Madre e la morte, La
If One Could See Into the Future (1911)
Director of photography: Giovanni Vitrotti – Production: Società Anonima Ambrosio, Torino – Original lenght: 202 m – Lenght: 150 m – Intertitles: Italian – Availability date: 06/1911

Cast: Mary Cléo Tarlarini (la madre/the mother), Ercole Vaser (la morte/the Death), Oreste Grandi (il figlio a vent’anni/the 20-year-old son), Maria Bay (il bambino/the boy), Gigetta Morano, Fernanda Negri-Pouget, Paolo Azzurri, Norina (Norma) Rasero

The film:

Snowy exterior shots and painted back-drops for a dark fairy tale with disturbing moral implications. Death is a benevolent old man with a sickle who lives in a magical cavern full of pendulums - the lives of men - and disturbing little devils with wings drawn on their chest. When he takes a baby from its mother, she cannot come to terms with it until the other future is shown to her in a magic spring proving to her that it could be worse: disgrace. In the closing emblematic shot, two daggers pierce her heart. Mystical.

 

The film restoration:

The preservation of La madre e la morte, which was carried out by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino and the Fondazione Cineteca Italiana of Milano, is part of the project launched by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino in collaboration with several Italian and foreign film archives, in order to promote Torino silent film heritage.

The restoration was based on a 149-meter-long tinted nitrate positive print with Italian intertitles belonging to the “Ambrosio collection” conserved at the Cineteca of Milano, and from a tinted nitrate preserved by Cineteca del Friuli of Gemona. A dupe negative and positive print, colored with the Desmet method, were printed at the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna in 2007.

 

Link Vimeo Cineteca MNC:

https://vimeo.com/356358486

 



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