Columbia Pictures Centennial to Be Celebrated by Sony and Locarno Film Festival With ‘Lady With the Torch’ Retrospective
variety.comNick Vivarelli International Correspondent Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival is set to celebrate the centennial of Columbia Pictures with a retrospective featuring classic titles spawned by the Hollywood studio between the dawn of sound and the late 1950s.
The Locarno retro, titled “The Lady With the Torch –– The Centenary of Columbia Pictures,” is being curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, co-director of Italy’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, which is dedicated to cinematic treasures of the past and organized in partnership with Switzerland’s Cinémathèque Suisse.
It will be officially unveiled on Thursday at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles. During its golden age, Columbia Pictures produced some of American cinema’s most iconic films “across a panoply of varied styles and popular genres,” the Locarno fest statement notes.
In 1924, the relatively small-scale motion picture company Cohn-Brandt-Cohn rebranded itself as Columbia Pictures, now owned by Sony. “This new studio would eventually feature, as its masthead and in the preamble before each film, the Lady With the Torch, the Statue of Liberty-like female figure that was, at first, draped nobly in the American flag and has become recognizable to film lovers everywhere,” the statement continues.
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