IL CINEMA RITROVATO 2026
OCTOBER 2–3, 2026
TEN WOMEN IN BLACK – FRIDAY AT 3:15
SMOG – FRIDAY AT 5:15
DEATH IN VENICE – FRIDAY AT 7:45
LA VISITA (THE VISIT) – SATURDAY AT 3:30
IL GATTOPARDO (THE LEOPARD) – SATURDAY AT 6:00
The Department of Italian Studies at Brown invites you to a unique program of restored films in collaboration with the festival Il Cinema Ritrovato, organized by the Cineteca di Bologna, Italy.
TEN WOMEN IN BLACK
A despicable television executive keeps nine mistresses. When the women join forces with his wife to kill him, she takes pity and warns him; together, they stage his murder before the unsuspecting mistresses. The scheme soon spirals out of control. After a noir-parody opening, the film unfolds through a succession of twists toward an unexpected ending, combining irony and paradox with a reversal of gender roles. The virtuosic direction—planned through a meticulous manga-style storyboard—frames a gallery of female types and stereotypes while satirizing the world of television.
Directed by Kon Ichikawa
Running time 103 minutes
SMOG
The first Italian film shot entirely in the United States, SMOG opened the Venice Film Festival in 1962 and then virtually disappeared from circulation. The film follows a Roman lawyer stranded in futuristic Los Angeles for forty-eight hours. Starring Enrico Maria Salerno, Renato Salvatori, and Annie Girardot, it features music by Piero Umiliani, with Chet Baker on trumpet, and cinematography by Ted McCord, best known for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Shot in a quasi-documentary style, SMOG portrays the Italian community in Los Angeles and its uneasy relationship with life in California, while exposing the provincialism and superficiality of its protagonist, a typical product of Italy’s “economic miracle.”
Directed by Franco Rossi
Running time 101 minutes
DEATH IN VENICE
Based on the Thomas Mann novella, DEATH IN VENICE follows Gustav Aschenbach, an aging musician whose encounter with the beautiful Tadzio unsettles his carefully ordered identity. Played by Dirk Bogarde with restrained bourgeois severity, Aschenbach embodies the idealism and decadence of fin-de-siècle Europe. Visconti presents Venice as a city of fading grandeur and physical decay, its canals and Byzantine past forming the setting for Aschenbach’s own deterioration. Beauty, desire, illness, and mortality gradually converge, as the city’s atmosphere mirrors his growing fascination with death. The film translates Mann’s philosophical concerns into an intensely visual and material form.
Directed by Luchino Visconti
Running time 31 minutes
LA VISITA
LA VISITA follows a single day in Pina’s life, when a man from Rome, met through a personal ad, arrives in her northern village. As the hours pass, he reveals himself as vain, hypocritical, and worn down by loneliness. Pietrangeli surrounds Pina with the greyness and banalities of provincial life, yet she endures with quiet dignity. Flashbacks reveal why: she preserves the memory of a passionate affair with a married truck driver. Sandra Milo (the Lover, in Fellini's 81/2, also released in 1963) gives Pina remarkable depth, balancing vulnerability, desire, and resignation in one of her finest performances. The film turns an awkward encounter into a subtle portrait of loneliness, memory, and frustrated aspiration.
Directed by Antonio Pietrangeli
Running time 112 minutes
IL GATTOPARDO
Luchino Visconti’s IL GATTOPARDO, adapted from the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, is a meditation on history, class, and the passage of time. Set during the 19th century Risorgimento, it follows the Prince of Salina, played by Burt Lancaster, as he comes to terms with the decline of Sicily’s aristocratic order and his own place within it. Visconti evokes this vanishing world through a stately visual style, culminating in a celebrated ballroom sequence. At once an epic of historical change and an intimate portrait of resignation, the film also becomes a hymn to Sicily—its rituals, landscapes, beauty, violence, and enduring sense of loss. The international cast includes Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon.
Directed by Luchino Visconti
Running time 180 minutes
