Article by Ludovico Franco

Translation by Martina Marino

In the opening lines of Swann’s Way (or The Way by Swann’s), Marcel Proust remembers how, as a child, he loved watching the images projected by the magic lantern: out-and-out apparitions that told stories, like a wavering and ephemeral glass wall. On a foggy hilltop near the border with Iran, the silhouettes of a man and a boy on horseback stand out: the young boy is checking a laptop screen, trying to connect to the internet to purchase the necessary equipment to revive an old analog projector, unearthed by a former projectionist from the USSR. However, the essential element needed to make the magic lantern work is missing: the light, provided by a simple yet elusive lightbulb.

The cinematic device is not just a tool used to project moving images, but a repository of values to be used therapeutically to reunite a community. The act of dusting it off reflects the desire to restore an ontological status that predates the advent of digital technology, reaching back to the era of pre-cinema. Like young Marcel, the two protagonists play with handmade projectors, experimenting with magnifying lenses and pieces of cardboard. They restore the centrality of the medium, which is not intended in the McLuhanian sense here, but as a haptic, tangible, disassemblable and reassemblable technical support, made of gears, light bulbs and “powered” by film reels.

The type of community the device fosters around itself is also pre-digital, bringing together viewers who give meaning to cinema as a collective social space, capable of transforming the private into the public. The documentary incorporates, like a metacinematic postscript, the essence of that marvelous wonder we love and call “cinema”: the projection of moving images, the screen, the theater, the audience, animation, censorship and dubbing. This tale of care and love for people and things not only follows the passage of seasons from autumn to winter but also reflects the cycles of life itself, because cinema serves as fertile ground for intergenerational exchange.

Perhaps this is also why Le Retour du Projectionniste (The Return of the Projectionist) has been compared to Cinema Paradiso. However, the beating heart of the documentary has very little to do with Tornatore and his ostentatious, citation-laden cinephilia. Instead, its essence aligns more closely with the cinema of Kiarostami: that same disarming simplicity, the intense need for communication and for an osmotic exchange between the old order and the new (especially the passing of the torch from the analog father to the digital son), and the transformation of repeated returns into a symbol of being-in-the-world. The iterative importance of the prefix “re” is no accident; from the title onward, there’s a desire to return, remember, restore, repeat, and, after small failures, to try again.