[The Daily] Il Cinema Ritrovato 2017

Reporting on last year’s edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato for Film Comment, Dan Sullivan called the festival “a rare beast indeed: a one-week, primarily repertory film festival, mind-bogglingly dense with new restorations, legendary prints, discoveries and rediscoveries, canonical works presented under optimal screening conditions, and an abundance of curios dating from the birth of the medium.”

The thirty-first edition, opening tomorrow, June 24, and running through July 2, promises to explore “three centuries of cinema, from the end of the 1800s to the start of the twenty-first century.” Films from the silent era will be accompanied live by a roster of internationally renowned musicians and music itself is the star of more than a few films scattered throughout the lineup. Programs range from Two Faces of Robert Mitchum (the actor’s featured on this year’s poster; the still above is from Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past [1947]) to Jean Vigo Recovered to In Search of Color: Kinemacolor and Technicolor to Colette and Cinema to the Japanese Period Film in the Valley of Darkness and on and on. As the dispatches come in, we’ll be making note of them here.

We can already direct you to Ehsan Khoshbakht’s preview for Sight & Sound of a retrospective he’s co-programmed, Tehran Noir: The Thrillers of Samuel Khachikian. “One of the father figures of Iranian cinema, Khachikian was for 40 years synonymous with popular genre films inspired by Hollywood and enjoyed by big audiences. But his formal innovations and fluid handling of genres not only expanded the possibilities of cinema, but reflect the specific social and political tensions of a country building to a revolution.”

Have a look, too, at the finalists for the 2017 DVD Awards. The jury, chaired by Paolo Mereghetti and including Lorenzo Codelli, Alexander Horwath, Lucien Logette, Mark McElhatten, and Jonathan Rosenbaum, will soon be naming their selections for Best DVD/Blu-ray (the Peter von Bagh Award) released between March 2016 and February 2017, Best Single Release, Best Special Features, Best Rediscovery of a Forgotten Film, and Best Series/Best Box.

Writing about their submissions to the awards and, in some cases, about the state of home viewing in general, are the BFI’s Ben Stoddart, James White (Arrow Films), Diana Vidrascu (Re:Voir Video), Marion Boulestreau (Ciné-Archives), Jedrzej Sablinski (DI Factory), David Marriott (Cinelicious Pics), Josh Morrison (Flicker Alley) and Eddie Muller (Film Noir Foundation), Dennis Doros (Milestone Film & Video), Anne Siegmayer (Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung) and Susanne Rocca (Filmarchiv Austria), Stanislaw Bardadin (Cyfrowe Repozytorium Filmowe) and Tomas Zurek (Národní Filmový Archiv), and Frédéric Maire (Cinémathèque Suisse), Nicola Mazzanti (Cinematek – Cinémathèque royale de Belgique), and Martine Derain (Editions Commune).

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from The Criterion Current http://ift.tt/2s46RdE