57Th Locarno International Filmfestival
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57th Locarno International Filmfestival RETROSPECTIVE Newsfront ß Introduction ß Program ß Pubbliacations Newsfront NEWSFRONT When the legend becomes fact, print the legend An almost limitless range of films, documents, memories, legends, from which it was almost impossible to make a selection and which will certainly leave plenty of space for criticism as to oversights and omissions. A research process which set out to rediscover a narrative genre in its own right (let’s call it the “newspaper movie”), only to find itself touching on high-level issues – the nature of truth and the objectivity of the image – in a critical and historical reflection connected both to the cinema (the director’s gaze) and to the press (the ethics of the reporter, the fascination of mass media). And to top it all, the highly topical debate on the distortion of reality and the triumph of documentary filmmaking. The result of this journey in search of the relations between film and journalism, of the origins of the information machine, across over a century of the cinema, is Newsfront, the special event at this year’s Festival. It’s a program which has found itself very much tied up with the present as well as with the history of filmmaking. The title Newsfront came from the cinema (courtesy of Phillip Noyce), as did Print the Legend for the volume published for the retrospective by Les Cahiers du Cinéma (a celebrated line from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) and That’s the Press, Baby! (from the Richard Brooks film) for the affectionate anthology specially prepared by Piera Detassis and Mario Sesti. The original concept, put forward with passionate insistence, came from Irene Bignardi, while we owe to the generous assistance of many (outstanding among them Jean-Michel Frodon, Alissa Simon, Bernhard Uhlman and the Swiss Film Archive in Lausanne) the remarkable results achieved: movie fans will be able to choose from over 90 titles for comparison, discussion and sheer enjoyment. What is Newsfront in the final analysis? First and foremost a journey, tracking across four chapters in which historical examination is blended with thematic and stylistic assessments. Many masterpieces are celebrated in the process: some names spring to mind at once, such as Citizen Kane by Orson Welles, The Front Page by Lewis Milestone, Call Northside 777 by Henry Hathaway, Ace in the Hole by Billy Wilder, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance by John Ford or All the President’s Men by Alan J. Pakula. The last named will be screened in Piazza Grande as a tribute to the hero of the Watergate scandal, journalist Carl Bernstein. Alongside the famous names, however, there will also be space for rare and unexpected titles: L’Affaire Dreyfus by Georges Meliès (1899), Making a Living (1914) with Charlie Chaplin as a cynical newshound, Buster Keaton as a Cameraman (1927), Romolo Marcellini’s Inviati speciali (1943), the heroic journalists of Invasion USA by Alfred E. Green (1952), the two screen versions of The Quiet American and the disaster movie The Day the Earth Newsfront Caught Fire by Val Guest (1961), Ján Kadár’s censorship-struck Obzalovany (Defendant, 1964) and Oon Shab ke Baroon Oomad (The Night When It Rained, 1967) by Kamran Shirdel, the forgotten L’ambassade (Embassy, 1973) by Chris Marker and 1974, Une partie de campagne by Raymond Depardon, plus the great lessons in cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard and the surprising attention devoted to the theme by Swiss filmmakers past and present. There will be rediscoveries such as the little- known Uslasma (The Consensus, 1992) by Turkish director Oguzhan Tercan, Opération Lune (Dark Side of the Moon, 2002) by William Karel, the premiere of the updated version of Robert Altman’s Tanner ’88 and the very recent The Hunting of the President by Thomason and Perry, Control Room by Jehane Noujaim and The Revolution will not be Televised by Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Brian. The four sections covered in each chapter (Prototypes, Genres, Filmmaker as Reporter and The Impure Eye) constantly overlap, however, creating a complex tissue of ideas which will be reflected in the keynote theme for each day of screening. In order to put together a retrospective which features over 90 titles (with the ones screening in Piazza Grande), including restored and specially prepared prints and international premieres as well as acknowledged classics and masterpieces of the genre, we had to make our programming flexible, using all kinds of screening formats, recreating the right conditions for the silent films and taking into account the importance of video in contemporary filmmaking. We also had to face the ever-increasing difficulty of obtaining top quality prints. In our view, it is the duty of a major festival retrospective to highlight this kind of problem. It must be emphasized therefore that in some cases (Fantômas for instance) we decided to go for a video format in order to show the results of recent restoration. In others we had the precious assistance (with help from private sources, too) of DVD producers, who today are often the saviors of genre films that otherwise might disappear altogether. One such instance was Invasion USA, of which there no longer exists an original print, while the digital copy is the result of a painstaking restoration. If it were not for the impetus from DVD for this kind of conservation and restoration work, a great number of films, both old and relatively new, would risk being lost for good. This is one of the tasks of a program dedicated to the memory of the cinema: to point out the constant danger of destruction facing our collective film inheritance and to encourage all new technical means of containing the damage. That does not mean that we prefer to take short cuts (video and DVD can never replace the original formats on film), or that we ignore the responsibilities of the State and private sector towards our heritage of images. On the contrary, our decision to present some films in a different format from their original one is above all a warning, a kind of deliberate scandal in the public eye. The ambition of every retrospective must be to provoke critical debate and, if at all possible, to add through its research to the state of our knowledge – of the cinema, but also of our own time. A themed retrospective must also face another problem. Shedding new light on or completing the history of the art and personality of a single master is the typical task of the historian, but in order to trace an outline across the surface of the History of Communication, the approach must implicitly be itself something close to cinematic. This is Newsfront why we conceived of Newsfront as a single project, but with multiple meanings, giving equal status to films, to the essays in the accompanying book and to the topical discussions of the two panels on the cinema and the press (in cooperation with the Swiss Press Association). Last but not least, of course, all these elements merge quite intentionally with the many titles which, in other Festival programs, feature stories and investigations worthy of the best reporting tradition. This is a retrospective dominated by the questions it raises, but without presuming to supply the answers; it is also a project which grew exponentially as we developed it, almost uncontrollably, as if the issues involved were stronger than our desire to define and contain them, as if the open questions involved had their own, urgent and necessary desire to be addressed. Giorgio Gosetti and Giovanni Marco Piemontese A retrospective of the 57th. Locarno International Film Festival. In partnership with Cinémathèque Suisse. Direction Giorgio Gosetti. Coordination Giovanni Marco Piemontese. Films researches in collaboration with Bernard Uhlmann. Researchs USA: Alissa Simon. In collaboration with: Hollywood Classics British Film Institute Metro Goldwyn Mayer Newsfront NEWSFRONT - PROGRAM 1. L'AFFAIRE DREYFUS by George Méliès – FRANCE – 10 min, 1899 Production: Star Film 2. LE MYSTÈRE DES ROCHES DE KADOR by Léonce Perret - FRANCE - 45 min, 1912 Production: Gaumont 3. MAKING A LIVING by Henry Lehrman - USA - 15 min, 1914 Production: Keystone 4. FANTÔMAS CONTRE FANTÔMAS by Louis Feuillade - USA - 59 min, 1914 Production: Gaumont Restored Version 5. KÄRLEK OCH JOURNALISTIK by Mauritz Stiller - SWEDEN - 40 min, 1916 Production: Svenska Biografteatern Restored Version 6. THE MYSTERY OF THE YELLOW ROOM by Emile Chautard - USA - 75 min, 1919 Production: Mayflower Photoplay, Emile Chautard Picture Restored Version 7. THE KID REPORTER by Alfred J. Goulbyng - USA - 57 min, 1923 Production: Century Film Corporation 8. THE CAMERAMAN by Edward Sedgwick, Buster Keaton - USA - 67 min, 1928 Production: MGM 9. DER TEUFELSREPORTER by Ernst Laemmle - GERMANY - 60 min, 1929 Production: Deutsche Universal Film GmbH 10. FIVE STAR FINAL by Melvin Le Roy - USA - 89 min, 1931 Production: Warner Bros 11. THE FRONT PAGE by Lewis Milestone - USA - 101 min, 1931 Production: United Artists 12. SOB SISTER by Alfred Santell - USA - 67 min, 1931 Production: 20th Century Fox 13. NOTHING SACRED by William A. Wellman - USA - 75 min, 1937 Production: United Artists Restored Version Newsfront 14. HIS GIRL FRIDAY by Howard Hawks - USA - 92 min, 1940 Production: Columbia Pictures 15. STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR by Boris Ingster - USA - 64 min, 1940 Production: RKO 16. THE PHILADELPHIA STORY by George Cukor - USA -112 min, 1940 Production: MGM 17. FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT by Alfred Hitchcock - USA - 119 min, 1940 Production: United Artists 18. CITIZEN KANE by Orson Welles - USA - 119 min, 1941 Production: Mercury Productions, RKO 19. MEET JOHN DOE by Frank Capra - USA - 132 min, 1941 Production: Warner Bros. Restored Version 20.