Tigre Reale Silent Film Concert

The Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago, in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Center of Minneapolis St. Paul and Archives on Screen, Twin Cities, are pleased to present the film concert of Tigre Reale (1916), with a live performance by Italian musicians Stefano Maccagno (piano) and Furio Di Castri (double bass).

Tigre Reale, a silent film made by Giovanni Pastrone in 1916, is a poem about the power of love and the destructiveness of memory, the cliché of the femme fatale and the obsession with guilt. Over the troubled love story between the Russian countess Natka and the young diplomat Giorgio La Ferlita, weighs the tragic past of the woman. In the sweetened and rarefied world of a fictional aristocracy, unattainable Dannunzian characters are driven by extreme passions. The film becomes a luxurious stage for the divine Pina Menichelli, who offers here a symbolic interpretation of the excessive and artificial acting that marks and distinguishes some of Italy’s silent cinema.

The music score harmoniously combines jazz and a classical inspired musical language offering the audience a musical experience distant but at the same time perfectly matching the film’s flow. Stefano Maccagno’s piano echoes late romantic and impressionistic influences in combination with an always balanced contemporary touch emphasizing the film’s dramatic tension. Furio Di Castri jazz scores wonderfully match all interior sequences while his solo improvisations give the filmic narration an intriguing atmosphere.

Year: 1916

Country: Italy

Duration: 78’

Language: silent, with Italian intertitles and English subtitles

The restoration of Tigre Reale was carried out by Museo Nazionale del Cinema of Turin in 1993 starting from a tinted and toned nitrate print, donated by Giovanni Pastrone to Maria Adriana Prolo in 1959. The incomplete nitrate copy was integrated with a dupe negative, also preserved by the Museum. The colors were defined thanks to the indications found in Itala Film production documents and to color samples. The reconstruction of the Italian intertitles was based on documentation and on the original intertitles plates preserved by the Museum. The restoration was carried out by l’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory in 1993.

The documents preserved in the Museo Nazionale del Cinema archives allowed it to be ascertained that this surviving restored version of the film, which is still the only known one,is not the original version but one produced at the time for British distribution, with a completely different ending.

The 4K digitization of the restored version was carried out by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema of Turin at L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory in Bologna in 2018. The musical accompaniment for this edition was composed and performed by Maestro Stefano Maccagno.