Five Findings from Pesaro

by Elisa Giudici

A quick, aperiodical column dedicated to the small discoveries from the smaller film festivals scattered across Europe.

Pesaro is a small coastal town in central Italy, interionationally known as the birthplace of composer Gioachino Rossini and as a city of bicycles. The economy largely revolves around seaside tourism. For 62 years it has also hosted the Pesaro International Festival of New Cinema, an event dedicated to discovery of new, innovative forms of cinema. The programme does not shy away from hybrid forms, medium-length works and pure experimentation. As a result, its main competition regularly brings together video art, short films, essay films, and boundary-pushing cinema, in all its forms.

This year, for the first time, I was able to spend three days at the festival and explore its offere. Here are five discoveries that surprised me and deserve a mention...

Lost Movies di Stanley Schtinter

Stanley Schtinter is the author of the book from which this documentary draws only a portion of its incredible findings. The premise alone could sustain an entire film: identifying, documenting, and cataloguing the final movies watched by major figures from American cinema and popular culture.

Schtinter, however, is even more ambitious. Guided by Jeremy Irons’ dry, amused voice over, he attempts to build an alternative history of American cinema by stitching together one “last film” to another, tracing unexpected connections between directors, performers, and that uniquely American mythology of presidents, serial killers, and the CIA conspirers that has fueled the nation’s cultural imagination for decades.

The result is dense and intricate, feeling far larger than its modest running time. Provided you find the premise curious rather than morbid, it is a real gem.

Jean-Jacques et Umberto by David Emmer, Leopoldo Santovincenzo

Some films and books have production histories so remarkable that they become worthy subjects in their own right. The Name of the Rose, a global publishing phenomenon that reportedly inspired the circulation of unauthorized translations at international book fairs, is certainly one of them.

As someone who loves the film and has spent years reading about its production, I was already familiar with much of the improbable chain of events that led a French director to adapt a worldwide bestseller written by an Italian semiotics professor who, at a certain point, simply decided he wanted to write a medieval murder mystery. Yet this interview, filmed inside Jean-Jacques Annaud’s franch country home, still uncovers stories I had never heard before. Perhaps that is the fate of certain films into which so much personal, artistic and financial investment has been poured. Decades later, there are always more stories waiting to emerge.

It helps that Annaud, even in a foreign language as english for a french native speaker, is an exceptional storyteller. His impersonation of Sean Connery bursting into his office and declaring, “Listen to me, boy,” before launching into what was effectively his audition is worth the view of this doc.

Antoñito vuelve a casa by Manuel Revuelta and Margarita y el lobo by Cecilia Bartolomé

The two best discoveries of this edition, at least for me, were introduced by the ever-knowledgeable Francesco Rossini. Unfortunately, both remain extremely difficult to see today.

These medium-length works were graduation projects made in 1969 by a generation of promising Spanish filmmakers completing their studies at The Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía (Spain's Official Film School). The two films were considered so subversive by the film commission that they were never publicly screened. The authorities not only halted their circulation but eventually shut down the school itself, alarmed by works that openly challenged the dictatorship as well as the patriarchy, national machismo, and social conservatism of dictatorial Spain.

I myself am sometimes guilty of dismissing something by saying it “looks like a film school project.” These two films make that comment sound like praise. Every minute contains a new formal invention, something fresh and audacious in both style and narration. Both films display a modernist approach that feels surprisingly postmodern: directors often breaks conventions and speaking directly to the audience. Revuelta is lucky enough to have a very young Víctor Erice in a cameo as a zoo worker confined inside a cage. Bartolomé, meanwhile, creates a musical about a woman finally leaving her disappointing boyfriend behind, singing to him: “You only loved my failures, so my successes will cure you of missing me… finally alone!”

Bartolomé’s story is both largely unknown, compelling and somehow tragic: she would go on to become one of Spain’s most censored filmmakers on the last century. Her fiercely critical and radical voice remained uncomfortable long after the dictatorship itself disappeared. Seeing one of her earliest works really feels like a privilege.

The Thing in the Coffin by Péter Lichter

Alongside Radu Jude’s Dracula, which premiered at Locarno last year, this is among the most radical and techinically adventurous reinterpretations of Bram Stoker’s vampire mythology in recent memory. Together they make a fascinating double feature, though one aimed primarily at cinephiles unafraid of challenging experimentations.

Lichter essentially creates a silent film structured around excerpts from diaries, letters, and memoirs from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Using footage, still images, and fragments drawn from countless recent and old adaptations of the text for the silver screen, he constructs a visual essay that corrodes, distorts, and gradually decomposes the images themselves. The original sources become almost unrecognizable, transformed into something tactile and abstract.

It is an extraordinarily ambitious idea. The problem is that the distinction between the various chapters remains fairly slight, and over time the film becomes somewhat repetitive.

A Drama of Jealousy (and Other Things) by Ettore Scola

Mastroianni, Vitti, and Giannini in A DRAMA OF JEALOUSY (AND OTHER THINGS)At the risk of sounding sentimental, sometimes the best festival experience requires abandoning the competition lineup and joining a public screening by the sea instead. Watching a film accompanied by the sound of waves and the mechanical hum of a projector (with an actual intermission to change reels surrounded by the comments of passerbys) can be just as memorable as any premiere.

Like so much great Italian cinema of the 1970s, Scola’s film manages to be deeply political without sacrificing its comical edge. Someone described this to me as a proto-Challengers because of the erotic charge running through its central love triangle. I loved Guadagnino’s tennis flick, but there is a substantial difference: this is a working-class Challengers and proudly so. It finds poetry and humor in the garbage-strewn, deeply unromantic beaches where a laborer and a flower seller consummate their illicit love affair over a flask of wine.

Led by an extraordinary trio (Marcello Mastroianni, Monica Vitti, and a very young Giancarlo Giannini) the film is overflowing with satire, sensuality, and extreme emotional honesty. Scola allows all three protagonists to explore both their sensual desires but also the darker, less flattering sides of their feelings, sharing them directly with the audience. The aim is not to shock, but to make viewers feel seen in desires that remains largely unspoken even today, in a slightly less conservative society. The result is funny, sexy, melancholy, and unmistakably alive.