Every year, at the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, the same miracle happens. For nine days, from morning to night, cinemas and squares fill up with an audience from all over the world. They come not for big premieres, but for old films. The rich program includes great classics, well-known but rarely screened films, and titles that are almost entirely unknown. It is hard to leave the festival without having made a discovery. Another remarkable feature is that many films are screened on film reel rather than digitally, as is standard in commercial cinemas, thanks to the resources of the Cineteca di Bologna, which organizes the event. The short films by Eric Duvivier presented at the fortieth edition were an excellent example of the kind of experience the festival offers.
Duvivier made numerous medical short films for pharmaceutical companies, mostly on psychology and surgery, blending scientific themes with a surrealist style. His works are not easy to find, though some are available online in low quality (for instance, on Internet Archive or YouTube). In Bologna, however, six shorts made between 1961 and 1977 were screened in their original 16mm format. Not only was the viewing quality the best available, but those in the audience could also watch the projectionist manually handle the film reels and the projector, solving on the spot the playback problems typical of these analog tools.
Watching Duvivier's films, one must remember that they were made in an era with different knowledge and sensibilities from today's, so they should be judged with their sociocultural context in mind. Today we can look at them not only as early attempts to raise awareness about psychiatric conditions, but also as examples of surrealist cinema. Ballet sur un thème paraphrénique, for instance, is not an essay on paraphrenia. It is conceived as a series of surreal tableaux, moved through gracefully but also fearfully by a dancer, representing the hallucinations and illusions in which she loses herself — an artistic depiction of this psychological condition.
Likewise, Autoportrait d'un schizophrène is not an essay on a similarly clinically severe disorder like schizophrenia. Played by Pierre Clémenti, narrated in the first person and shot almost entirely from a subjective point of view, it portrays schizophrenia as the observation of a fragmented, swirling world, in which the protagonist sees his own face reflected only as deformed or shattered.
In Auto-stop – Les cinq grandes constitutions psychopathiques, a grotesque tone prevails: comedian Jacques Dufilho plays five characters who are given a ride by actress Dorothée Blanck, each representing a different condition (the cyclothymic, the perverse, the mythomaniac, the paranoid, the emotional). Dufilho is very entertaining in characterizing each figure through action alone, without dialogue, though some exaggerations or simplifications can come across as unfair and unpleasant.
Far more unsettling is Phobie d'impulsion, which depicts a mother's homicidal fantasies toward her newborn son. The fear of losing control and committing violence because of an impulse phobia is portrayed through scenes that start with the tenderness of the mother-child bond and then shift into horror-film sequences, where one fears the protagonist might commit an irreparable act over which she seems to have no control, before we see her again, conscious and shaken. Duvivier understood the need to bring taboo subjects like postpartum disorders into the open, rather than keeping them hidden.
If, on the other hand, one wants to see an example of the French director's most experimental and creative cinema, Concerto mécanique pour la folie ou la folle mécamorphose is an excellent demonstration. Two characters face situations that belong fully to surrealism, with enormous objects, masked figures, and impossible actions: it contains the whole repertoire of visual representations of the unconscious. It cannot strictly be called a medical film, but it can be appreciated as an experiment in the artistic representation of the irrational.