Gorge on classics at Bristol’s second festival of film restorations

It’s a topsy-turvy world in which the President of the USA imagines that he can magic away all criticism with the simple mantra: “Fake news!” Meanwhile, trust in mainstream news outlets has also plummeted to such an extent that alarming numbers of people rely on those helpful swivel-eyed folks in tinfoil hats infesting social media to tell them what’s going on. How did we get here? Let’s see what the movies can teach us. Turns out they’re been quite prescient, as July’s second annual Cinema Rediscovered celebration of digital restorations, rare prints and contemporary classics reveals.

Its timely Manipulating the Message strand begins on the opening day (July 27) with journalist and broadcaster Samira Ahmed introducing Paddy Chayefsky’s Oscar-winning 1976 satire Network, which brilliantly nails cynical ratings-chasing TV news and anticipates the inarticulate rage that led to Brexit and Trump, as summarised by Peter Finch’s memorable line: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

Also included is Billy Wilder’s extraordinarily dark Ace in the Hole, with Kirk Douglas as a cynical, drunken, self-centred, down-on-his-luck, hard-bitten hack, who will stop at nothing to re-establish his reputation with a scoop. And if you think that’s bleak, try Ealing director Alexander Mackendrick’s atypical Hollywood debut, Sweet Smell of Success: a splendidly perverse film noir with Tony Curtis as a gossip-hustling press agent under the thumb of a vicious Broadway newspaper columnist (Burt Lancaster).

The Watershed’s cinema curator Mark Cosgrove programmed Manipulating the Message after picking up a copy of Network at a DVD fair during last year’s Cinema Rediscovered. “I hadn’t seen it for years and I just couldn’t believe how absolutely on the money it was about ‘fake news’ and all that stuff about the media,” he enthuses. “I did a bit of research and found that it was 40 years since it was released in the UK.”

Inspired by Bologna’s annual Il Cinema Retrovato festival, which has been running for more than 30 years and built huge audiences, last year’s first Cinema Rediscovered dipped a tentative toe in the water to see whether Bristol had a similar appetite for classics and reissues. The answer was a resounding ‘yes’, so more partners have been brought on board for this year’s expanded event. These include cinemas such as Clevedon’s historic Curzon and the Cube, which is hosting The Entity for feminist horror collective The Final Girls; online film platform MUBI; and black programming collective Come the Revolution, whose contributions include screenings of the Beyonce-inspiring Daughters of the Dust, brilliant racially-charged recent horror Get Out, and a 50th anniversary dusting down of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

Indeed, anniversaries are a handy peg on which to hang programming strands. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act (which partially decriminalised homosexuality), the 50th anniversary of the death of Joe Orton, and the 30th anniversary of the film adaptation of Prick Up Your Ears, which is screened at Cinema Rediscovered along with a new restoration of Entertaining Mr. Sloane.

The 25th anniversary restoration of Merchant-Ivory’s Howards End is also previewed, underlining another of the event’s key functions: to counteract the vagaries of critical fashion. Just as it was fashionable to sneer at the great films of the seventies back in the 1980s, and Powell & Pressburger had been almost forgotten until the likes of Martin Scorsese began to champion their work, so some of the key films of the eighties have now fallen into disrepute. Mark Cosgrove makes the case:  “I have to say that when I said to colleagues that we were showing a Merchant-Ivory film, they weren’t exactly jumping with enthusiasm. But when I said we’d got the director’s cut of Blood Simple, it was ‘Woo-hoo!’

“I think Merchant-Ivory got pigeonholed as what has become known as National Trust Porn. After Downton Abbey, it’s almost become parodic. But if you look back to their original films, they’re really powerful, moving work. Howards End explores the role of women in Edwardian society. The other important thing about Merchant and Ivory is that they saved the British cinema industry in the bad days of the eighties.”

Other Cinema Rediscovered highlights include Aardman’s Peter Lord celebrating the original King Kong on 35mm; a restored print of the first great festival movie, Monterey Pop; and a Girls Like Us focus on female-oriented wartime classics (The Gentle Sex, Millions Like Us) to  tie in with Their Finest.

https://youtu.be/WHkMZfmxDB8

Of greatest local interest however, is the English premiere of Bristol documentarian Mark Kidel’s much acclaimed Becoming Cary Grant, which was unveiled at Cannes and features music by Tim Norfolk and Bob Locke (The Insects) along with Portishead’s Adrian Utley. “I’ll probably get hung, drawn and quartered for saying this, but I’m not a huge Cary Grant fan,” admits Mark Cosgrove. “But Becoming Cary Grant did that brilliant thing of making me want to go back and watch every single bloody Cary Grant film. It includes the story about him taking LSD in the ’50s, which I don’t think many people know. The Bristol connections are all there too, interspersed with his performances, which makes you see the films in a completely different way. That’s evidence of a great documentary.”

Cinema Rediscovered runs at various venues from July 27-30. See our comprehensive film listings for the full programme.