Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Silent Merchant in Silent Venice

Merchant of Venice [Il Mercante di Venezia]. Dir. Gerolamo Lo Savio. Perf. Ermete Novelli, Francesca Bertini, and Olga Giannini Novelli. 1910. Silent Shakespeare. DVD. Image Entertainment, 2000.
This 1910 Merchant of Venice, made in Italy, is beautiful. Each frame has been painstakingly (at least, I assume it was more painstaking than slap-dash) colorized, often with amusing effects.

I've edited the twelve-minute original down to about five and a half minutes, and I've added a soundtrack from The Klezmer Conservatory Band (to buy their amazing, astonishing album, see below). Enjoy the color, enjoy the acting, and enjoy the fact that it ends (in both my edited version and in the original) right after the courtroom scene.

Links: The Film at IMDB.

Click below to purchase the film from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

 —The Tempest