Version made from a black and white positive print conserved by the Cinémathèque Française and from the original negative without intertitles conserved by the Cineteca Italiana di Milano.
Particular aim of the restoration was to safeguard the photographic quality of the original negative and to balance the strong differences in contrast between the different elements.
“[…] Certainly Gallone’s entrance into the cinema world was impetuous: in 1914, his first year, he made twelve films, some of them already considerable undertakings, and he was soon noticed. Even if after Il bel gesto an inattentive critic called him Gallona, already in 1915 Lucio D’Ambra, in an article on La marcia nuziale, defined him as “one of our best directors”. In fact, it is true that at the time in Italy there were few persons able to shoot as he did. You can note it already in his second film, La donna nuda, which is not a masterpiece, but which demonstrates considerable knowledge in the use of space and the luxurious Cines-style scenography and contains many beautiful sequences and directing ideas. For example, the scene in the woods, when Lolette thinks of suicide: leaves fall in abundance and the whole landscape participates in the character’s melancholy and tiredness. Or the splendid reserve produced by creating a simple juxtaposition in editing the film: in order to afford medical treatment for her lover, the model goes to pose for an aristocratic and ambiguous lady painter, they withdraw from the scene. Immediately after the scene break, she again enters the scene from the same point of the frame, but this time arm in arm with her lover who is now well, one might well think that he has been healed thanks to something in the previous allusive scene exit.
Lolette is played by Lyda Borelli. She and Gallone’s wife were the two actresses frequently called upon to interpret Gallone’s films in these years (others included Diomira Jacobini, Diana Karenne and Leda Gys). The two divas were exemplary of the women in his cinema. Soava played the part of the mother, the betrayed young wife, the faithful fiancée in the family melodramas that, along with the sailor dramas, made up the genre he most commonly used in this period. Lyda, on the other hand, was the model, the artist, the sinner in the great high society and perdition melodramas. This is how we see her at the Carneval party in the only surviving reel of La falena, or in Fior di male, a beautiful tinted print of which exists at Amsterdam, highlighting the sunsets and the empty landscapes (but also certain lights typical of Caravaggio) that amplify the sadness of the decadent personality. Landscapes and close-ups are also the stylistic methods of Malombra, which can also be obtained in video cassette, and about which I only want to say that it was the first film to leave a deep impression on the eleven year old Luchino Visconti – after seeing it he immediately went out in a boat on the same lake that he had admired so dark and attractive on the screen. A reference that for now serves to compare two cinematographers that, even though they lived in completely different worlds, sometimes achieved results that were not all that different.
(Alberto Farassino, Cinegrafie, n.7)