This year’s Piazzetta Pasolini screening opens with the Mitchell & Kenyon local topical film Whitsuntide Fair at Preston, which will transport us to the setting of our show, a fairground, and to the venue for film screenings in 1906, a travelling cinematograph tent. The films in our programme – hilarious comic scenes, moving dramas by Albert Capellani, a fascinating view of Japan by Camille Legrand and Maurice Hache as well as the final féerie with its gorgeous polychrome apotheosis – all come from the stock of a travelling cinematograph, the Imperiator Bio-Cinématograph Géant operated by a Belgian showman. In 1906, Léon van de Voorde, owner of the legendary Grand Théâtre Morieux (“Mécanique, Pittoresque et Maritime”), acquired a projector and films from Pathé Frères; his tent seated an audience of 600 and had a screen of 100m2. In 2006 the estate of the de van de Voorde family was rediscovered in a warehouse in Belgium, a time capsule containing 350 film posters, 92 films from the years 1902-1909 (all of them produced by Pathé though apparently van de Voorde had also contacts with Gaumont and Ambrosio), machines, some 3,000 elements of sets, puppets and dioramas of the mechanical theatre and two spectacular tent frontages. A part of this treasure, known today as the Morieux Collection, was exhibited in 2013 during Il Cinema Ritrovato in Biblioteca Salaborsa. The most precious films rediscovered are certainly several unique prints of dramas by Albert Capellani, confirming his pioneering role as a master of mise-en-scène and fluid narrative.

Mariann Lewinsky