We’re continuing our journey through Italian landscapes captured by cameramen at the beginning of the 20th century. This journey began at a session of Il Cinema Ritrovato 2014 and is part of a research and restoration project that the Cineteca di Bologna has been working on in collaboration with several prestigious and generous European archives. Our journey is framed by two short fragments of smoking jugglers, decidedly out of context but, in our view, compelling. The first leg of the trip, Italien (1911), is not really a film but an anonymous cut and paste job that assembles shots from diverse sources. We consider it a kind of reflection of how Italy was perceived internationally: a kaleidoscopic muddle in which we find beautiful landscapes from the mountains to the sea, urban monuments loaded with history, the Middle Ages and modernity, charming beggars and high society figures. What this film gathers by reconstructing imaginary geographies (where is the “Gredenigo” mentioned in the intertitles?), others isolate in more circumscribed journeys, among the palm trees of Palermo or the lake breezes up north, along the banks of the Arno in Florence or the beloved alpine paths of the Savoy. In Catania, Etna’s smoke evokes destruction in antiquity, which cinema at the time often venerated, and the footage displays a system of tricks that could easily be found in a catastrophic peplum film. Italian rulers too were taken with the dream of expanding beyond the Adriatic. Montenegro carved out a role as friendly country, confirmed by the marriage of King Victor Emmanuel III to Elena, Nicholas I’s daughter. In the early 1910s Italian cameramen often crossed the short stretch of sea dividing the two countries, landing in a rough lunar landscape with a swaggering court, side by side with the Montenegrins in the first Balkan War against the Ottomans, which exploded in 1912.
At the end, an exceptional document that allows us to see – between spontaneity and mise-en-scène – glimpses of Giacomo Puccini’s private life: we watch him smelling roses at his villa in Torre del Lago, showing off his love for cars, playing the piano and hunting on a boat amidst the reeds. Director Paolo Benvenuti happened upon this film while doing research for his movie Puccini e la fanciulla: it was found among love letters in a suitcase belonging to Giulia Manfredi, the composer’s secret lover.

Andrea Meneghelli