Paura degli aeromobili nemici, La Fear of Zeppelins, The (1915) Director: André Deed –
Director of photography: Segundo de Chomón –
Production: Itala Film, Torino –
Original lenght: 300 m –
Lenght: ca. 300 m –
Intertitles: Italian –
Censorship certificate: 10736, 27/11/1915 –
Première: 20/02/1916 –
Cast: André Deed (Cretinetti), Léonie Laporte, Felice Minotti, Domenico Gambino.
The film:
Cretinetti gets married and he couldn’t be happier and in love with his curvy wife. Just on the day of his wedding though, posted on a wall, he reads a notice that recommends how to behave in case of an attack by enemy planes and is seized by panic…
André Deed, playing Cretinetti, was one of the most representative comic actors of the very rich Italian comedy production. He was a true expert to orchestrate always different situations in which he gave vent to his anarchic and destructive energy.
The film restoration:
The restoration was carried out by the by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino and the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna. After analyzing the various copies of the film that are conserved at the Cineteca Nazionale in Roma, the Museum in Torino and London’s British Film Institute, it was decided to base the restoration on a duplicate negative with English intertitles that was printed in the 1960s from an original nitrate print in excellent condition, which was probably donated to the Museum in Torino by Giovanni Pastrone but today is no longer available. The reconstruction of the Italian intertitles was based on a nitrate dupe negative that is conserved in Rome; although it is of inferior quality to the negative in Torino it has Italian flash titles which, with the help of intertitles on plates, served as a model for the graphics of the backgrounds and the font for the reconstructed intertitles. The texts of the missing intertitles were taken from documents conserved at the Museum in Torino. An analysis of the splices in the nitrate copies revealed that the film was originally in black and white; research on Itala productions of the same period confirmed the hypothesis that only the intertitles had been in red.
The restoration was carried out in 2005 at the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna.
