A masterpiece of silent cinema: this is how the film "La Grazia", based on the short story "At night", written by Grazia Deledda in 1894, has been defined since its release in 1929. Restored in 2005 by our newspaper on a project by Sergio Naitza and Susanna Puddu, embellished with the original soundtrack created by the composer Romeo Scaccia, the film is given a new life as “The rediscovered grace - from silent to sound”. This is the title of the restored film, enriched by four insights, which will be re-proposed on Wednesday 20 October at 9 pm at the Teatro Doglio in Cagliari with piano accompaniment by Maestro Scaccia.

Three cities

The screening, organized by Isre, is part of the programming of the international conferences of Deleddian studies which will be held from tomorrow to Friday in Cagliari, from 25 to 27 November in Sassari and from 9 to 11 December in Nuoro. The enhancement of the film begins when the journalist Sergio Naitza, then the author of L'Unione Sarda, edited a series of 25 films that told about Sardinia. «I would have liked to have also included“ La Grazia ”, but the films available were in very bad condition - he explains -. The series was a great success, so I proposed to the publisher Sergio Zuncheddu to restore this film to return it to Sardinian culture, both nationally and internationally ».

Transpositions

The novel "Di notte" was the protagonist of a series of transpositions: in 1921 it became an opera libretto (also signed by Deledda) and made its debut as an opera in 1923 with the title "La Grazia". In 1929 the cinema arrives. The film, directed by Aldo De Benedetti, tells of Elias (Giorgio Bianchi), a young man who arrives in a mountain village in Sardinia for an inheritance. Meet Simona (silent film diva Carmen Boni), a shepherdess she falls in love with and promises to marry on her return. During the trip he is the victim of an accident, he wakes up in the house of a rich woman (Ruth Weyher) who seduces and holds him. But the man has not forgotten Simona, who meanwhile gives birth to a daughter, the result of a night of love between the two. Captured by Simona's family, Elias will be sentenced to death for dishonoring her. «It is a film with a strong melodramatic impact, played on environmental contrasts (the pastoral world and the bourgeois one), on psychologies that revolve around the primary feelings of love, hate, revenge, forgiveness - explains Naitza -. In the visual short circuit between nineteenth-century naturalism and deco interiors there is the hand of Melkiorre Melis, author of the sketches and costumes, in turn inspired by those that Giuseppe Biasi created for the opera ».

Music

Scaccia's contribution is precious: "The expressiveness, the emotional charge that remains in the characters and in the stage action, inspire an evocative music, the result of numerous suggestions, which follows the film merging with it, capturing and making its character nuances its own of the characters".

Alessandra Ghiani

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