The dark rainy sky of a summer Sunday did not demotivate the thousands of people who met in the evening in Piazza Maggiore in front of the images of Paris, Texas, of which the 4K restoration restores the light, the spaces, the depth; the gaze of Nastassja Kinski with her pink angora sweater and that of Harry Dean Stanton among the mirrors of life and the landscape of a dreamed America. It is one of the many fragments in the mosaic of these days at Cinema Ritrovato, presented on stage by its author, Wim Wenders, among the protagonists of this edition of the festival which has built an ever-growing audience in its thirty-nine years of life attentive not only to the “event” but above all to the films. Each presented in the “renewed” guise of careful restorations – like that of Napoleon by Abel Gance, seen a month ago at the Cannes festival, screened here in the new and beautiful “underground” room of the Modernissimo – which bring its image and meaning back to life, placing them in correspondence with contemporaneity.
WE TAKE The devil’s stepItalian title for the original Devil’s Doorway, a magnificent western by Anthony Mann which in 1950 poses the question of the Native Americans and their massacre beyond (and on this side) the “founding myth” in the device of a capitalist colonial machine which denies them any type of recognition within of society. And it is surprising to see how in the complexity of the points of view put forward, American history – and its representation – are questioned by issues of timely relevance. «Our relationship perhaps would have worked in a hundred years» says the protagonist, a young native, to the lawyer (Paula Raymond) who defended him, projecting conflicts into the future that remained unresolved for that piece of America that has continued over time to be removed. Yet he, Lance Poole – played by Robert Taylor – had believed in change, he had fought in the Civil War for the Union, he thought that from then on with his people they would have new rights and equality with the “whites”. And instead he discovers that he will lose everything, his land, his dreams, that he can’t even ask for a concession because the natives are not recognized as American citizens, and it’s not just the ban on drinking in the saloon but everything that isn’t the ghetto of the reserves.
If the film’s reference period is the years in which the American government deprives native tribes of their lands by confining them to reservations, when Mann makes it, the policy that after the Second World War pushed the natives to migrate to the cities promising better conditions – and in reality the goal was to completely disrupt their culture. Have things really changed centuries after that Taylor/Lance sentence? Very little needs to be said. In this comparison Mann (a director loved by the Nouvelle Vague, and Scorsese certainly looks to him for Killers of the Flower Moon) does not stop at the “theme” – as frequently happens now in “a posteriori” readings of many genres – but works in depth into the landscape of the western; he blends noir into John Alton’s black and white, weaving the contradictions in depth in the figure of his native “hero” – and therefore from his point of view – rebellious due to pain and disappointment, who fights for his land which is his life knowing you have no future. Seeing it today is precious for any criticism.
With the image entrusted to the enigmatic face of Catherine Deneuve in Les parapluies de Cherbourg by Demy the festival works on multiple levels, grown in its spaces in a way that dialogues with the territory and with what is part of the annual activities in the Cineteca “system” which is undoubtedly the most complete in Italy.
AMONG THE DIFFERENT itineraries, that of female – and feminist – battles in the imaginaries of the world is highlighted transversally and in particular within the Cinema libero program curated by Cecilia Cenciarelli. This is where it was introduced The Sealed Soil (1977) by Iranian director Marva Nabili, never screened in Iran and over time becoming one of those formative titles for many generations who saw it on videocassettes or low-quality screeners.
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Wim Wenders, cinephile passions and the pleasure of the big screenThe copy here – restored by UCLA in Los Angeles – restores the power of a formal research that looks at Persian miniature, at painting in the frontal relationship between the camera, the characters and the places, and at a physicality in which the female body is earthly and space of emotions and conflicts – there is a very beautiful sequence in which the protagonist undresses in nature, letting the rain water flow over her. Marva Nabili – who is now 83 years old and greeted the public with a small video message – brings to her images her experience as a visual artist – she had studied painting at the University of Tehran – which precedes that of cinema discovered by interpreting Siyavosh at Persepolis (1966), considered one of the references for the New Wave of Iranian cinema (directed by Fereydoun Rahnema). From there he moved to London and then to New York, studied cinema, made a few films before returning to Iran where he created a series for television inspired by Persian fairy tales. And at the same time he also turns The Sealed Soilin 16 mm and with a crew that she had managed to have thanks to her other work – Flora Shabaviz plays the protagonist, Barbod Taher is the director of photography.
BUT WHAT DOES IT SAY the film? Of a girl, in fact, in a remote village in south-western Iran, no longer a child, and therefore without the freedom of the childhood age of her little sister and the other girls and boys of the village, but not yet “adult” because she she is not married. This is what confines her to her house, waiting for a husband who she however refuses. In a limbo of solitude and repeated daily gestures, the girl goes mad while her village subjects her to an exorcism, believing her to be possessed. Meanwhile, people begin to leave seduced by the promises of new settlements that will further impoverish the countryside. The Shah is still in power, even if the Khomeinist Revolution is about to happen – it will be in 1978, the film is finished in America – and many trajectories of that suspended time suggest the profound caesuras that run through it. For example, there is a mirroring of glances between the girl and her sister’s young teacher who, with her head uncovered and in trousers, seems to suggest a different dimension, embodying transformations that had often been superficial, without producing a widespread push which instead seems to belong to the Donna Vita Libertà movement. In which the request for freedom and new living conditions involves and unites multiple parts of society in a battle that tries to respond to the singularities of each (and everyone).
