LOLA
                                  

To Program is to Write Film History

 
Peter von Bagh
I realised that Yogas are a European invention. In Paris and New York today there
are Yoga clubs frequented by all sorts of people, businessmen, society women,  
bakers, secretaries, etc. They earnestly believe that by indulging certain
  contortions once a week under the supervision of a teacher they will achieve the
  1. Jean-Luc Godard, trans. Tom Milne,
Godard on Godard (London: Secker &
famous Hindu wisdom. But in India nothing like that exists. Warburg, 1972), p. 142.
– Roberto Rossellini, as invented by Jean-Luc Godard, 1959 (1)

I.    
It all used to be so simple. There were movies, hard to catch – but when it happened,
they were seen in productive circumstances: in a cinema, with a genuine audience, in 35
millimetre … all of which guaranteed an intense moment of life and art. And there were
books: not that many of them, but some essential volumes, including those labelled
‘histories’ and written by a Georges Sadoul or a Jean Mitry, which functioned like the
centre of our universe.
 
Yesterday and today. The differences are fundamental.
 
I begin each morning discussion at the Midnight Sun Film Festival by asking my
interlocutor – a film director – what was the first film they ever saw. I still get responses,
but they inevitably lose their point when my interlocutor is under the age of 40. Instead
of a significant ‘first film’, we encounter all the arrogance imbued by virtual realities
witnessed since early childhood. In a questionnaire published by my magazine Filmihullu,
a young philosopher said that the time of ‘firsts’ is over – well, maybe there is still the
first sex act, but that’s about it.
 
My generation (born in the 1940s) lived a cinema-life based on the idea of the search: we
were always after films, whose network existed as a map in our heads – in some cases,
leading to seeing certain movies after perhaps an intense dream-state of 25 years. With
the instant accessibility of films, that reverie is permanently postponed. Instead, there is
a tendency to believe (or half-believe) that you have seen a film when you own a video of
it, or spotted it in a shop window or on an Internet list. The term ‘instant accessibility’
must now be returned to its real status of illusion – one of many such illusions of the
present time, such as, foremost, the almost parodic insistence with which celebrated
notions of ‘film culture’ are reproduced in the market, as imitations.
 
If a DVD reproduction is the imitation of a film, surrounded by all the new ways of
viewing, there are imitations also in every detail: ‘restoration’, ‘director’s cut’ (sometimes
valid, mostly a commercial manipulation to profit on the ‘bonus’ side). Restoration,
director’s cut, and so on, are, at the same time, slogans even in the video shops, where a
‘pod’ aspect (à la Invasion of the Body Snatchers) gets the upper hand. There are
restorations that for practical reasons – and because nobody cares about the difference –
are made only digitally. The film becomes a virtual product; only the traffic of money is
real. In many cases, some parts of prints are – to achieve a smooth impression – treated
digitally: the problem of ghostly non-images can be sensed not only in the shockingly
empty, latest Star Wars release, but also – and more and more frequently – in archival
restorations. To have seen a digital transfer of Singin’ in the Rain (such as occurred in
Cannes 2002, a presentation praised by many journalists) is worse than having never
seen it: we witnessed a pod.
 
The cards get shuffled strangely. Some years ago, someone made the claim that TNT (the
movie channel of Turner Broadcasting System) does more for film culture than any other
known source, the point being that TNT has – in an overall situation where we currently
see less and less – offered a way for us to view, at long last, many vanished titles from
early 1930s Hollywood cinema. DVD has mushroomed to fantastic proportions,
performing (with interviews, bonuses, additional material, rare clips) moves that should
obviously have been performed by the archives, if only they were swift, agile and wealthy
enough. This isn’t something to be laughed at, as there is, in theory, some kind of popular
knowledge looming. But then – so where does the disquieting sense of an overall
ignorance come from?
 
Tua res agitur … The small, privileged, mental world of a movie nut is tested hard in the
midst of such daily reminders and humiliations. To visit a film school, in most cases,
means observing that any kind of common knowledge – those points from which any
sensible reasoning about films could start – is long gone.
 
Another personal experience. I see a brand new ‘restoration’ of Sir Arne’s Treasure
(Mauritz Stiller, 1919), and it simply does not move me. I begin remembering the impact
of a mediocre, unsubtitled 16mm print I have seen several times … Were some key
sequences treated digitally, perhaps? Some lifelessness had crept in. Where is the life? In
the cases where actual prints are perhaps not even struck, the colourful DVD campaigns
become signs of a cruel irony: celebrating the life of a film that has no real existence.
 
This type of disquiet happens much too often. Of course, the revelation of a good
restoration is a magic moment. In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks, 1967), seen at Bologna in
a dazzling Sony-Columbia restoration, was one such case, in relation to a relatively recent
film – recent films also, all too often, being in need of urgent work. However, in the case
of Tillie’s Punctured Romance (Mack Sennett, 1914), shown in Sacile, October 2004, a
minor film, bloated and boring in several of its multiple versions, suddenly became an
overwhelming demonstration of anarchism in its most epic form.
 
II.
DVD – another of my obsessions, I admit – is everywhere, and especially dominant in
schools and universities. The creeps sitting in their offices do not see much sense in
paying the expense for a 35mm print – and nor do most of the teachers who were already
unable see any difference between a film and a VHS.
 
The main struggle, again and always, is to respect films. I take a provocatively
conservative stand: 35mm projection is, for me, at best, an ultimate definition of life.
Films are life itself! We have in front of us an ocean of films – more than ever, watched
more absent-mindedly and nonchalantly than ever before. Historicity – an old-fashioned
concept – requires the existence of ‘real’ films, and the depth of 35mm, which is still the
centre of even commercial events and marketing processes, regardless of where the big
money comes from. But more and more material is being shown to people who see – in
the truest sense – less and less. The one, original ‘film’ is divided into more and more
totally different and often contradictory subgenres. What is our right to promote the
35mm projection as the one and only experience? I know that certain brilliant
commentators are entirely capable of redefining their point of view and casting in rosy
colours the changed, indeed ameliorated conditions for a new, real state of cinephilia.
Jonathan Rosenbaum has suggested:

Can films seen on television screens change one’s life as films on giant theatrical
  screens could? I think so, but almost certainly not in the same ways, and possibly    
in certain new ways that are still evolving. (2)

This sorry view is all too true of commercial fare, to be distributed even more effectively
2. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Goodbye
and with an even more monotonous feel of endless recycling at the moment that Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture
‘projection’ mean pushing a button to unleash a DVD screening. But, at the same time,   in Transition (Chicago & London:
University of Chicago Press, 2010), p.
there are other, marginalised aspects, and a truth in what Rosenbaum cites from 6.
filmmaker Travis Wilkerson:

The new cinema doesn’t concern itself with technological debates, particularly the 3. Travis Wilkerson, ‘Incomplete Notes
  antagonism of analogue against digital. It employs, without prejudice, any and all   on the Character of the New Cinema’,
World Socialist Website.
tools available to it. (3)

There, is of course, a strong temptation to quip that films – the commercial fare that fills   4. Michael Wood, America in the
Movies (New York: Basic Books, 1975),
with almost the same bunch of films 90% of the cinemas in the world – fit the same as quoted in Neal Gabler, Life: The
schema of hollowness. Michael Wood describes these new movies as a ‘rearrangement of Movie – How Entertainment Conquered
Reality (New York: Vintage, 1998), p. 6.
our problems into shapes which tame them, which disperse them to the margins of our  
attention’ where we can forget about them. (4) We should perhaps invite Douglas Sirk to
give us concepts – imitation, deceptive mirror, and so on – to express the depths of our 5. The relationship between DVD and
festival presentation raises an
situation, in which films are seen primarily in other ways than in a cinema: on television, interesting paradox. When festivals
video, DVD (in a size that neither respects or produces a true experience of them), at become the final way to decently see a
work, the appearance of a DVD box set
excessive speed, with or without commercials – if there is felt to be a difference at all. containing the every Laurel and Hardy
They are shadows indeed, and the old variant seems, in comparison, like life itself. (5) movie can simultaneously both delight
and sadden us – because it means that
  a ‘complete Laurel and Hardy’ festival
III. program is now quite unlikely. Home
cinema celebrates digital half-truths,
I cannot help feeling that in the midst of this omnipotence – everything available at once, while the film itself disappears. A DVD
abounding written materials and video editions, thousands of TV channels around the release, even if it is an imitation
approaching perfection, is henceforth a
world showing movies, film departments working at full steam – there is less knowledge mausoleum.
than at any point within the last 50 years. One, single symptomatic detail conjures the
ideal of film history, and the dream of a Sadoul or a Mitry: to write a personal history of  
world cinema. This all seems to have receded definitively into the past. Nobody seems to
care. Instead, committees toil in several countries, with quite a few of the same names
 
repeated in slightly different editions (and usually, somehow not at all giving their best in
this kind of context) – it is bound to be something that exists in annual reports, not in
human minds.
 
I should say, in passing, that I am still consulting the pages of Sadoul and Mitry – those
personal histories – more happily than the pages of these huge, ‘scientific’ editions ... And
here is the point of the Godard/Rossellini quotation with which I began, that does not
even concern cinema very directly, but in which I am tempted to see more of an idea and
more truth about cinema than in the output of the entire American university machine,
with its film departments, over the last ten years. I do not mean to say that American
film scholarship hasn’t produced some good – indeed, some brilliant  – things, but it has
also been a too-organic part of the commercial empire of Hollywood, pushing – again
symptomatically – its version of film history around the world, with, for instance,
European cinema consisting of five auteurs (Fellini, Bergman, etc.) and little more.

It would be too rude to generalise about present film literature, but we all know the    
overkill of books dedicated to a handful of fashionable names (Lynch, Tarantino, von Trier)  
and the dark difficulties of publishing anything else. Many film archives complement,  
unawares, this state of film culture. Fellini, Tarkovsky and even Eisenstein might still be
 
regarded as topics worth frequent treatment but, at the same time, this hammering of an
ever diminishing name-list means blatant oblivion for those who circle the supposedly  
‘true names’: Pietro Germi and Alberto Lattuada, Gleb Panfilov and Marlen Khutsiev,  
Vsevolod Pudovkin and Fridrikh Ermler – not to mention a more general context and
6. André Bazin, ed. Jean Narboni, Le
dramaturgy that are simply absent, an absence that the disappearance of film histories cinéma francais de la libération à la
accentuates. The effect is obviously cumulative: when the basis is hollow knowledge, the nouvelle vague (1945-1958) (Paris:
Éditions de l'Étoile, 1983). Some of the
programming ideas become static. contents of this volume are also
  available in English as Bazin, French
A preliminary answer to the sad lack of film history among us – let me cite a book I still Cinema of the Occupation and
Resistance: The Birth of a Critical
regard as just about the best history around: the compilation of André Bazin’s daily and Aesthetic (New York: Ungar, 1981), a
weekly writing, Le cinéma francais de la libération a la nouvelle vague (1945-1958), translation by Stanley Hochman of an
anthology assembled by François
edited by Jean Narboni in 1983 ... As a book about the French cinema of a certain period, Truffaut for Union générale d’edition in
no other publication prompts as much illumination or dialogue – a work written at a time 1975.
when everything was urgent, without the slightest trace of the complacency of our times.
(6)
 
IV.
The question posed to me by Bernard Eisenschitz went something like: given the present
ghostly situation of comprehending film history, are, for example, the festivals – in some
concrete way – authentic contributions to the writing of film history? I seem to have
formulated the same situation some ten years ago, as follows:

A good film showing can, and should, dramatise a film as a moment in History.
Even if the requirements of a true retrospective create the need to show rather
many films per week, or even per day – two or three showings seem to be a rather
general practice inside FIAF, but even far fewer can lead to fine and essential
results, if the programmer has a poetic sensibility. I am hereby defending small
  countries, small places, small cities, reminding people that sometimes    
programming only has a chance of one film – anyway something ridiculous in
comparison with London, Paris, New York or Madrid, who have a chance to show
perhaps four or five or even ten films a day. The impact must, however, be
estimated in connection with other showings in the place, with the situation of a
given national film culture of the time.

The contribution of any film festival is necessarily an event of a very small scale but, at    
the same time, it has, at best, a concreteness and impact all its own – or, paraphrasing
Vertov, film events beget films. This is evidently true of Cannes, which has a very special
sense of its duty, contributing to the continuity of a remarkable bunch of filmmakers who,
without that support, would not in some cases perform as much – a phenomenon
violently opposed, in some articles, by the writers of Variety (in whose Darwinian mindset
those films should not exist at all) and other pillars of the system. But small festivals
contribute simply by adding to our sense of film history.
 
At this point I should certainly give credit to the fabulous retrospectives that practically all
major festivals (which are, many times, the only places that can afford the costs) are
giving us, with varying degrees of inspiration. Although not the festival shark some might
suppose I am, I have had my share of unforgettable moments. San Sebastian – where
retrospectives compensate for the necessarily poor level of competition, due to the
festival being, calendar-wise, the last annual link among the A-list festivals, and thus
having almost nothing decent to show – has produced the mind-boggling retrospectives
of William Wellman (1993), Gregory La Cava (‘95), Mitchell Leisen (‘97), Mikio Naruse
(‘98), John M. Stahl (‘99) ... Berlin has sustained a remarkable, well-produced
concentration on German-language-area émigré directors – Erich von Stroheim (’94),
Robert and Curt Siodmak (’98), Otto Preminger (’99), Fritz Lang (’01) – whose work
crossed over several countries.
 
I admired the Soviet (and US) ‘Before the Code’ retrospective in Venice (’90); but the
Locarno Soviet season of 2000 is perhaps my all-time most memorable experience – an
event that was literally history-writing ablaze, and thus an answer to the informal topic of
this article. To cut to the chase, all these were clearly moments of film history in the
sense of being superb experiences of added understanding, pieces of a puzzle handed out
at just the right time, and in an inspired way. And all of them represented the precious,
electric meeting of film archives and film festivals.
 
V.
A good film archive program reads like a piece of music. Take the brochures of
Cinemateca Portuguesa (headed by João Bénard da Costa), Filmoteca Espanola
(programmed by Catherine Gautier), The Pacific Film Archive (programmed by Edith
Kramer) or the programs of the Cinémathèque française, and we have the heavenly
feeling of film history in motion, and a sense of responsibility – the need to share
experience, and explain our life as only film can, but devoid of superficial, sociological
notions. Nothing in these programs is self-evident ... They are a beautiful dream, in their
diagrams of a week or a month, or even one evening – as one very special, favourite
programming memory will indicate.
 
Here is one day from more than 25 years ago, engraved in my memory – starting on a
Saturday afternoon at the Cinémathèque française, and continuing on into the night:

                 One Exciting Night (D.W. Griffith, 1922)

                 Way of a Gaucho (Jacques Tourneur, 1952)
                 The Diary of a Chambermaid (Jean Renoir, 1946)
   
                 Europa 51 (Roberto Rossellini, 1952)

A perfect day in my life, which I have been thinking of ever since, as fervently as Everett    
Sloane/Bernstein thinks of the girl he once fleetingly saw on the ferry at New Jersey in
Citizen Kane (1941) …
 
A primary school-type, linear, ‘this is film history’ approach does not work anymore in the
way it used to, as there is not much around to back up such an idealistic approach. A
right film – even just one right film – at exactly the right time, and in the right
circumstances, can move a world. Programming is all about sensibility, and it relates very
much to artistic activity in general, just as film festivals can be compared (if they are
done with genuine understanding) to the act of directing a film.
 
There are no big or small themes, just an endeavour to deepen the sense of connection,
and an intuition to see a small particle as an organic part of film history – this is how
even small-scale archive showings or modest-size festivals can contribute essential pages
to film history. A history that I, in the present situation, would sooner see as a process of
adding to our understanding, with all available means, rather than producing a line of
books.
 
Often a surprising, inventive theme makes an indelible mark: the Cinemateca Portuguesa
and its theme of ‘absent protagonists’ (during January-February 2001) – central film
characters who are named, talked about, but never seen – or the Cinémathèque française
and its ‘swindlers’ rubric of January-February 1994. And, on the other side, an obvious
theme can be treated creatively: regularly eyeing the programs of La Cinémathèque
Suisse, I have long admired the productive results of homages immediately dedicated to
just-deceased personalities – often with good, bad and mediocre films together, probably
based closely on its own collection (a constraint that is no less essential in tracing the
‘career’ of a Swiss star or director) but with, as a result, the sense of a life lived in
concrete circumstances.
 
There is a generational change forthcoming, or already happening, in the film archives.
Seeing, for example, the booklets of Österreichische Filmmuseum (whose programming is
in the hands of Alexander Horwath) makes one feel secure: a film archive can give a
pulse to all the film-presentation activities of a country – the old films become fresh and
new and modern again, and the new ones attain dimensions that instantly link them to
the past.
 
At some point, I had the feeling that FIAF was going in a bad direction. A body count at a
congress in the early 1980s resulted in some five people vitally interested in film. Not
many words were said about restoration. Some time later, restoration and programming
developed hand in hand; that is the only thing which can guarantee that an act of
preservation grows into the actual rebirth of a film, of the recreation of its social life –
even of certain significant characteristics of its original impact, the human echo of its
initial perception.
 
Coming from a background in archives myself, I have an inclination to see their
importance as paramount: without them as the centre, everything within film culture –
including the mental circumstances of filmmaking itself – is muddled. I will use my own
country of Finland as an example of some new twists, because careless, distracted
viewing habits have also taken over our way of seeing films: a generation already without
any serious time spent at the precious, privileged site that the Finnish Film Archive still is.
The last filmmaker to have spent some years in the right kind of darkness – the Film
Archive – is Aki Kaurismäki, and that was more than two decades ago. No wonder many
filmmakers experience difficulties getting their ‘language’ recognised in the apprehension
of foreign spectators.
 
VI.
Each country has its own strategies of survival, and has always had them. For instance, I
have often wondered about Italy. How was its remarkable knowledge and informed
cinephilic passion possible since, every time I spend an evening even in one of its major
cities, consulting the daily programs, I find only a mess of the same, Anglo-Saxon junk.
The explanation relates to Italy’s special events, with cinephile nomads constantly in
movement. One event on Ulmer, another on Ophüls, etc. In constant circulation, inside
and outside its several film archives. I am too modestly informed about France, but I
imagine the same kind of explanation there; indeed, every (or almost every) country has
something to teach us in this regard.
 
I might start by remembering some highpoints in the workings of the two festivals I know
best: Pordenone/Sacile (Giornate del cinema muto) and Bologna (Il Cinema Ritrovato).
Instead of trying to be logical and systematic, I hereby offer some miscellanea from
various years.
 
My first and most precious memory goes no further back than 1988. It involved one of
those fabulous ‘big’ themes that has made Pordenone a legend: the American 1910s, with
all the rarities, all the forgotten themes you have ever dreamt of; then, the following year,
Russian films before the Revolution, including the work of Jevgeni Bauer; then German
cinema before Caligari ... Like the homages at San Sebastian and Berlin, the Venice and
Locarno programs were accompanied by substantial reference volumes. These are
revelations you cherish for your entire lifetime.
 
A homage to a personality can produce just as much, whether a gigantic series on an
evident theme (Pordenone and the silent DeMille); or a surprise choice and a
sophisticated idea, like having the films of Herbert Brenon (Pordenone again); or even a
seeming banality like Valentino or Garbo can be as overwhelming and surprising as any
revelation of hidden secrets of film history – done at a right time, with the right gathering
of the public (in Bologna, the participation of local townspeople is crucial), it leads, at
best, to surprising, productive results.
 
As for rarer material, a typical Bologna subprogram: something related to Mittel-Europa
and reflecting, most likely, the special knowledge of the great historian and collector
Vittorio Martinelli (1926-2008). This theme was seen through the films of some
fascinating Russian émigré personalities – resulting in a truly rare bunch of movies all up,
among them Viatcheslav Tourjansky’s Michael Strogoff (1926), Victor Trivas’ Dans les rues
(1933, with music by Hanns Eisler!), Anatole Litvak’s Cette vieille canaille (1933), Alexis
Granowsky’s Das Lied vom Leben (1931), and Fédor Ozep’s Amok (1934) ... Adventures
from the borderland of silence and sound, from directors (these were not the only films
by them, the selection was rich) who seemed to change country with each film, and thus
became unclassifiable, and largely – with the exception of Litvak, whose charged story
gains some light when situated here – forgotten, missing out on their share in film
history.
 
While many of the films may be unknown or have long remained unavailable even to the
finest specialists, some others are known, but only in a print that hides more than it
reveals the beauty of the original images; and yet other films attain an entirely new
identity when seen, as a spectator, together with the best bunch of people in the world,
i.e., the inimitable collection of archive professionals, film historians, essayists,
preservation specialists, critics, cinephiles, and simply all those curious about the always
thrilling equation life = film. The proportions of Pordenone/Sacile and Bologna vary, but in
this kind of essence they both have produced an amazing, inventive synthesis of
programming and surrounding dialogue.
 
A quote from my first preface, when blind chance made me the artistic director of
Bologna in 2001, after being plucked directly out of the ranks of its regular clients:

The eight happy days of Bologna will offer all that heaven (= cinema) allows:
images of everyday and dreams, popular entertainment and avant-garde,
 
narrative and non-narrative works, rounded works and fragments, canonised
masterpieces (that must be saved from the unknown almost as often as the films  
  that are lost or faded almost into nothingness) and B movies, and works that are
 
7. The complete 2001 program of
not quite films and of which Nico de Klerk uses a subtle expression ‘orphans and Bologna 2001 is archived here. (PDF
document.)
foundlings’, thus examples of an author’s voice and the anonymous charms, so
essential to cinema and its popular call – and not less essential. (7)

Both Pordenone/Sacile and Bologna are organic continuations of the finest moment of    
FIAF: the Brighton conference of 1978, with its ambitious effort to screen all available
pre-1905 material. (8) Since then, we have witnessed a triumphant return of the silent
film heritage, with various sectors, for once, acting in remarkable harmony; thus the work
of Il Cinema Ritrovato is closely connected with a laboratory (L’immagine ritrovato) and
restoration work (taking care, for instance, of all Chaplin’s feature films).
 
Lately, even more than before, we are facing the tragedy of surprisingly new films almost
in the state of extinction. Bologna’s thematic series of 2003 and 2004 dedicated to
formats has shown this.
 
A shocking example is provided by the fate of the original CinemaScope, launched in
1953 by Fox with the ratio of 2:55:1 and Stereophonic sound. It only lasted for three
years, after which all of it was standardised into the 2:35:1 format. The golden moment
was over, and that strange, original sense of it lost – in the words of Leon Shamroy,
‘actually witnessing an event, rather than watching a picture of it … giving the viewer a
feeling of being surrounded by the action and, therefore, participating in it’.
 
A symmetrical angst faced us in the case of VistaVision: another ideal case for cinephilic
musings, as writing about it can no longer be based on facts – i.e., actual viewing of the
prints – and thus the phenomenon is located somewhere in the wonderland or borderland
of ideals and dreams. A series pushes us to meditate about the dream of VistaVision.
 
One of the privileges of a film festival dedicated to lost eras and rediscovered films is the
chance to offer a glimpse of the original circumstances of a movie. The series on
VistaVision was that kind of glimpse – almost literally, as the effort to dramatise the real
circumstances of the system was clearly abortive (none of the few, probably dazzling
original prints from the very first year of the system were found, the original viewing print
of Vertigo [1958] remained in the vaults of the Cinémathèque française, etc.). Still, I
guess it was a pertinent attempt to understand the degree to which that system made its
day, and how a technological definition in the heart of a collective art can become a
figment of memory.
 
We seem to be as nostalgic for these systems – they touch us like angels at a certain,
tender age – as for the stars or stories that coloured an epoch. VistaVision appears as a
concrete fact in the heated mental apparatuses of the period that covered the 1954-62
era of the ‘leisure time president’ Eisenhower in the United States, and in the US satellites
we were mentally becoming right then (including, in one of the very rare real VistaVision
films, the greatest ‘leisure time’ movie ever, To Catch a Thief [1955]). Just like the first
three, tremendous years of CinemaScope: a veritable time travel.
 
How can we not be sentimental about the system that produced both The Searchers
(1956) and Vertigo, the two grandest visions of impossible searching and the duplicity of
illusions? VistaVision, with its graphic edge, seemed to be all about the definition of a
landscape – external and internal.
 
Film festivals are, in this sense, adventures, as well as meditations on necessity and
randomness in history. Thus, really productive festivals are seldom just compendiums of
good or great films; anything shown will be seen in a new light. Thus, in a parallel way,
relating still to CinemaScope and VistaVision, we might observe the interesting fact of
how the key films at the starting point of a new technological phase – often summarily
dismissed as irrelevant – are actually a kind of ideological sum of basics: The Jazz Singer
(1927), The Robe (1953) … and White Christmas (1954), with its vision at the crossroads
of religion and consumerism.
 
Thus, returning again to The Robe, we have, in ‘normal’ terms, just an extreme
mediocrity, albeit an interesting movie from the vantage point of the Cold War (the
warring elements of the reactionary tendency on one side and, on the other, those critical,
leftist forces at work in the filmmaking team). But, screened in the way a festival should,
‘historically correct’, i.e., in 2:55:1 and in Stereophonic sound, we suddenly have a
miracle: a stroll into an unknown space that is perhaps not Ancient Rome but ‘the year
1953’ – the totality of it.
 
VII.
At this point, I would like to say a few words in praise of the cinephile, assumed to be
more or less the nice, clownish figure so sweetly dramatised in glimpses provided by
Truffaut, or in Ettore Scola’s We All Loved Each Other So Much (C’eravamo tanto amati,
1974). In general parlance, a cinephile is a symbol of alienation, the sworn enemy of ‘real
life’ – and thus devoid, by definition, of any understanding about social realities or the
flow of history.
 
The truth is different. As I remember it, the old-school cinephile was preoccupied with
real things, and with an urge for real knowledge, satisfied only with eternity and the deep
focus of the kind of universal knowledge only film can provide – cinema being, let’s face
it, a kind of parallel wisdom along with the wisdom of books and, as such, something
without which the true history of the 20th century cannot be written.
 
I might march in here as a witness, like Jerry Lewis taken onto a television panel in
Artists and Models (1955) as a deranged example of somebody consuming cartoons to a
senseless degree. My example concerns Paris, the knowledge of which is, from my point
of view, based on hundreds of hours spent in small cinemas. Almost literally, I had been
present there for ten years before seeing the Eiffel Tower or visiting a museum – seeing,
instead, films that, day after day, enlarged my modest knowledge with jolts that stopped
the heart. Although it might seem absurd, it was all about enlarging the machinery of
understanding – in the way that film, in its prime definition, could present this to me.

One great book exemplifies the achievements of cinephilia, the combined Stakhanovite
days and nights one or two generations spent in shabby cinemas. It is a compendium on
merely a couple of thousand film titles and yet, in its impact, it far overwhelms any recent
effort in film history: Jacques Lourcelles’ volume in the series Dictionnaire du cinéma. (8)  
This summary of a lifelong cinephilia, due to its breadth, is an object proving my point
that the range of cinephilic activities – screenings, writings, discussions – constitute one 8. Two volumes were published from
the Brighton symposium, one of which
sovereign point of history proper. (9) is a detailed filmography of the some
    600 works screened: Roger Holman,
Cinema 1900-1926: An Analytical
Paris is, to my knowledge, the only city where this book could have been compiled. Study (Brussels: FIAF, 1982).  
London or New York neither show enough, nor radiate the same understanding of that
commitment without which a writer cannot act. But our judgment should not be so harsh 9. Jacques Lourcelles, Dictionnaire du
cinéma: les films (Paris: Robert Laffont,
or pessimistic. Every other point in the universe must gather its knowledge and 1992) – 1,725 pages in small type.
understanding via varying means, without discrimination. Living cinephilicly: it is again
the principle of pars pro toto, a part taken for the whole. The feeling that even the
remotest place can be homebase for real cinephilia and genuine understanding.

VIII.    
Every festival should have a self-definition and mission all its own. I am privileged to be
associated with two festivals. As both of them are a kind of wonderful hobby, rather than
something I do for a living (which again relates more to the conventional writing of film
history, or reflecting it in other ways, especially in the form of the montage film), I guess
we are near enough to our main point – of trying to grasp how screenings can have a role
in the vast, unlimited process of writing film history.
 
Pordenone/Sacile is a privileged meeting place for film scholars, while Bologna is a more
freewheeling compendium of scholarship, enthusiasm and cinephilia (but still a specialist
gathering, essentially). Bologna is a combination of many things – local and foreign
sensibilities, the non-professional citizens of Bologna and highly specialised audiences ...
It comprises a range of events, combinations of films that seem first to be wildly apart –
but which hopefully form a unity that is mostly lacking in the commercial mentalities now
creeping into once safe corners of film culture.
 
My dearest child, named the Midnight Sun Film Festival (mid-June), covers far more
innocent and ignorant ground – it is not a specialist festival at all. It fell upon me at a
crucial moment: I had just ended a 20 year stint of programming for a Film Archive, and
experienced a tragic feeling of emptiness, with ghostly programs filling my restless
dreams. Then came the initiative from three movie-director friends: we should start an
international film festival in the middle of nowhere, in a small village in Finnish Lapland,
120 kilometres north of the North Pole.
 
The beginning is well worth mentioning. The director Anssi Mänttäri was, for some reason,
in the village of Sodankylä, in November 1985, boozing with a local, cultural secretary. It
was 4am, total darkness and nothingness all around them. Anssi quips: ‘Why not start an
international film festival here?’ It must be the most incredible start for any festival and,
of course, a productive one – very much due to the creative energy of the Kaurismäki
brothers, who were active in it from the start.
 
Half a year later, mid-June 1986, we had it all: Samuel Fuller, Bertrand Tavernier,
Jonathan Demme and Jean-Pierre Gorin were the first visitors, and we felt safe in the
midst of a huge bunch of people, whose arrival seemed – and always seems – almost
incomprehensible (and they proved, from the very first, not to be just a section of
Helsinki cinephiles decamped to the north for a few days, but an audience definitely from
all corners of Finland). In a small village that is like a facsimile of some small, tasteless
American spot, and with nothing else to do, we offered three venues for films on a 24-
hour-a-day basis: an old cinema (an extreme rarity at that altitude in this moment of
history), a school, and a huge tent.
 
This became an emotional centre-point in life – perfectly defining the meaning of cinema
for me, as well as for our public, whose main characteristic is their holy ignorance. As a
matter of fact, there is nothing terribly extraordinary in the program; it is only the
concentration on cinema that is nothing short of complete.  As we have done our share of
presenting veterans – our basic wording is that guest directors under 80 are in the Youth
section – this means that we have had retrospectives of Michael Powell, André de Toth,
Richard Fleischer, Stanley Donen, Robert Wise, Alberto Lattuada, Dino Risi, Joseph H.
Lewis, Jacques Demy, Claude Sautet … always with the director in attendance. These
series cannot be complete in the way, for example, that Amiens (an obviously great
festival I have never yet attended) stages them. The new films are a compendium of the
best of the year, facilitated by the fact that there is no competition – indeed, there are
none of the usual side effects, thus bringing about an anti-festival atmosphere.
 
Before continuing, I must place our festival within a larger context. The Sodankylä event
is a part of the almost incomprehensible net of summer festivals, originated by the town
of Jyväskylä from the late 1950s onwards, with all arts combined – and all this (today
more and more specialist, with the strongest rise in music festivals) taking place
essentially in the midst of nature. Our film festival seems to share something that the
Finnish summer festivals have in common: a mystery play, full of holy naïveté, the feel of
pure nature.
 
But why, in a film festival? It took me some years to get the point, but I think I now have
it clear. Film is a drama of light – something filmmakers like Fellini or Kaurismäki never
tire of declaring. And our festival, with its incredible drama of natural light, with the
experience of going to the dark of the cinema at 3am and coming out at 5am into full
daylight, is a parallel drama which creates a dialectic that simply has a unique effect on
us, undiminished even after two decades.
 
This general context, and the inspiration of Finnish summer events – based, as we know
from Bergman’s 1950s films, on the shortness of Scandinavian summer, and the brevity
of happiness – of course inspires us to strive, in everything, for the vitality of a live
performance. Old films are shown as if they were new, new films as if they are already
classics. The stakes are high: even if you have already seen Murnau’s Der letzte Mann
(The Last Laugh, 1924) quite a few times, the vision of it at Sodankylä would have to be
the show of your lifetime. Incidentally, this particular event took place with our house
orchestra, the 12-piece Anssi Tikanmäki band – and it later led to the ‘last silent film of
the 20th century’, Aki Kaurismäki’s Juha (1999), with music by Tikanmäki: a film that was
clearly a festival baby.
 
After the army of some 150 young, totally dedicated volunteers has packed and left –
there is sadness in the end, and in these circumstances it is especially concrete, with the
silent village achingly reminding us of the last minutes of The Circus (1928) or certain
moments in Fellini – we face the problem of those other 360 days of the year ... how
about them, under the present circumstances?
 
I write this in the conviction that even a small festival, far from the ‘big cities’, can
contribute something truly essential. Any kind of festival must be based on the need to
make the life of a film palpable. The ideal, which forever eludes us, is that each film –
always an individual film – causes strange, unexpected formations with other films, if
shown in an inspired and dignified way; ideally, so that that one showing is always
remembered as the finest related to a cherished film.
 
The touching effect of Midnight, intact over 19 times, relates to the fact that the main
part of the audience is definitively out of the miracle of cinema in the proper, old-
fashioned sense I have tried to define as essential, still today. We have those five days
and nights there together, world famous filmmakers and young, often ignorant (in terms
of cinema), naive, curious people, indivisible and one, face to face with basic definitions of
what cinema is. And that exactly appears to be the point that charms one filmmaker after
another, causing a reaction already repeated in the very first years by veterans like
 Samuel Fuller, Michael Powell or Joseph H. Lewis: it's as if I’m seeing my own films for the
first time …
 
A wonderful short film by Octavio Cortázar comes to mind: Por primera vez (For the First
Time, 1967), an account of small, Cuban children in the mountains where a cine-car takes
a projector and a print of Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), and we witness the miracle and
wonderment of cinema in its full, original form. An unsurpassed, inspirational moment for
all of us who rehearse the art of running a film festival ...
 
 
This text by Peter von Bagh (1943-2014) was commissioned by Bernard Eisenschitz for
Cinéma magazine and published in its ninth issue (Spring 2005), pp. 116-131. Von Bagh
wrote it in (sometimes approximate) English, and then revised it according to
Eisenschitz’s translation for the French version. For this new version, we have returned to
the original English language manuscript, but edited it in the light of its definitive,
published form. For access to these materials, and for permission to print this version,
LOLA warmly thanks Juhana von Bagh, Bernard Eisenschitz, and Antti Alanen of the
Finnish Film Archive.

from Issue 6: Distances    

© Estate of Peter von Bagh, 2005.

Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.

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