find this madness in the free cinema of the beginnings of the seventh art and in the experimental cinema of the sixties and seventies of the new avant-gardes. Madness is a precious asset; it must be preserved in the best possible way.
Second obsession: the removal of animated cinema. The first cinema certainly technically feeds on the invention of the Lumière, but the mystery of the stories lies in the imagination, in the creativity, in the color that comes to us from the slides of the magic lanterns of the 18th century and from millennia-old knowledge. Animated cinema is the cinema of boundless creativity where everything is possible, and Rossini’s trilogy by Emanuele Luzzati and Giulio Gianini is a timeless ticket for a unique journey.
Third obsession: the end of the film. With the advent of digital, films are increasingly destined to disappear. The struggle for the survival of film has always been terrible: the transition from silent to sound, the transition from flammable film to acetate film, the transition from film to pixels. However, it is difficult to imagine the future of cinema without film. Great authors, but also young promises of cinema, are starting to shoot in many formats on film. The battle is therefore still open, and our documentary, Two Dollars a Kg, produced 25 years ago, is more relevant than ever.
Fourth obsession: unscheduled. Cinema is always unscheduled. It’s difficult to know how we will emerge from viewing a film, what we will think and what we will feel, how much we will need to understand the world and ourselves… This is the mystery and the reason why a film archive like ours never ceases to amaze us, excite us every day, and push us to try to tell it once again in a beautiful festival like this.
Nel regno di Satana
Gaumont, Francia, 1907, color, 7 min
Point and Counterpoint
Cioni Carpi, Italia, 1959-60, color, 5 min
Ladri di gioielli
Pathé Freres, Francia, 1906, color, 6 min
Film 13
Luigi Veronesi, Italia, 1981-1985, color, 10 min
Mefostofeles – Vision d’Art
Pathé Freres, Francia, 1902, color, 3 min
Un giorno un aereo
Cioni Carpi, Italia, 1963, color, 5 min
Danze in costume originale dei principali paesi della Terra
Pathé Freres, Francia, 1907, color, 4 min
Idea assurda per un filmaker
Luna Gianfranco Brebbia, Italia, 1969, color, 11
Buonanotte
Anonimo, 1910, color, 1 min
La gazza ladra
Emanuele Luzzati, Giulio Gianini, Italia, 1964, colore, 10 min
Italiana in Algeri
Emanuele Luzzati, Giulio Gianini, Italia, 1968, colore, 11 min
Pulcinella
Emanuele Luzzati, Giulio Gianini, Italia, 1973, colore, 11 min
Scacciapensieri
Guido Manuli, Italia, 1973, color, 1 min