Both L’Italia s’è desta and Napoli sirena della canzone are compilations of fragments of several unidentified films by Elvira Notari. A diligent comparison with film stills from lost works by Notari would without any doubt allow us to identify a good part of the source films of these fragments; but do we want or need to know? Their secondary life as found footage collages suits them so well. No longer embedded in a coherent narrative they appear even more suggestive and intense, like the texts of the songs they used to accompany as visuals in the late 1920s.

Incidentally, of the hand coloured films so often mentioned in the Notari lore, nothing has survived except several scenes contained in these two compilations.

Mariann Lewinsky