October 26 - December 7

The Toronto premiere of a restored English version of Tati’s delirious Mon Oncle plus CinemaScope treasures from the greatest decade of American cinema by Preminger, Boetticher, Fleischer, and Sturges highlight this season of films from the Bologna festival. Perhaps most exciting is the third film we have presented by the immensely important Soviet director and theorist Lev Kuleshov, subject of a major, eye-opening retrospective at Bologna this year. For those who missed previous Cinematheque screenings of his two intense silent classics, The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks and By the Law, the boggling Great Consoler will be quite the introduction to the work of this director, whose “Kuleshov effect” every film student learns, but whose films remain little known.

Every July, the world’s cinephiles, film scholars, historians, curators, and archivists go on pilgrimage to Bologna in northern Italy to the festival known as Il Cinema Ritrovato, organized by the Cineteca di Bologna, one of the finest cinematheques in Europe. From twenty years of riches, we select our own cinema ritrovato, bringing the best of Bologna to Toronto on an ongoing basis. We are especially grateful to the archives and studios who have made special loans for this series, and, of course, to the Bologna festival, which annually renews our faith in film culture.

– James Quandt