Waiting for the following year’s Richard Wagner anniversary, Ambrosio planned to make films based on his opera in the spring of 1912. The plan resulted in two films: Parsifal and Siegfried, both directed by Mario Caserini, scripted by Arrigo Frusta and shot by Giuseppe Angelo Scalenghe. Both films share the outstanding visual aesthetics in which the actors stop and move geometrically in depth of field images. The quasi-formalist beauty most famously seen in Caserini’s Ma l’amor mio non muore! (1913) is prefigured in these Wagner films. However, after being released, the difficulty of making a film based on Wagner’s oeuvre was discussed everywhere. A Japanese critic wrote: “This was adapted from Der Ring des Nibelungen by Richard Wagner, a great man of the art world who shined in the 19th century. It is very far from the original. Because this is a film, we should overlook this change. The nymphs singing on the bank of the luminous Rhine. Kriemhild with her beautiful blond hair swinging her sword… It’s an elegantly glossy film.” (“Kinema Record”, November 1914).

Hiroshi Komatsu