The film:

A tutor and his students hunt insects in a wood. The capture of a butterfly reveals some unexpected events: the insects turn into young girls who want to take revenge against the entomologists. The poor tutor has to suffer the treatment he would have given to the captured insect: being skewed with a pinhole on a big cork. He will be saved by his students. 

La peine du Talion is a brilliant example of féerie, a film using tricks, an in vogue genre at the beginning of the century; appearances, disappearances, transformations, flights and magic, enchanted the public of the time and today. The pochoir coloration technique perfectly depicts the poetic of the marvel: the anti-naturalistic colors exalt the shapes in a never–ending metamorphosis. 

The film has a delicate sense of humour and some original mise-en-scene solutions: the representation of the entomologist’s glance through the images of the captured butterflies seen with the magnifying lens or the bird’s eye view of the tutor who is shaking while trapped on the bottle stopper. 

The film restoration:

In 2011, the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino and the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna conducted digital restoration of La Peine du talion, from a coloured nitrate copy held at the Museum.

The restoration was carried out at the laboratory L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna.

The film had already undergone photochemical preservation in 2007.

Link Vimeo Cineteca MNC:

https://vimeo.com/130554798

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