Last month, the ICO’s Duncan Carson and Sami Abdul-Razzak headed to Bologna for this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato – the Cineteca di Bologna’s annual festival showcasing the latest restorations and rediscoveries from archives and film laboratories around the world. In this blog, they share a few of their highlights.
Duncan Carson, Projects and Business Manager Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (dir. Sergei Parajanov, 1965)
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, image courtesy of Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre
Watching Kleber Mendonça Filho’s cinephilic paean Pictures of Ghosts (2023) last year, the director, reflecting on a lifetime of self-documentation and cinema-going, notes that photographs only unburden themselves as time passes, that the latent parts of an image only emerge with the passing of time. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors [Tini zabutykh predkiv, 1965] is the film that Sergei Parajanov viewed as his breakthrough into the lyrical, lively, queer space he mapped out in his later work. Like many films at Il Cinema Ritrovato, their meanings are only now on view: not ahead of their time, but ahead of our understanding.
Listening to Daniel Bird and Olena Honcharuk speak about the process of restoring the film with the Oleksander Dovzhenko National Centre (Ukraine’s home for its cinematic heritage), it was hard to ignore the reason for making work like this and perpetuating its access. Parajanov was imprisoned and fettered in his time by the USSR, and it’s both hard and easy to see why: his work sings loudly about the power of the hyper-regional and untamed spirit, using every cinematic trick to build a language that is adequate to the true wildness of life off the bureaucrat’s map. Yet a line-by-line censors dissection would struggle to locate this in dialogue.
Watching the film in the newly refurbished, undiluted elegance of Cinema Modernissimo – a space I have visited during previous editions in states of decay and renovation – held a glimmer of hope that what seems ghostly or in retreat can be revived and rebuilt. Parajanov, with his joyful, resistant, inventive spirit, opens up these possibilities, for Ukraine and for the world.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is available in a new restoration from The Film Foundation and tickets are available for the UK premiere of the restoration at Cinema Rediscovered in Bristol next week.
The Annihilation of Fish (dir. Charles Burnett, 1999)
The Annihilation of Fish, image courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive
Director Charles Burnett, a venerable figure among the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers, has never made films with a continuity of genre or tone. Besides focusing with deep humanity on predominately African American lives, his films glide from the social realism of Killer of Sheep to the folkloric To Sleep with Anger to the gritty The Glass Shield. The Annihilation of Fish (1999) is a lightly madcap, near screwball comedy. James Earl Jones is Fish, a Jamaican gent who in the film’s opening scenes is booted from long-term residential psy