Thanks to the determination of a young student from Rimini, recently graduated in Dams at Bologna with a thesis on Corrado D’Errico, it is today possible to show one of the extremely rare examples of futurist cinema.

“However, if we compare the images of this short film with the frames published on Cinema in December 1952 as appendix to Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s article on Abstract cinema, and also the ones included at the end of Carlo Belloli’s study on avant-garde cinema, we can only come up with the conclusion that the short (absolute, or according to another definition, abstract) movie which concludes Rivista LUCE n. 2 is La gazza ladra by Corrado D’Errico (which Belloli called Visual Music), the visual transposition of Rossini’s masterpiece under the same title. […] La gazza ladra was made by using different techniques: classic animation, but also animated cartoons produced with the cancellation technique, the spreading of material – mostly paper clips – directly on the film, frames (or rayogrammes), and maybe something else. The movie starts with the outline of a trumpet and a sphere on the upper right corner, from which white concentric circles emanate, resembling waves. Is this a suggestion of the propagation of sound, or music? Who knows! We can also suggest that the movie starts with the sound of a trumpet (or another wind instrument) in the overture.

[…] We can infer that the production of La gazza ladra was made possible in the Istituto LUCE’s laboratories only after the updating of technical equipment in the Special Effects and Animation department, carried out in 1934.

Silvio Celli, Cinegrafie, VI, n. 9, 1996