Ancient Ostia is like a ghost town, which has been dusted off after some apocalyptic event. The film invites us to contemplate its splendid legacy and, with educational zeal, to repopulate it. “It housed 60,000 inhabitants, merchants, bankers, armourers, silo functionaries, port workers, boatmen, labourers, and people from every country.” So reads an intertitle, before the film reveals all that remains of the places in which this varied humanity shopped, made sacrifices to the Gods, and gave themselves over to pleasure. The task of reanimating these motionless streets is left to our imagination; it is as if we have to complete the film ourselves.
Torquato Tasso excelled at such feats of the imagination, to a point that borders on delirium. The Holy Land is a fantastic place, which can be explored and moulded through the power of thought alone. In the first shot, his room becomes the stage on which ghostly young girls, paladins and Saracens frolic. The Church labelled him a heretic, forbidden love landed him in deep water, and courtly intrigue sent him to a very real prison (a large part of the film was shot in the castle in Ferrara). But what they did to him didn’t matter, because the power of artistic invention remains a more formidable weapon.
The so-called artist in the Ancient Greek intrigue The Rival Sculptors learns as much to his own cost. His problem? Being both bad at sculpting and a sculptor who was bad. The two things go hand in hand. The body of the young woman he desires eludes him and his chisel proves no match for the marble with which he tries to immortalise her. The embarrassing statue that results is the reflection of a vain debaser of art, a man who is too insensitive to entertain phantoms.
On a similar note, the first shots of Volga i Sibir appear like an imagined fog in which spectres jostle to be seen. It is a dirty trick played on us by chemical decay. But perhaps also an admonishment: if the course of events cannot be changed, then telling a story can at least give meaning to entropy. Moreover, the print (atypically, the Italian release of a Russian film from 1914) only survived in fragments. Did we put them back together in the correct order? Obviously, we hope so. Otherwise it will be just another enjoyable account of the bloody and heroic exploits of Ermak Timofeevič, who conquered Siberia. We cannot even be sure that he died, because the final frames are missing.

Andrea Meneghelli