The film:

Spark, flame, ash: the fire and the passion are doomed to follow the same path of rise and fall. Giovanni Pastrone tells this in one of his masterpieces, a melodrama at the same time baroque and essential which launched the mysterious owl woman Pina Menichelli on the Olympus of the divas. 

The film restoration:

The restoration of Il fuoco was carried out by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino based on a dupe safety negative with Italian intertitles printed in the 1960s, which served as the matrix for two black and white positive prints in 16mm and 35mm. The dupe negative, in turn, was based on a lost, unedited nitrate negative without intertitles, which contained information for the colorization.

The copy was reconstructed according to the editing mentioned in portions of the working notebook and the censorship certificate, which are conserved at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino. The intertitles, which had been inserted in the wrong places were put in order, thus restoring the film’s original symmetry. The intertitles which had presented modified texts or which were missing were reproduced, based on the intertitles on plates. The indications for the film colorization were deduced from the working notebooks; tinting and toning were recreated using the same techniques as when the film was produced.

The restoration was conducted in 1991 at the Bruno Favro laboratory in Torino.

The Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino and contributed to a DVD edition of the restored film, part of the music box Il fuoco (2014) with new and original music composed and performed by Giardini di Mirò.

Link Vimeo Cineteca MNC: https://vimeo.com/755082667

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