Rapsodia Satanica (Nino Oxilia, 1917)

[Tommaso]

Ouiiiii.... I watched this late last night on arte TV, though I had never heard of that film (let alone its director) ever before, and also not expecting too much from an Italian film of that time. Gee... twelve hours later now I'm still totally blown away by it.

"Rapsodia Satanica" is apparently the last film by director Nino Oxilia, and it's a 45 minute variation of the Faust story. It goes like this: an old aristocratic woman sells her soul to the devil and regains her youth and attractivity, without however being able to fall in love. She of course becomes a femme fatale, causes some unlucky events in the life of her lovers, and finally she's old again and her soul is taken by Satan. Sounds pretty much like standard fare, I know. But HOW it is done: this is for the most part NOT a horror/expressionist film, but rather a very melancholic, 'quiet' and extremely beautiful filmic 'poem'. For long stretches it looks like a Rossetti painting or some of the more decadent D'Annunzio novels come alive. Apart from the sheer beauty of the main actress and the interiors, Oxilia manages to get some utterly stunning outdoor images (again: often composed like a late-romantic painting), including some amazing contre-jour photography. A fantastic sense of space in the mise en scene and few, but very effective close-ups add to its dreamlike quality, all enhanced by the apparently original hand-tintings. I felt utterly, utterly entranced by it.

The whole thing was restored in 2007 by the usual suspects, i.e. L'Immagine Ritrovata of Bologna, and arte recorded the original orchestral score by Pietro Mascagni for it, which fitted the images perfectly . Apart from two brief missing scenes, the print was in surprisingly good shape for the most part. I only hope that this will come to dvd via arte stummfilmedition in the not too distant future.....

I guess this one has made it immediately into my top ten list of silents, and I consider it a real major discovery by the good folks at arte, perhaps comparable to that of the films of Evgeni Bauer a few years ago (and perhaps that's the only real comparison I can think of, despite the absence of camera movement in the Oxilia film). I haven't seen many other Italian silents, only the usual stuff like "Cabiria" and "Pompeji" and those short films on the "Silent Shakespeare" disc (which left me pretty cold). So, my question is: has anyone else seen it or can give some comments/info on this film or on Oxilia? Does it fit into a special movement at the time, are there other works which are similar (and perhaps even available on dvd)?

[Saimo]

From Il Cinema Ritrovato 1996 program:

Ritrovati e restaurati - Rediscovered&Restored - Trésors à la Cinémathèque Suisse
RAPSODIA SATANICA (Italia, 1917)
R.: Nino Oxilia. S.: Alfa (Alberto Fassini), Fausto Maria Martini. Sc.: Alfa. F.: Giorgio Ricci.
In.: Lyda Borelli (contessa Alba d'Oltrevita), Andrea Habay (Tristano), Ugo Bazzini (Mephisto), Giovanni Cini (Sergio), Alberto Nepoti.
P.: Cines, Roma.
L.: 905m. D.: 55' a 18 f/s
Didascalie italiane / Italian intertitles
Da: Cinémathèque Suisse, Cineteca del Comune di Bologna e Cineteca Italiana di Milano
Partitura per grande orchestra (orchestral score by) di Pietro Mascagni
Ricostruzione di (reconstructed by) Nicoletta Conti
Eseguita al piano (performed on piano by) Nicoletta Conti

For who loves silent cinema this screening will have a particular fascination. For years it was asked where the famous coloured copy of Rapsodia Satanica could have ended up. Its retrieval lives up to expectations because the chromatic complexity of the copy adds new magic to what is probably the most perfect work of Italian silent cinema.
Alba d'Oltrevita, in the Castle of Illusion is confronted by Faustian temptations. Mephisto descends from a painting and promises new youth in exchange for her promise that she will renounce love forever. Young again she is courted by two brothers, Tristano and Sergio. The latter declares his intention to kill himself if Alba does not declare her love for him. She wants to, but of course cannot.

Spoiler

With a few minutes to go until the hour set by Sergio for the fatal meeting, Tristano presents himself, determined to go to any lengths so that the woman goes to the meeting with his brother. Alba seduces him. A gun shot disturbs them from their idyll. Tristano flees when he sees Sergio's corpse. Alba cannot keep her promise to Mephisto. "Love: all. The rest mocking illusion ". The woman decides to follow her instinct and agrees to marry Tristano. While she is on her way to the marriage she is intercepted by Mephisto who takes her back to her real age. Nothing can be done: Alba tries to see her reflection in the water but without success. Death is waiting.

(Giacomo Manzoli)


(...) the restoration of Rapsodia Satanica is an extreme case: its reconstruction took place slowly and by degrees under our very eyes. As if a faded rose were regenerating and one petal after another, regaining its freshness in the height of its brilliance. An unexpected miracle was slowly taking shape, progressively and irreversibly. A slow backwards decomposition, a patient re-composition. As if this masterwork did not wish to give itself to our eyes all at once. Might it have been too blinding? Thus the history of the successive restorations of Rapsodia Satanica has in its turn become a bella messinscena. It is easy to imagine that Oxilia would have preferred it that way. (...) In the beginning this copy in black and white was rather ugly... And yet it was clear that we were dealing with a splendid film. Then the music by Mascagni composed specially for Oxilia's film was discovered. A new surprise. Then to this - was this the last stage? - the discovery of a good copy in colour! Rapsodia Satanica , from the point of view of colour, places us in front of another problem, because - a unique case in the history of cinema? - the use of stencil colouring is not alternative to that of toning and imbibition, but contemporaneous . On monochrome images we thus have coloured detail. Even if the restoration on acetate film manages only in part to restore the exact gradations of colour and above all its internal balance (the pink of a dress stencil coloured which stands out from the monochrome background, for example), the result is extraordinary. Here colour fully realises the explicit ambition of the opera to be a total art, just as it results as being formulated in the preface to the programme of the era: "Certain in our souls of validly contributing to the intellectual elevation of the cinematographic art, soon to reach its transformation in a purely artistic sense, we present the public with this Rapsodia Satanica , a taste of a brand new cinema-lyric art conceived and produced with intentions of serious research. (...) This Rapsodia will reveal a thing of great importance: the possibility of collecting in a cinematographic work the sensations of all the arts; the possibility of making a projection room into a magical melting-pot of all the artistic sensations in a new whole, never before attempted and today obtained for the first time. (...)
(Eric De Kuyper., "Cinegrafie", VI, n.9, 1996)

The orchestral score for Rapsodia is by Mascagni.

Nino Oxilia (1889-1917) was a well-known Italian playwriter (his most famous work being Addio giovinezza, filmed by Augusto Genina in 1927), but he also directed several films. I don't know how many of them still survive, but Sangue bleu (1914, 70 min.) was screened in Bologna in 1991:

Another fascinating example of Francesca Bertini's art and appeal. In facts, it was the first film to be written for her, to emphasize her character, to exploit her possibilities to create a new "diva".

Retaggio d'odio (1914, presumably lost), instead, was considered "a bold attempt to make a psychological film".

Oxilia, alongside with Guido Gozzano and Luigi Maggi, belongs to a generation of young "modernist" students from Turin, influenced by scapigliatura and interested in cinema and Futurism, but I am not sure if we should name this as a coherent movement.

[HerrSchreck]

I had a burn of this film but it had some glitches in it-- need to grab a new copy-- but it looked absolutely original and fascinating.

[zedz]

Sounds great! Also worth seeing in terms of early, non-epic Italian cinema is Bragaglia's Thais. I was going to save this for the inevitable "Early Cinema List Discussion & Suggestions" thread, but this seems like the right time. . .

Thais

This was a film I’d been searching for for decades, having seen an amazing still in Roud’s Cinema: a Critical Dictionary (quite the site for amazing stills – I’m still desperate to see Sjostrom’s The Girls from Stormycroft on the basis of the extraordinary sophistication of the mirror shot reproduced in that book). It looked like a futurist fantasia.

The truth is more complex, and it’s obscured as well, as the print I managed to see was extremely dupey and quite incomplete, its first two acts elided into less than ten minutes, while acts 3 and 4 play out over half an hour.

The story, a kind of pre-L’Inhumaine affair about une grande pricktease, is very text-heavy, and for much of its length it falls into the lurching syntactical pattern of explanatory titlecard / illustrative shot / explanatory titlecard / illustrative shot. The story and performances are unremarkable, but there are plenty of felicities of mise-en-scene to keep your interest. Many excellent location shots, including beautifully spacious land / riverscapes, and there’s also a drunken party in which a static shot fogs in and out woozily – unless this is a case of sympathetic print damage. The incredible art direction hinted at by that long-ago still is there (how can you not love a room decorated with eyes?), but the futurism doesn’t infect the entire film as I hoped. Rather, it defines the heroine’s arty digs: “son studio décoré selon les principles les plus absolus de l’art decadent.”

So, not exactly what I expected, but well worth seeking out. But then, in the last few minutes, something very exciting happens. The explanatory title cards ease up, the frontal framing loosens up, the camera starts adding wilder angles and close-ups, and the wild décor takes over, to deliver one of the great death scenes of early cinema in a very effective montage that makes the most of the abstraction of the design. It’s as if, in its death throes, the film finally starts to truly breathe.

Some sample stills to get your juices flowing: