This section has some real gems: Mi ricordo, sì, io mi ricordo, a documentary film about Marcello Mastroianni directed by Anna Maria Tatò in 1997, and Carosello che passione, in which Luciano Emmer reconstructs the dawn of Italian TV advertising (and the history of one of the TV shows that shaped the collective imagination of the Italian baby boomer generation) with the precision and vitality of a great documentary filmmmaker. And that is not all: The Legend of the Ugly King, a compelling portrait, exploring the life and works of Yilmaz Güney; Ma vie en Allemagne au temps de Hitler, a montage of striking found footage showing Germany under the dark, towering shadow of swastika, with the voice of Ute Lemper; a fascinating and hypnotic Voyage au Congo by André Gide and Marc Allegret; and a few episodes of Chris Marker’s extraordinary documentary L’Heritage de la Chouette (1989) in which by ‘stripping’ twelve words of Greek origin and interviewing intellectuals and politicians, Marker explores the cultural legacy of Ancient Greece and how it has shaped our minds.

Film production of 1918 is marked by the last year of the Great War and the apogee of the Italian Diva film. Admire Francesca Bertini, Pina Menichelli and Lyda Borelli at their best. Wonder why avantgarde poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in Bolshevist Russia adapted a novel by Edmondo De Amicis and get to know counter-revolutionary cinema activities in Europe. Rediscover the immensely popular Hedda Vernon and the Czech filmmaker and actress Olga Rautenkranzová, and be happy that fragments of Âmes de fous by Germaine Dulac, Der Fall Rosentopf by Ernst Lubitsch and of films with Bela Lugosi and Douglas Fairbanks have been found and restored. A treat for the eyes will be the art direction of Ben Carré and the exotic studio settings in adventure films, the genre on the rise.

This small section is as a tribute to two important figures of Neapolitan cinema. Ten years after his death, we remember Vittorio Martinelli with great affection and esteem; he passionately studied the cinema of Naples, writing one of its most compelling histories. Elvira Notari is an icon of Neapolitan films of the 1910s and ’20s, and her pictures are extraordinary examples of how cinema grabbed hold of Neapolitan popular culture, of which singing is the most emblematic expression. So it is music that guides this programme offering significant silent movies set in Naples with film concerts and the brand new – supported by The Film Foundation – restoration of Carosello napoletano, a unique Italian musical movie with, not surprisingly, Naples as its star (and an impassioned young Sophia Loren).

In the effervescent Turin of the 1910s, Arrigo Frusta (1875-1965), born Augusto Sebastiano Ferraris, was the director of Ambrosio’s “Screenplay Office”. An eclectic figure, Frusta was an intellectual, a bon vivant, a would-be notary and a journalist by vocation. The nascent film industry won him over with its new technology and the monthly salary of 300 lire that working for a movie company could guarantee him. Schiller, Virgil, Balzac, D’Annunzio and Shakespeare, no adaptation was too mighty for Frusta’s pen. With over 250 screenplays and scenarios, he made a decisive contribution to establishing the practice of writing for cinema. This year Il Cinema Ritrovato is offering a sneak peek into the world of stories that this prolific screenwriter created, starting with a restored version of Nerone (1909). Peopled by emperors and Risorgimento martyrs, romantic heroines and amazons, psychopathic killers and depressed fairy-tale princes, Frusta’s universe provides a kaleidoscopic view of Italian silent film.