The film:

In 1919 Genina was not yet thirty years old but, with dozens of films under his belt, he could already be considered a set veteran. Always on the lookout for new stories, he was struck by the cinematic possibilities of Pirandello’s novella Lo scaldino and dashed to Rome to meet the author. The director remembers Pirandello as a quiet but affable man who “had the gift of listening and making his interlocutor believe that he was saying exquisite things”. The meeting marked the start of a friendship and the film was made.

The film restoration:

Lo scaldino was restored by Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino, Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, Russian  Gosfilmofond from an incomplete 35 mm safety print with cyrillic intertitles, preserved in Moscow. The Italian intertitles of the surviving portions were reintegrated according to the production papers preserved in Turin. Graphics were reconstructed from Itala-UCI film productions from the same years.

Missing frames were marked with 10 black frames, or with two intertitles summarizing the plot in case of longer gaps. The restored fragment is 903 meters long while the original length was 1,590 meters, as reported by the Italian censorship visa.

The film was digitized at 4K by Gosfilmofond laboratory. The 2K digital restoration was carried out by L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna in 2017. Thanks to Istituto di Cultura in Moscow for their collaboration.

back

• Restorations
• Silent films
• Sound films

• Online collections