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As every year around this time, we get the echoes, images and news from what is undoubtedly the best film festival in the world and to which we promise to go sooner or later, the already veteran Cinema Ritrovato de Bologna that has just closed its 37th edition with the city squares packed every night to see the best silent, classic and modern films in new restored versions.
One of the most anticipated events of each edition is the announcement of the prizes awarded to the best restoration and editing works on DVD and Blu-ray, yes, still, with their corresponding critical editions for the international market.
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And this year’s winner in the ‘best box set’ category we couldn’t have liked more: the gorgeous box-set Jonas Mekas: Diaries, Notes & Sketches Vol.1-8 (1949-2000) (Re-Voir) brings us the diaristic cinema of the great Lithuanian-born filmmaker in new prints that reveal all the vital splendor and filmic vibrance of essential titles like Walden, Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania and As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty together which also include outtakes, fragments and texts that accompany and complement these memorable pieces of authentic poetic cinema torn from everyday life.
The international jury made up of Lorenzo Codelli, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Philippe Garnier, Pamela Hutchinson, Paolo Mereghetti and the Spanish Miguel Marías has also included the edition of Get Carter (1971, Mike Hodges) by the BFI for its special contents, “a true gold mine” that includes critical essays, two audio-commentaries, documents, interviews, memories or television reports from the time on an emblematic film from that hangover of Swinging London starring an extraordinary Michael Caine.* 100008*
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In the category of ‘best rediscovery of a forgotten film’, the award went to the Blu-ray edition (Ignite Films) of the B-series sci-fi classic Invaders from Mars (1956) by William Cameron Menzies, demonstration that in the spirit that moves the Ritrovato there is always room for the most popular cinema. The edition includes numerous extras, including the alternate ending that has circulated in Europe for decades and now allows comparison with the North American original.
Major words for the other award-winning chest in this category, none other than the full length by Kinuyo Tanaka that Carlotta put into circulation last year in new copies restored in 4K and that has been seen in Spanish theaters and even on Filmin. Quite an event that we have already dealt with here and that reveals a filmmaker greater than other Japanese masters of the 50s and 60s in which, after a long career as an actress, she directed her six unique and wonderful films, among them the exciting Eternal Breasts (1955).
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The chest that Criterion has dedicated in 2022 to some of the films recently restored by the Film Foundation chaired by Scorsese is not far behind. Volume 4 of the ‘World Cinema Project’ wins the prestigious prize to which the Finnish historian Peter Von Bagh gives its name, including the Angolan Sambizanga (1972, Sarah Maldoror), the Argentine Prisoners of the Earth (1939, Mario Soffici), the Iranian Chess of the wind (1979, Mohammad Reza Aslani), Cameroonian Muna moto (1975, J.P. Dikongue-Pipa), Hungarian Two girls on the street (1939, André de Toth) and Indian Kalpana (1948, Uday Shankar) .
One last award for the ‘best individual edition’ went to the unknown classic from the Czechoslovak nova vlnà The Sun In a Net (1963, Stefan Uher), the story of two young people, he from the city, she from the countryside , and their friendship in the troubled Bratislava of those days.
Author programming for summer cinemas
Very stimulating programming for the Patio de la Diputación for this weekend. Today, Thursday 13, in Seville, you can see El caftán azul, by Maryam Touzani, the highest grossing film of the year in Morocco and selected for the Oscars, a story about homosexuality and its obstacles that critics have praised for its sensitivity in the treatment of the subject.Also sensitive and delicate is the Irish The quiet girl, by Colm Bairéad, for tomorrow, Friday the 14th, a story of youth initiation marked by the revealing silence and the look of a girl who spends a few summer days with relatives far from the violence of the family home. On Saturday the 15th it is the turn of the master Spielberg and his latest masterpiece, the autobiographical The Fabelmans, and on Sunday the 16th there are even more reasons to celebrate with the screening of the hilarious and classic New Moon (1940), by Howard Hawks, set in the world of journalism and starring Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn.
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At Cicus, today you can recover Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s first feature, Stockholm. On Monday the 17th, there will be B-series noir films with Trapped (1949), by Richard Fleischer, and on Wednesday the 19th, Still Waters by the Japanese Naomi Kawase. And at the CAAC, that same Wednesday the 19th they can opt for the Norwegian film Sick of myself, by Kristoffer Borgli.
Herrmann: ‘Wuthering Heights’
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Bernard Herrmann, the best film composer of all time, only composed one opera, this Wuthering Heights (1943-1951) with a libretto by his wife Lucille Fletcher based on the famous novel by Emily Bronte and her usual and recognizable romantic hallmark. He never saw it performed in life (in fact, it has only been performed once, in 2011, on the occasion of the centenary of the composer’s birth), although he recorded it in a concert suite in 1966, paid for out of his own pocket.
That same suite for soprano, baritone and orchestra, in which passages from the soundtrack of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir can be heard, is now reborn by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Mario Venzago in a brand new recording for the Chandos label, which also includes an arrangement for string orchestra by his Echoes quartet.