If you have always thought that cinema was born in France at the end of the 19th century by the Lumière brothers, then the time has come to think again. Mario Mucciarelli, film author, but above all passionately in love with the Seventh Art since time immemorial, offers us proven proof that it all began in Bologna, certainly not by chance the home of one of the most important Italian film archives.
He does so with his latest book, Lumière Lumière (Sagoma Editore, 2024, pp. 200), a concentration of stories full of humor and devotion to the cinema of times gone by. Stories that take place in a cinema in Bologna that showed only old films and where the seats were extremely uncomfortable. The projector was making sinister noises. And in the room there was a bustle of nuns, mimes, popcorn sellers, drunks, film buffs and more drunks. It was the old Lumière cinema, the place from which the Cineteca di Bologna later "sprouted".
We asked Mario Mucciarelli how the idea for such a particular book was born?
«Over the years I have written several humorous stories, but they have remained in the drawer. I wanted to do something with it, before it became a fossil record: humor gets old quickly. I made my partner read them, and she especially enjoyed two stories that were set at the Lumière, the arthouse cinema linked to the Cineteca di Bologna, which I frequented as a boy in the 1980s. The old Lumière, because in the meantime the cinema has changed location. In short, those two had aged well. I wondered if they couldn't be the nucleus of a collection of stories about those years, about Bologna, about the world of cinephiles. I said yes, I wrote the stories, then Carlo Amatetti from Sagoma Editore also said yes. Then we contacted the Cineteca di Bologna, and anxiously awaited a response. Or rather, I was anxious. Amatetti was calm."
