[January 1958] Paris, Thursday Dear old Robert [Lachenay], … I am screening Les Mistons, absolutely finished, Tuesday evening about 6.00, on the Champs-Elysées. I hope you’ll be able to come with whoever you like, the auditorium is very large and I’d like to fill it so as to have a better atmosphere. Rivette, Rohmer, Godard, Doniol, Bazin, etc. like the film enormously, and I’ve also come to like it again, nearly all of it. The music is terrific, you’ll see. A few days later, the film will be shown out of competition at Tours to two thousand people. I’m obviously very excited since the time is coming when I’ll know what the immediate future holds for me: more sketches, a feature film or who can say?

François Truffaut, Letters, Faber and Faber, London 1989

Filmed in the South, freely adapted from a short story taken from the Maurice Pons collection Virginales, and produced by Truffaut’s own production company (Les Films du Carrosse), which would go on to make most of his works, in little over a quarter of an hour Les Mistons fully reveals the talent of the filmmaker … Henri-Pierre Roché, the elderly author of Jules et Jim will write to his young friend “Drink from it like from a spring”. So too Maurice Pons, whose story the upandcoming director adapted according to his own tastes, will end up convincing himself that the “betrayal” carried out in the transition from page to screen was precisely what was needed. It is as though Cocteau’s enfants terribles had met and clashed with the sensuality emanating from the Renoirs, father and son. Truffaut is already present in the “subjective objectivity” with which the film depicts the difficult age these brats, as if waist deep in a ford, are passing through, and in the disapproval of that French cinema that manipulates childhood (the target is Delannoy’s Chiens perdus sans collier), as well as in the sense of death that pervades the ending.

Ugo Casiraghi, Vivement Truffaut!, edited by Lorenzo Pellizzari, Lindau, Turin 2011

Set against the backdrop of Budapest, Bobita follows a young boy who skips school and wanders the streets, turning the city into his personal playground. Through his eyes, the city becomes a place of wonder, its towering buildings, rigid routines, and asphalted streets take on a raw and picturesque nature. In contrast, the adult world appears distant, joyless, and impenetrable. The grownups he encounters seem consumed by their own concerns, their gestures hollow, their presence fleeting. As the boy drifts between solitude and fleeting moments of delight, his quiet rebellion becomes a portrait of emotional negligence and silent yearning. This clueless search by the boy transforms into a depiction of the complex issues of neglect and abandonment. Especially when the divorced parents show little interest or emotional presence, leaving the child in a constant search for belonging.

Considered the first example of an anthropological documentary made in Italy and, for some people, a forerunner of the language of neorealism, it tells the story of the pilgrimage undertaken every year on the first Sunday after Pentecost by people from the Ciociaria region and Abruzzo to the Sanctuary of the Most Holy Trinity in Vallepietra, on Mount Autore. The culmination of the feast day is the so-called “weeping of the spinsters”, a prayer chanted by the young unmarried women of the area. It was the first of only two films made by Giacomo Pozzi-Bellini, a refined intellectual who made a name for himself after the Second World War as an art and reportage photographer. In the early 1930s, he was hired by the production studio Cines as assistant director to Ludovico Toeplitz and collaborated on the writing of some screenplays with Mario Soldati and Alberto Moravia. Despite winning an award at the Venice Film Festival in 1939, the film was heavily cut by fascist censorship to less than half the leght of the film due to its use of excessively archaic and crudely realistic imagery, which portrayed rural Italy (“a non-conformist short film in which folklore took on a decidedly polemic value” according to Roberto Nepoti) in a way that was not in line with the aesthetic canon of the regime. Pozzi-Bellini, rediscovered today thanks to the research of scholar Elisabetta Giovagnoni, managed to save the original version by depositing the negative at Cinémathèque française, thanks to the help of his friend Henri Langlois. Twenty years later, Gian Vittorio Baldi returned to the same locations to shoot another short film by the same name.

In November 2021, I was invited to present my work at Histoires du Cinema Festival in Toulouse. During the festival, Francesca Bozzano, the director of collections at la Cinémathèque de Toulouse, invited me to visit their Research and conservation Center in Balma. She wrote “Would you like to have a look to some decomposed images we conserve? I found out some prints that you could find interesting.” Among the relics she showed me were the surviving reels Survivre (1924), directed by the artist Edouard Chimot. I made an edit that made use of the nitrate decomposition visible throughout the print. In my revision of the film, a passport officer (Sylvio de Pedrelli) dreams of an old flame (Justine Johnson), who then appears at his office with another man. Through the magic of nitrate celluloid disintegration, her current partner is temporarily dissolved, and the one-time couple are reunited again for a night of revelry.

Bill Morrison

James Sibley Watson has many claims to fame. Born into wealth, he became a generous patron of the arts. In the 1920s he co-owned and co-edited one of the most important modernist literary magazines, “The Dial”. Having acquired a 35mm camera to shoot home movies, he soon made two seminal works of the so-called First American Film Avant-Garde, The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Lot in Sodom (1933), both co-directed with Melville Webber. In his spare time, he photographed and occasionally directed stunningly beautiful and critically acclaimed industrial films, such as The Eyes of Science (1930) and Highlights and Shadows (1938). Trained as a medical doctor, in the 1940s, he teamed up with radiologists from the University of Rochester and, for more than twenty years, worked on X-ray cinematography. Intended for research only, the films were at times charmingly eccentric. Watson’s “models” played musical instruments or even put on make-up impenetrable to X-rays, which turned a skeleton into a lovely woman. Every now and then, the avant-garde filmmaker took over the scientist.

Peter Bagrov