The film:

"In the insect world, the cricket is a good bourgeois, home lover, who likes to blissfully take his time on the doorstep receiving a healthy ray of sunshine. He constructed his small house with perseverance, feverishly digging the slope of the grass with his anterior paws, that operate like solid hoes, while the posterior paws  are useful to throw the piled soil behind. When the vain butterfly flies about around his house, he looks at her with mocking commiseration like the good and modest housewife watches a coquettish woman, with no house,  passing in front of her doorstep, among the frou frou of her silk dress.

[…] The cinematographic goal has accomplished the miracle of catching the episodes that we described in the life of these insects. A precious work by a passionate entomologist, who wanted the public to share his patient and interesting observations."

[From the original brochure of La vita del grillo campestre – Museo Nazionale del Cinema Collections/ Online Collection: Documents from Torino’s era of silent films http://www.museocinema.it/Materialipubblicitari/Materiale_pubblicitario-200_dpi/01R0561930000_P41710_002_m.jpg

http://www.museocinema.it/Materialipubblicitari/Materiale_pubblicitario-200_dpi/01R0561930000_P41710_003_m.jpg]

The film restoration:

The preservation of La vita del grillo campestre was carried out by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino and the Fondazione Cineteca Italiana of Milano, and it was based on a black and white positive nitrate print with sound that is conserved in Milan.

The preservation work was conducted in 2008 at the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna.

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• Restorations
• Silent films
• Sound films

• Online collections