Day 2 started early and was down for breakfast at 7am and joined by former Suisse Cinematheque director and old friend, Herve Dumont.
I then headed for the Cineteca di Bologna to meet Mark Cosgrove and Madeleine Probst ahead of the start of the Europa Cinemas conference.
On my way I bumped into Kevin Brownlow and spoke to him briefly about a short film he’d made in the 1960’s that he had sent me recently about Ascot.
Mark Cosgrove was interviewing me regarding my work on Mark Cousins A STORY OF CHILDREN AND FILM (2013) as well as talking about other projects I’m involved in and discussing creative ways to attract young audiences to watch old movies. The conference was attended by around 30 film programmers from around Europe.
As Mark and I were up first we were finished around 11am so headed to the Lumiere for a coffee where we were joined by Jonathan Rosenbaum and filmmaker and writer, David Cairns.
After a very good lunch with guys from the conference and fellow guest speaker, Nick Varley of Park Circus, I headed to my first screening of the day which was to be Fred Niblo’s Garbo vehicle THE TEMPTRESS (1926). The film was rather poor but we were treated to two endings to the film: a typical upbeat Hollywood ending and one very downbeat alternative.
Next up for me was the two new Renoir restorations of UNE PARTIE DE CAMPAGNE (1936) and LA CHIENNE (1931). Both were beautiful restorations and whilst I’d seen the first film before I had not seen LA CHIENNE which turned out to be a revelation for me. Incredible performance from Michel Simon.
That was to be the last film of the day as I then headed for dinner with Geoff Gardner (film writer and former director of Melbourne Film Festival), Tony Rayns, Colin MacCabe and Senses of Cinema editor, Rolando Caputo.
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