Cinema Rediscovered 2023: A Space For Proud And Vivid Reflection

According to film theorist Laura Mulvey, an interview with whom opened Cinema Rediscovered for its 7^th year last Wednesday, the Bristol-based film festival is about “creating heterotopias”. The heterotopia, Mulvey tells us, was first conceptualised by Michel Foucault and denotes a place separate from real life. It has its own ideas and its own temporality, forming a sort of utopia within the real world—of which the cinema auditorium is a prime example. What it seems Mulvey is trying to suggest here is that every year, in a sunny week at the end of July, CineRedis celebrates the heterotopic space of the cinema, allowing its audience to shoot through cinematic history at whiplash speed, all while staying in the same seat.

This year's edition leads with Chantal Akerman's 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which turned heads with its “rediscovery” at the top of the Sight and Sound 100 Greatest Films of All Time poll last December. While many, including Mulvey, have spent years championing this film, its ascension in the poll represents an entirely new, much wider outreach, reflecting equally large societal rifts in attitudes towards female representation in cinema.

This is what CineRedis is all about; connecting to films of the past that explored ideas and social issues that weren't often spoken about at the time but have since entered the mainstream. This is undoubtedly the case for Jeanne Dielman, which has also experienced a revival on social media. Speaking at the festival, Isabel Stevens—Managing Editor at Sight and Sound—remembered how baffled she was that screenings of the film last year were filled with young people; Rachel Pronger, co-founder of the Invisible Women collective also expressed excitement over seeing the notoriously long and uneventful film appear on TikTok. So, perhaps social media is the predominant motivator for cinema rediscovery today—it is the platform on which young people communicate most, so it makes sense that a film exploring ideas way before its time would be picked up there.

Following close behind Jeanne Dielman in celebrations of rediscovery were double bills like Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022) and A Portrait of Ga (Margaret Tait, 1952), as well as A Dog Called Discord (Mark Jenkin, 2023) and the classic Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, 1943). Both exemplify a rediscovery of cinema through shared themes and ideas: the former through portraits of parenthood; the latter through celebrations of celluloid. The heterotopia here jumps years of cinema history to connect us with artists of the past who were talking about the issues pertinent in society today.

Alongside these was an equally potent programme named ‘Down & Dirty: American D.I.Y. Restored'. Partly inspired by New York's ‘no wave' movement in the late 1970s, the films in this strand such as Variety (Bette Gordon, 1983) and Kamikaze Hearts (Juliet Bashore, 1986) explore queer and feminist themes and seek to—with the use of 16mm, touched on more in a talk at the Watershed on the medium—shed light on the hidden communities in big-city USA. The studios wouldn't document the filming of a porn parody of Bizet's ‘Carmen' as in Kamikaze Hearts, so they had to do it themselves, hence the name of the programme.

Then there was ‘Look Who's Back: the Hollywood Renaissance & the Blacklist', a collection of late ‘60s/early ‘70s films that were shunned for their political deviance or included previously blacklisted cast and crew. Many of these films sparked a feeling of “how did they get away with that?!”, such as Hal Ashby's 1975 film Shampoo, which was not only Lee Grant's first film after being blacklisted but contains scenes that many at the time wouldn't have taken a liking to. In this case, the act of viewing is itself the point in rediscovering these films, be it that we appreciate the power of seeing a condemned actor on screen again or appreciate the freedom to show scenes that would have once been censored (and hopefully not get too offended).

Mark Cosgrove, the founder of Cinema Rediscovered, doesn't hide the fact that the festival was wholly inspired by Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato. Predominantly happening on a large outdoor screen in the Piazza Maggiore, this festival encapsulates exactly what Cinema Rediscovered is about: walking the tightrope between creating a space, a heterotopia, for travelling back to bygone and perhaps lesser-known areas of cinema history but doing so by connecting to the community and environment that surrounds it. Watershed and its team, despite the heaviness and timeliness of this year's themes, walked this tightrope with grace and finesse.