In the bowels of the cinema hospital: this is how the great films of history are rescued

Sometimes the patient who comes in is a star.

Others, no one knows her.

But they are all cared for and listened to, because each one has a story to tell.

Some only suffer the infirmities of age.

But in the laboratory, more desperate cases are also dealt with: fractures, cuts, burns, hoarseness, even missing pieces.

And, of course, forgetfulness.

After all, the youngest patients add up to 40 or 50 years.

And there are even that exceed the century of life.

“I don't know if we ever bordered on therapeutic obstinacy.

You grow fond of movies”, smiles Céline Stéphanie Pozzi, one of the main people in charge of watching over the films that surround her.

Although, if it were a geriatric hospital, the Cineteca de Bologna would border on a miracle: one enters hurt, or even decrepit, almost always leaves splendid.

And ready to shine again.

When the cinema no longer does magic, go to this great basement.

And find dozens of sorcerers willing to help.

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So much so that the institution has become one of the most relevant worldwide.

And a real pride of the city, with permission from porticos, ragú or mortadella.

It restores a hundred works a year, from Federico Fellini to Jean Renoir, through Agnès Varda or Albert Samama-Chikli, the first African filmmaker.

It has opened offices in Paris, Amsterdam and Hong Kong, to be close to its many Asian clients.

But it also teaches, promotes, exhibits, produces, and sells the seventh art.

“Safeguarding and philology are mixed.

We have graduates in Chemistry and Humanities”, sums up its spokesperson, Andrea Ravagnan.

Behind him, a map on the wall reveals the next step in the project: moving to a new headquarters that brings everything together in the same space.

A colossal oasis of cinema.

Earlier this year,

They intend to inaugurate a brand new room in the heart of Bologna, ancient and very modern at the same time.

Like the Cineteca itself.

The director of the Bologna Cineteca, Gian Luca Farinelli. Bologna Cineteca

“Ours is a beautiful story”, boasts its director, Gian Luca Farinelli.

“In 1962, a group of intellectuals convinced the young culture councilor Renato Zangheri [later mayor of the city] to promote it.

The idea was that these bodies should be governed freely, without being blocked by politics or bureaucracy”, he continues.

platforms now dominate

;

Eternal refuge for university students, today Bologna is also licking the wounds of gentrification;

but, while everything changed, Farinelli believes that this principle was maintained.

Faced with so much indignation at the inefficiency of the Administrations and their efforts to erase all traces of the predecessor, here is a sample of what happens when things are done not just on film, but simply well.

“All the mayors of Bologna have fought for the Cineteca and to help it grow, with dialogue, but without invading us”, asserts the director.

Even the

Giorgio Guazzaloca, already deceased, the only non-left councilor in one of the reddest cities in Italy.

Region and Central State have also given their support.

And in 1993 the organization obtained autonomy as an institution, chaired since then by a prestigious filmmaker: currently Marco Bellocchio.

Little by little, in short, the Cineteca had the time and funds to become what it is today.

Farinelli himself was trained in the free silent film screenings that the organization offered in Bolognese institutes in the 1970s.

There were film literacy courses, a room was opened, in the eighties a peculiar festival was born, Il Cinema Ritrovato.

A niche event,

Who might be interested in seeing the works that the world's film libraries preserve and protect?

Answer, from the walls of the Cineteca, a photo of the summer of 2022: on the big screen,

;

around, the main square of Bologna overflowing with attendees.

And, among them, John Landis himself, director of the film.

The 37th edition of the event, by the way, starts on June 24.

Screening in the Plaza Mayor of Bologna of 'Rogues at full speed', within the framework of the Il cinema ritrovato festival, in the summer of 2022, with the presence of the film's director, John Landis.Lorenzo Burlando

“The contest became important.

We realized that there was a huge void in film restoration.

And we start with the changes.

Then came the laboratory, the school…”, Farinelli insists.

There are names that serve to expand his response: the complete works of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton passed through his stretchers;

once a year, the director visits Martin Scorsese, who advises some of his rescues.

And maybe Wes Anderson will ring the doorbell, eager to see a film impossible to find elsewhere.

But another key completes the explanation: “Launching itself since 2006 very consciously into digital repair.

It is about taking advantage of its enormous possibilities, but, at the same time, forcing it to get as close as possible to the original physical material”.

The numbers also help explain the phenomenon: the catering company, L'Immagine Ritrovata, has gone from 20 to 80 employees.

The institution has just acquired a state-of-the-art Dutch center to improve the physical and chemical treatment of celluloid;

and its budget, including the exhibition halls and all its different facets, reaches 16 million annually.

One third comes from public money.

The rest, in addition to sponsors and donors, is generated by the Cineteca through its own activity.

Starting with the laboratory.

An employee of the Cineteca de Bologna works on the digital restoration of a film. Lorenzo Burlando

Creators, companies, even governments.

Anyone who wants to save a film sends it to these underground corridors, an involuntary metaphor for the film's own descent into hell.

And, also, from the bunker of resistance against the storm of pessimism that plagues the seventh art.

Here you walk among gigantic machinery from another era, the present is still measured in 16 or 32 millimeters and the work of the projector is conceived as that of the famous Alfredo from Cinema

.

“Movie” is also understood in its most literal sense.

"Is preserved.

You open the drawer and immediately see the image, while formats and digital supports are changing”, claims Céline Stéphanie Pozzi.

And that Kodak has remained the only producer globally.

Along with nostalgics like Christopher Nolan or Quentin Tarantino, the Cineteca is one of its main clients: its work begins and ends with celluloid, although along the way it also embraces the latest 4K resolutions.

"We start with the inspection of the material from the physical and chemical point of view," adds the person in charge of the laboratory.

On the tables of several workers there are adhesive tapes, scalpels and even a glue that they themselves have invented.

And that's where the first problems of a film parade: stains, ruptures, humidity, missing fragments.

Or more abstract gaps, which require searching for other copies, if they exist, or the owners of the rights.

At most, they deal with five or six films at the same time.

On a shelf, Pasolini's

, awaits its turn of care.

In another corner, he has been waiting for months for the western

from 1915. Time has made his jeans very delicate.

"If you pick it up, it falls apart," says Pozzi.

Several films kept in the Bologna Cineteca waiting to be restored. Lorenzo Burlando

Another of the most problematic patients suffers just the opposite: from hitting itself so much, the film looks like a snail.

When it finally unravels, it will end up digitized, like the German film from the twenties that a young employee is converting to this format.

And like all the works that the Cineteca pampers.

Because here begins the second phase of the restoration: photography, colors or sound are reconstructed from the screen.

With the technique that the institution has been perfecting.

With the knowledge, for example, that a length from the 1930s cannot “sound flat”, says Pozzi.

And with the help, sometimes, of articles from the time, people who collaborated in the original creation or famous artists as advisers.

It is not possible, yes, to know everything.

If any employee had spoken Chinese, for example,

In general, the restoration can last from a week to several months, with exceptions that take years.

The varied casuistry also prevents estimating an average cost: the most frequent ranges between 50,000 and 100,000 euros, but on very few occasions it has skyrocketed beyond one million.

Once finished, in any case, the film also joins the archive of 100,000 works that the Cineteca maintains for years.

And that, soon, it will move to its new headquarters, together with the offices.

The lab will follow in a couple of years.

Negative of one of the films treated at the Bologna Cineteca. Lorenzo Burlando

The future location also tells a movie story.

Something like a Monicelli tragicomedy with Fellini surreal overtones.

Because Italy hosted the Soccer World Cup in 1990 and three games fell in Bologna.

So some politician decided that the city needed a huge

for the occasion.

What was never explained was why it was built six kilometers from the stadium.

Nor, above all, what a huge collapse of cars the clashes that had touched in the city, between Yugoslavia, Colombia and the United Arab Emirates, must have entailed.

The fact is that the City Council has now obtained aid from the State to transform the abandoned

Giuriolo into a paradise of filmic passion, between green and stillness.

An image of how the new headquarters of the Bologna Cineteca is expected to be, in the place of the old Giuriolo parking lot.Cineteca

And much more centrally, in the middle of via Rizzoli, the new Cineteca exhibition hall will emerge, which represents another rescue: the Modernissimo cinema already hosted projections in the twenties, before closing, but never like now.

“The living room must be a space that cannot be copied at home, with unrepeatable characteristics”, Farinelli interjects.

His will be

but futuristic, with options to project both on celluloid and digital, and even a space to accommodate an orchestra.

The director hopes to recover in the public a feeling that he himself adored in his childhood: when his parents announced that the family was going to the Smeraldo, the children were excited by the simple fact of going to the cinema.

They didn't even know what movie they would see.

Hence, the person in charge of the Cineteca spreads optimism.

Experience tells him so, from someone who has already heard the seventh art for dead and has felt like the last of the Mohicans too many times;

and it is also suggested by the response that viewers have always given to his activities.

So much so that it expresses a granite certainty: 10 years from now, mobile phones may have evolved into something else, but the rooms will continue there: “The true revolution of our time is that we have fixed images for the first time, and then moving images from a century before.

If my grandparents had had them in 1905, when they emigrated, they would have been able to see the French Revolution or Napoleon interviewed in a documentary.

The cinema has somehow won.

And it is the art of modernity, so no one should be afraid of its future”.

There is no more uncertain film.

But, at the same time, exciting.

So maybe you should hold on to that archaic pleasure.

Better sit in the chair.

Wait for the lights to go out.

And enjoy.

Martin Scorsese (right) and Gian Luca Farinelli (right next door), director of the Bologna Cineteca, attend a 2018 screening at the Modernissimo, the cinema that the institution will reopen this year.

Photo: Lorenzo Burlando.

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