Caduta di Troia, La (original)

1910

Alternative Titles

The Fall of Troy (Alternative), La Chute de Troie (Alternative), Trojas Fall (Alternative)

BFI identifier

135963

Synopsis

HISTORICAL DRAMA. The story of the Trojan war. Rl.1. Homer sings to the Greeks of the exploits of the heroes of the Trojan war. Menelaus, King of Sparta, takes leave of his wife Helen, departing by chariot. Paris, son of Priamus, King of Troy, arrives as Ambassador and is received by Helen. Paris is greatly struck by her beauty. His advances are repelled by Helen, but the goddess Venus comes to his aid and they are wafted in a gigantic seashell to Troy. The news is carried to Menelaus by a servant, and to avenge the insult, the Greeks declare war on Troy. They lay seige to the city but are repulsed. Priamus and the populace rejoice (812). Rl.2. The Greeks feign return, leaving behind a wooden horse which is supposed to be dedicated to protect them on their return voyage. The Trojans decide to remove it into the city and demolish part of their defences to draw the sacred effigy into the city. A spy carries the news to the Greeks whose fleet is anchored at the mouth of the River Xantus. They quickly embark and make for Troy. That night, the Greek warriors hidden in the horse emerge and fire the city. The Greeks enter by the dismantled gate and fierce fighting ensues amidst the falling buildings. Paris and Helen seek to escape but are discovered by Menelaus and his men. Paris is killed by Menelaus in single combat and Helen is captured, to be removed in bonds to Sparta (935). (1747ft) NOTE: The Archive also has another viewable copy, incomplete (1201ft) in Joye 599/600. This starts with a complete reel 2 (829ft) with no intertitles. Reel 1 (787ft) follows but not in the correct order, and with the beginning missing up to and including the arrival of Paris. The earliest scene shows Paris wooing Helen in a garden. There is one German intertitle.

Production Country: Italy
Production Company: Itala Film
BFI Category: Fiction
Source: N/A

Cast

Giulio Vinà (Paris)
Madame Davesnes (Helena)
Ermete Novelli
Borgono
Francesco Casaleggio

Credits

Director: Giovanni Pastrone, Romano Luigi Borgnetto
Production Company: Itala Film
Script: Giovanni Pastrone
Based on the works by: Homer
Photography: Segundo de Chomón
Designer: Romano Luigi Borgnetto

Film Technical Information

Original Length: 600 m
Length of BFI Viewing Print: 1745 ft
Support: Viewable
Black and White
Format: 35 mm

Comments on the print:

Source for original length: Aldo Bernardini, Il cinema muto italiano 1911 (1995), Vol 1, p. 66. Cineteca di Bologna and Museo Nazionale del Cinema (Turin) have restored the film using nitrates from Cineteca di Bologna, Eye Filmmuseum (Desmet Collection), Cineteca Italiana di Milano, and Archive Film Agency (Bob Geoghegan), resulting in a new 600 m 35mm colour print. Cineteca di Bologna holds a digital copy of the restored film.

Pantelis Michelakis adds: Seven further titles for the film are listed by FIAF. Although the original length is cited as 600 m, 605 m was declared on censorship visa no. 7892, Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin. The BFI holds a second, incomplete copy from the Joye collection, 599/600, at 1201 ft, reel 2 complete at 829 ft with no intertitles and reel 1 following at 787 ft out of order, lacking the opening up to the arrival of Paris, with one German intertitle. Marotto and Pozzi identify the BFI elements as follows: LJ, a first-generation nitrate positive from the Joye collection, tinted and toned, with German flash titles, disordered and depleted at an undated point by the extraction of frames, and conserved and restored in London after 1976; and L, a black-and-white safety positive of 532 m with English intertitles, assembled in London in the 1960s from two 1958 dupe negatives struck from two tinted nitrate positives since destroyed. The film is held in nine archives (FIAF 5424): the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Filmoteca Española, Cineteca del Friuli and Cineteca di Bologna on 35mm, the Museum of Modern Art and the Deutsche Kinemathek on 16mm, the BFI, with further non-access 16mm elements in Berlin, and copies at the Cinémathèque française and Eye. FIAF credits the writing to Oreste Mentasti and the photography to Giovanni Tomatis, whereas the BFI catalogue gives the script to Pastrone and the photography to Segundo de Chomón, an attribution that needs settling.

THEME - A Composite Greece in Motion: Early Cinema and the BFI’s Silent Prints

This essay focuses on eleven Greek-subject films in the BFI National Archive, made between 1903 and 1927 in four countries, and argues that ancient Greece functioned for early cinema less as a body of stories to be adapted than as a repertoire of operations: a stock of things that could be done with bodies, costumes, poses, objects, substitutions, colour, and frames. What reached the studios was never a recoverable antiquity but a composite already assembled from translation, painting, sculpture, theatre, opera, dance, archaeology, and exhibition practices, which these films homogenise into a single world and differentiate only where a plot requires it. Each film is then read as testing unsettled possibilities of the medium, and is given a verb naming the relevant operation. Causation rarely sits where these stories assign credit, falling instead to slaves, objects, and uncredited performers whom the surviving records seldom name, and circulation is at once what the films depict and the condition of their survival, since colour, intertitles, lengths, and endings varied from copy to copy and are what each print has kept or lost. Read from the prints rather than from the synopses, these films are not attempts to reconstruct antiquity but records of a medium finding out what it could do.

THEME - The set designs for classical antiquity from the Turinese film studio Itala (1909 to 1911)

This article focuses on four of Itala Film's first silent films, preceding the famous epic Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, Itala 1914), but already developing an iconographic vocabulary on antiquity, especially through the search for scenic elements. All prints used stem from the collection of the British Film Institute but are analysed in comparison with prints elsewhere. Giulio Cesare (Giovanni Pastrone, Itala 1909) is contextualised by its roots in theatre and painting, but also its recycling of sets, costumes and even actors from a previous Itala production, Principessa e schiava (dir. unknown, Itala 1909). Both films mark Itala's debut in films about Roman antiquity. Confirmation of this recycling by Itala can be found in two films both set in ancient Greece instead: the famous film La caduta di Troia (Giovanni Pastrone, Romano Luigi Borgnetto, Itala 1911) and the lesser-known Clio e Filete (Oreste Mentasti, Itala 1911), with the latter reusing parts of the scenography and costumes of the former. This analysis considers the sources of the ancient worlds designed by Itala, the style of its reconstruction, the use of recycled materials, and what all this says for Italian filmmakers’ visions of the ancient world in 1909-1911.

MUSEUM of DREAMWORLDS