Thursday 10 6 July, 5 pm - Sala Frau Meeting: the importance of Restoration for Italian Cinema.
Attending: Caterina D´Amico (general manager RAI Cinema) Luca Magnani (Magnani´s son) Simonetta Puccini
(founder Fondazione Giacomo Puccini) Andrea Purgatori (journalist and screenwriter) Sergio Toffetti (Director Cineteca Nazionale) | Thursday 6 July, 7 pm - Sala Frau Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma
a film by Carmine Gallone
cast Anna Magnani (2008 is her birth centennial), Gino Sinimberghi, Ave Ninchi
a restoration made by
Cineteca Nazionale
in care of Ripley’s Film
During the restoration made in 2003, new footage was found and inserted.
At a gala evening at the Sala Frau, illustrious representatives of the world of cinema will be present: producers, directors, actors, actresses, and technicians.
A Tosca set in Rome when occupied by the Germans, Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma was released with huge success a few months after Rome Open City and adds to Neorealism an “opera-movie” that Gallone was an undisputed expert in.
Restoration notes
The film required a complex process of restoration divided in several phases. It begun in 1991 when a first print was found in the Film Archive of Lausanne. The present version includes an extra 11 minute footage that was missing in the previous editing. The added scenes that allow us to see the picture in its unabridged version were based on a 16 mm duplicate found in an archive of Ripley’s Film and were imported digitally and inserted after a philological comparison of the different versions.
Anna Magnani is Ada, an opera singer. Together with her boyfriend – Marco, a tenor signer (Gino Sinimberghi) who plays the role of Cavaradossi – Ada is preparing for the staging of Tosca. Both serve in the Resistance. Marco hides in the house of an English soldier and Ada, fearing he might be an enemy, denounces him to a Nazi officer. Differently than in Sardou’s drama and Puccini’s opera, Marco/Cavaradossi isn’t murdered. The Germans, in fact, try to arrest two men at the end of the performance, but Ada/Tosca and the theatre technicians succeed in saving them and helping them escape. The Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia - Cineteca Nazionale and Ripley´s Film, in collaboration with Marzi srl and with the support of Spoleto 51 present the restored version of the picture Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma, directed in 1946 by Carmine Gallone, starring an extraordinary Anna Magnani. The movie by Gallone, considered the best expert of film-operas, a genre that became lucky after WW2, is particularly interesting for the mixture of popular cinema, extremely codified as film-operas, and the aesthetical and thematic urging of Neorealism. “Gallone indissolubly intertwines opera and life, as if trying to claim the core of domestic melodrama tradition (and therefore of his entire directing career), capable of inspiring civil feeling and libertarian passions, even during the most dramatic moments of national history (the movie takes place between June 4, 1944, when Rome was freed).” (Paolo Mereghetti). In Avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma Anna Magnani (dubbed by the famous soprano singer Renata Tebaldi in the scenes of Tosca) leaves behind the more popular characters that made her famous to play the role of a refined theatre actress, a role she had become famous with in the Thirties. |
