One of our goals is to recreate a screening experience of the type travelling cinema operators of the time offered to their audiences, combining in every programme a great variety of films from different séries de production. The principle is applied in its purest form in this Best of 1903 programme, an anthology of visual pleasures: comic scenes (scènes comique) with great, witty humour, the beauty of image composition in nonfiction (scènes de plein air), the irresistible filmogenie of scènes de danses and their performers, aesthetic mastery inherent even in scènes militaires, astonishing scènes à truc, the epoch-making achievements of an exceptional féerie, and, surprise, eroticism in a German educational film.
Another major concern of ours is to present – with the support of the carbon-light projection on the Piazzetta Pasolini – the colour techniques of early cinema to a contemporary audience. So two of the film with the most glorious colours of 1903 (Le Chaudron infernal and Les Royaume de fées by Méliès) can be found in this programme. As for technical aspects, the films shot by Émile Lauste for the German branch of the Mutoscope and Biograph Syndicate were originally on 68mm and perfectly illustrate why the phrase “bigger than life” is applied to films shot on any format larger than 35mm. And last but not least we continue the tradition of screening in the summer heat of Bologna some snow (and a bear).

Mariann Lewinsky and Karl Wratschko