The Locarno Film Festival is justly renowned for its retrospectives, and this year is no exception. But rather than an individual director or star, this edition is dedicated to a studio: Columbia Pictures with “The Lady with the Torch” celebrating the studio’s centenary.
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With 44 films from well-known titles such as Orson Welles’s “The Lady from Shanghai” (1947) and Fritz Lang’s “The Big Heat” (1953) to more obscure gems like Frank Borzage’s “Man’s Castle” (1933) and Earl McEvoy’s “The Killer that Stalked New York” (1950), curator Ehsan Khoshbakht has created what he calls an “unofficial history” of the studio in its heyday, as controversial president Harry Cohn dragged Columbia from poverty row to Academy success.
Variety sat down to speak with Khoshbakht (who is also the co-director of Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato Festival) about the retrospective.
Variety: What role does the retrospective play in Locarno?
Khoshbakht: Very recently, I was reading the the book of interviews with the late Michel Ciment, and he was praising Locarno, saying that he was on the jury here with Abbas Kiarostami. In the morning, they used to go and watch some Yasuhiro Ozu in the retrospective and in the afternoon, they went to the competition films to do their job. This is a nice movement between the two.
Audiences grow as the festival progresses.
Once people get the notion that these films are not just something made in the past. This is something from the past, but which has new meanings, and relates to our current culture. A film like “Gunman’s Walk” (1958) is incredibly rich and timeless, because those questions still exist. The way the film treats patriarchy, psychological complexes, racial tension and the roots of racism; and the link between racism, violence and sexual identity, these are incredibly modern for a movie made in the mid-’50s and totally relevant today. If you go and watch “Washington Merry-Go-Round” (1932), “The Undercover Man” (1949) and “All the King’s Men” (1949) which we’re showing back-to-back; can you get a more accurate picture of America than these three films? They are made by very different directors: James Cruze, Joseph H Lewis and Robert Rossen, from super low-budget to super high-budget, from radical left to center-right. But they understand America, they can show it. That’s a remarkable achievement.
How did the collaboration with Locarno come about?
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I met Giona Nazzaro [the Locarno artistic director] in Mexico, and he proposed doing something. I had the idea of Columbia Pictures, and I talked to my friends at Sony. Grover Crisp is the man who calls the shots, and Rita Belda is also an extremely influential person. They’re directly responsible for a good number of the digital restorations. Grover has been there for 40 years, longer than any other film Heritage Department of any major or minor studio. The reason that quality has been maintained is because of him. He loves what he does, and he does it artfully, with a clear understanding of the history of the studio. When I got in touch with him for the first time, one of the very first titles I asked for was “Gunman’s Walk.” He knew the picture, but maybe he didn’t quite know that it’s a masterpiece. But you never know it’s a masterpiece until you play it in the cinema. That’s the beauty of this job. That moment. When you project it, all of a sudden, it becomes something else.
Will the retrospective show elsewhere?
Other venues will make a selection from it. People asked me to come to a meeting after I introduced a film, after the start of the screening, and I said: “No, I’m not coming, because I know that in my lifetime, this film will never play again.” I’m not exaggerating. Think about “Brothers” (1930) by Walter Lang. Who and why should anyone play this film? There’s no star angle, no director angle. This was the only context for it, and it’s a fine film. I’m almost certain I won’t be able to see that film in 35mm again. Other venues might show a DCP. But here the idea was: let’s go for as many 35mm prints as possible.
And during one introduction, you thanked the projectionist.
Jean-Michel Gabarra is a wonderful projectionist. He’s the one who makes this thing work. It’s not pushing a button: 4K, DCP, here we go. He’s ace. But also, the venue is perfect. Screen projectors, the quality of it, the amount of light. This is perfection. It’ll be very sad after this for me, because I don’t think any other venue can satisfy me, even in Bologna, unfortunately, we don’t have this size and this quality and a bit of a curve on the screen perfect for Cinemascope.
What could these films teach contemporary filmmakers?
I don’t want to be mean, but one problem I have with new films, especially the big titles, is that they are so long. Look at all these Columbia films. We have three or four titles clocking in at two hours, but the majority are under 80 minutes, and they pack so much into the 65 minutes to 80 minutes. The economy of storytelling is very visual. People have this false idea, that films from this period are chatty. They have dialog, but they are very visual; that is not ostentatious. Jacques Revette says that Frank Capra’s “It Happened One Night” (1934) is just over 100 minutes, which is long for Capra in the ’30s. Rivette says, if you make the same film, which is about a journey today, even though the means of travel have become much faster, the length of the film will probably be three hours.
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