Lyda Borelli

Effetto Venezia

Effetto Venezia

Livorno



  • Effetto Venezia. Il Cinema e la Città. 2-6 August 2023
  • Palazzo Huigens, Wednesday 2 August 2023, 10.00pm

    RAPSODIA SATANICA by Nino Oxilia
    Italy, 1917, music by Pietro Mascagni
  • “Rapsodia satanica” is the title of the film, screened on 2 August and made up of a prologue and two parts. It is a 1917 silent work, masterfully directed by Nino Oxilia, starring the leading Italian screen diva of the period, Lyda Borelli, with music by the Livorno-born composer Pietro Mascagni. A gem of Italian cinema, restored and shown once again to an audience that turned out in great numbers to see it.

    The story is drawn from a 1915 poem by Fausto Maria Martini and echoes Goethe’s “Faust”. It tells of an elderly society lady, Alba d’Oltrevita (Lyda Borelli), who strikes a pact with Mephisto to regain her youth, on condition that she never fall in love. Alba is courted, however, by two young brothers, Tristano and Sergio. The latter threatens to take his own life if she will not love him. Alba does not return Sergio’s passion, and he takes his own life, while she prepares to marry Tristano. Having broken the terms of the pact, Alba sees Mephisto return to reclaim the youth he granted her, and she instantly turns old and dies.

    The film is one of rare beauty, among the most celebrated of its period, drawing on both a markedly D’Annunzian inspiration and Futurist experimentation — two aesthetic and formal tendencies that are, in theory, incompatible and at odds, yet which Oxilia manages to bring together seamlessly.

    If the subject matter (a fading nobility) and the sets, costumes and acting style (above all Borelli’s) are steeped in Liberty-style aesthetics, then it is in certain chromatic experiments running through the entire film that its Futurist side shows. Though filmed in black and white, the film makes use of a technique then very much in vogue — technically known as toning — a black and white image tinted towards a single dominant colour across the whole frame. The colours chosen for this “toning” change continually, according to the scene and the emotional tone the director — together with the cinematographer — wished to convey to the audience. But Oxilia goes further still, hand-colouring parts of individual frames.

    Long before Technicolor was invented, the Futurists experimented with this innovative technique of hand-colouring film, frame by frame, painting them almost like oil paintings. Oxilia, however, chooses to colour only certain parts of each frame — the protagonist’s dress, say, or the grass of the lush gardens — leaving other details of the same frame in black and white. In doing so, he lets colour and black-and-white coexist within the same sequences, anticipating by a century what Quentin Tarantino would experiment with again in films such as the two parts of “Kill Bill”. In “Rapsodia satanica”, colour thus becomes an expressive device, meant to underline not just formal but also conceptual aspects of the film, so that the coloured passages are never accidental but carefully considered, meant to convey precise messages. All of it framed by Pietro Mascagni’s poignantly beautiful music…

    (from “Rapsodia satanica”: il film di rara bellezza, musicato da Mascagni, accolto dagli applausi a Palazzo Huigens, by Gianluca Donati, Livornosera, 3 August 2023 )
  • the 38th edition of Effetto Venezia runs from 2 to 6 August 2023. Download the programme
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