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I am going to write an essay about Italian silent cinema, especially Mario Caserini’s The Last Days of Pompeii. I’d like to get some recommendations about the books of Italian Silents written in English. Is there anything like The Magic Mirror (Tsarist Cinema), The Haunted Screen (German) or American Silent Film? Or do I have to check out some general books and write from them?

Thank you in advance.

I'm sorry I don't have recommendations for any books specifically about Italian silent cinema, at least not in English. I've encountered the same difficulty in finding anything other than general film texts in English. I've recently written three relatively brief blog essays concerning early Italian silent film, and I've had to rely primarily on period publications, mainly "The Moving Picture World," the primary US film trade periodical beginning in 1907.

Much of what is available on the internet in terms of "factual" reference material, especially IMDb (don't even think about Wikipedia--even the Italian Wiki) is simply too unreliable to be of much use. It depends on how much depth you want in your essay. My method was to obtain basic facts from reliable sources and general texts, to view and analyze the films themselves and to then write my own opinions based upon that -- OK for my purposes, but hardly adequate for anything "scholarly." There are some very interesting Italian language resources, but with the language barrier, they aren't of help to an English or other language researcher -- unless you feel like spending hours translating Italian with "Google Translate," which I actually attempted but it's impractical for more than a few sentences at a time.

There are tantalizing texts in Italian -- one I came across was an apparent multi-volume study, Italian Silent Cinema, Aldo Bernardini, Vittorio Martinelli, (New ERI, Turin, 1992). With all of the international participation in the annual Pordenone festival and Le Giornate del Cinema Muto ("The Griffith Project" is an outgrowth of that) it would be nice to see more of the original Italian research on silent film be reproduced in English translations.

There is an Italian National Film Museum website that I recently came across, but have not explored much, and it has information on Italian silent film and film restoration that is at least partly in English,

http://www.museonazionaledelcinema.it/m ... aurati.php" target="_blank" target="_blank

This may not be very helpful, but I find

Gian Piero Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano. Volumo primo: Il cinema muto 1895-1929, Rome 1979

a very good book on the subject. I picked up a 2001 Editori Riuniti reprint for a song in Bologna some years ago.

An English translation of Brunetta's book was published earlier this year by the Princeton University Press.

Jim Gettys

About Mario Caserini "Last days of Pompeii" you can visit my website, where you can find an article (in three parts) on the various 1913's versions on "Last days of Pompeii". The articles are in italian language, this is the babelfish transation: http://it.babelfish.yahoo.com/translate ... rl=Traduci" target="_blank" target="_blank

Sorry, maybe too late.

Jim Gettys wrote:An English translation of Brunetta's book was published earlier this year by the Princeton University Press.

There's not a lot published in English. As Jim noted, Brunetta's book looks like your best best: here's a link to the PUP listing, and the googlebooks has some of the chapter on the silent era online.

A quick search also turned up Pierre Sorlin's Italian national cinema 1896-1996, 1996. [Routledge]

Although it might not be very relevant to your essay, another book on early Italian cinema is Angela Della Vacche's Diva: defiance and passion in early Italian cinema, 2008. [University of Texas Press]

Also somewhat tangential, in the edited volume Dante, cinema, and television (2004) there's an essay called "Early Cinema, Dante's Inferno of 1911, and the Origins of Italian Film Culture".

Academic journals are probably your best option ...

Thank you all. Those books were completely new to me, I will try to find them from libraries before buying. Big thanks also to "inpenombra", your article seems very interesting.

I'm sure I will find what I'm looking for.

This is the link to the restoration of The Last Days of Pompei (Ambrosio 1913) by Museum of Cinema in Turin, english version:

http://www.museonazionaledelcinema.it/m ... id=15&l=en" target="_blank

Also worth looking at is Epics, Spectacles and Blockbusters: a Hollywood History, by Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale, an intelligent, well-researched and very readable history of the epic film, which includes a fair bit on the early Italian epics (including Gli Ultimi Giorni di Pompeii), albeit from the American exhibition perspective.