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# 63 • JUNE 28 , 2015
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ITALIAN CINEMA:
CINEMA RITROVATO
By Edoardo Peretti
In these days takes place one
of the most important and internationally known Italian film
festivals, at least among the
movie enthusiasts: the Bologna “Cinema Ritrovato” (from
29 June to 4 July). It is not the
dear old Venice Film Festival,
or the Festival of Cinema in
Rome: it is a festival that does
not focus on new or large previews. This festival is totally
dedicated to the cinema of
the past, thanks to numerous
sections covering the totality of
the history of cinema, allowing
to find and enjoy unknown tidbits scattered in the depths of
the history of cinema.
It is a festival aimed on the one
hand to the everyday public,
motivated to explore the rich
program with a few tasty and
unexpected positive surprises,
and on the other hand to scholars.
The event has an international
vision, but has an ample space
dedicated to Italian cinema: if
last year was used as an oppor-
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tunity to rediscover the many
episodic film made in the fifties and sixties, this year there
is the opportunity to rediscover Renato Castellani, thanks
to the retrospective dedicated
to him. Castellani is a not particularly celebrated director,
certainly not as good as others
more known, but he has been
instrumental in the development of our cinema, declining
the dominant neo-realism in a
more popular way. Active since the end of the 40s, he has
produced works as “Due soldi
di speranza” (Two Cents Worth
of Hope) in which the attention
to the reality of the country
just out of the war were read
in terms of popular comedy.
Castellani was, in fact, considered one of the inventors of the
so-called "pink neorealism"
(definition initially used mostly
in a derogatory sense, which
gained a more nuanced value
over the years).
Very interesting is the section
about the rarities from postwar
Italian cinema, which recovers
movies, both from known and
unknown authors, long gone
out of the usual circuits: film
long remained invisible, mo-