Live Music Duo Jazzes Up Vintage Italian Drama

The visuals will be vintage but the music will be in real time during a showing of the Italian-made silent film Tigre Reale (1916) at 8 p.m. Thursday, February 29, at the Cox Auditorium in the Alumni Memorial Building. It is a unique opportunity to see a restored work of art from more than 100 years ago and hear a live film score performed by a duo of internationally renowned musicians.

Stefano Maccagno, piano, and Furio Di Castri, double bass, will perform the live film score. The jazz and classically inspired music, a new composition by Maccagno, offers the audience a musical bridge from past to present as it adds emotive depth to the story. The piano echoes late romantic and impressionistic influences, emphasizing the film’s dramatic tension, while Di Castri’s jazz style and solo improvisations enhance the narrative.

The event is presented by UT’s Italian program in World Languages and Cultures (WLC), Cinema Studies, and the College of Music in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago (ICIC).

WLC Professor Flavia Brizio-Skov worked with the ICIC to bring the touring production to campus. The institute has been a partner in securing grants for undergraduate Italian language studies, and were impressed with the vibrance of the program at UT.

“Normally a tournèe of this type will only stop in bigger cities,” she said. “But this year the director of the institute decided to visit Knoxville and offer the show to our students and to the public at large.”

Brizio-Skov teaches a special topics course in Italian cinema every spring and Introduction to World Cinema in the fall.

“This year I am teaching a world cinema class on action films and violence,” she said. “We started the semester watching films from the silent era, but the clips that we show are a poor rendition of a silent movie.”

Many archived silent films are not the best quality, but with this restored 4K presentation, the UT audience will be able to experience a preserved film as it would have been shown in 1916, complete with live accompaniment.

Tigre Reale is described as “a poem about the power of love and the destructiveness of memory.” It exemplifies the cliché of the femme fatale and an obsession with guilt. The showing will be a highlight for students in Brizio-Skov’s class, who are learning relevant background aspects of the silent film era.

“They will learn that the film by Giovanni Pastrone—the most famous director of the silent era, author of Cabiria—is derived from a novel by renowned novelist Giovanni Verga,” she said. “They will learn what it meant to be a diva or femme fatale at the time. They will read the story in the target language in our Italian classes before the performance, and finally they will see an archive film that is pretty rare.”

The film depicts a troubled love story between Russian countess Natka, who has a tragic past, and young diplomat Giorgio La Ferlita. In their world of fictional aristocracy, Pina Menichelli portrays Natka in an interpretation of the excessive and artificial acting that is a hallmark of some of Italy’s silent cinema.

“I consider it an operation of cultural archeology,” said Brizio-Skov. “Because it is the only way we have to see the values and the mindset of the people who lived at that time.”

The film’s restoration was carried out by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema of Turin (MNC) and the l’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory in 1993, starting from a tinted and toned nitrate print donated by filmmaker Pastrone to MNC founder Maria Adriana Prolo in 1959. The two institutions collaborated again for the 4K digitization of the restored version in 2018.

“This event will delight cinema studies students, students of Italian, and students of music,” said Brizio-Skov. “And, I am sure, anybody who loves cinema.”

Back to News