Mariute
(1918) Director: Eduardo Bencivenga –
Director of photography: Giuseppe Filippa –
Production: Bertini Film (Caesar Film) –
Original lenght: 743m –
Lenght: (frammenti/fragments) 144m –
Intertitles: Italian –
Censorship certificate: 13506, 1/5/1918 –
Availability date: 05/1918
Cast: Francesca Bertini (se stessa/herself e Mariute); Gustavo Serena, Livio Pavanelli, e Camillo De Riso (se stessi/theirself); Alberto Albertini (il reduce/the veteran)
The film:
The actress Francesca Bertini, as every diva worthy of her name, always arrives on the set extremely late. One day, in the studio, she happened to hear a colleague actor who, back from the front, tells about the brutalities suffered by the civilians in the occupied territories. At night, still troubled by that story, Bertini falls asleep and dreams: in her dream she plays the role of Mariute, a young Friulian countrywoman, mother of three kids waiting for her husband homecoming from the frontline. One day, while she is going to the well for water, she is assaulted and molested by three enemy soldiers. Her father-in-law will avenge her. In the meantime Bertini, waking up with a start, will arrive to work on time and she will end the film inviting the public to put their savings into the war bonds.
The copy, incomplete, keeps just in a measure the sequences dedicated to the diva, but it provides the evidence of a mise-en-scene, particularly brutal and violent for that era, exalted by the verist acting of the actress Bertini.
The film restoration:
The preservation of fragments of Mariute was carried out by Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino from two colored nitrate prints, 30 and 35 meter long, and from a 79 meter long colored safety print held by the Museo. The materials were scanned at 2K and the digitized images were ordered according to a film copy preserved at Cineteca Nazionale in Roma.
The preservation work was carried out at L’Immagine Ritrovata in 2015.
This preservation was part of a project to safeguard and valorize the World War I films conserved by the Film Archive of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino and promoted on the occasion of the exhibition, at the Mole Antonelliana, AL FRONTE. Cineoperatori e fotografi raccontano la Grande Guerra [ON THE FRONT. Cameramen and photographers recount the Great War] (curated by Roberta Basano and Sarah Pesenti Campagnoni - Mole Antonelliana, January 29 – May 17 - 2015).
