Before I get on to this fragment from early Italian cinema, let me sound off for a minute about the new shape of the Sky film channels. It's all very well showing five new flicks a week on the Premiere Channel, but screening these at the same time daily means a lot of time-shifting to find something new to watch during peak hours. I've complained, but to no avail. To make matters worse, the choice of movies each week is weird to say the least. For example, this week they showed "Silent Hill" (2006) and "The Dark" (2005) as a pair, and even now I am having difficulty remembering them as two separate movies, since both involved a somewhat neurotic mother (Radha Mitchell/Maria Bello) losing her daughter -- not as in death but as in disappearance -- and entering a kind of underworld to find her, at the sacifice of her own existence and bringing back a child possessed by past spirits. To make matters worse, the father of both families was played by Sean Bean in totally wooden mode. OK the one was set in an abandoned Pennsylvania mining village and the other in Welsh Wales with suicidal sheep, but they are beginning to merge in my mind. I did have rather high hopes (now dashed) for both, since "Silent Hill" was the first movie for French director Christophe Gans since his remarkable "Brotherhood of the Wolf" back in 2001 and "The Dark" was a film from the Canadian director John Fawcett who wrote the imaginative "Ginger Snaps". And while the Gans movie had some genuinely creepy atmosphere, in the end the two were just too thematically similar to prove successful.
Anyhow to get back to the matter at hand, this Italian silent was the last film by one Nino Oxilia who was killed during World War I. It only ran 45 minutes and I gather that about two minutes has been lost before its restoration earlier this year. It's yet another version of the Faust legend transferred to the body of a wealthy dowager who sells her soul to Mephisto for another go at youth and love. While it was lovingly restored with beautiful tinted colour, it really wasn't overly exciting, and its main claim to fame now can only be its rarity value. Still I'm all for preserving any and all silents that come to light since all too many have been lost to us forever.
2 comments:
One positive thing about the silent era, it didn't matter about language.
http://journals.aol.co.uk/acoward15/andy-the-bastard
I think you have somewhat undervalued 'Satan's Rhapsody' as the camera work
was advanced for the time and the acting not quite as 'stagey' as it can be in a lot
of early films - while short, it had quality when you compare it with some of the
Italian epics of the period such as 'Maciste'
Post a Comment