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@fed
un incentive pro-diva films de la însuși guy maddin:
When on a shopping spree for anguish, rapture, martyrdom, comas, counts, rapes, bastards, orphans, dogaressas, philtres, sirens, suicides, mistaken identities, flower festivals, and sudden fatal loves -- even a tattooed baby -- one need look no further than the Italian Diva Film, a vast clearinghouse of art nouveau decors and nineteenth-century melodramatic devices still in wondrous working order.
[T]hese diva films, which flourished on the continent between 1910 and 1920, starred cinema's first divinities: Lyda Borelli, Pina Menichelli, Francesca Bertini, and other Olympian ancestors of the merely mortal stars of Hollywood history.
Penny-dreadfully named -- Satanic Rhapsody, Royal Tiger, The Painting of Osvaldo Mars -- and aggressively assembled by genuine but forgotten Italian auteurs, the diva films are hugely watchable. Packed with melodramatic non sequiturs, dazzling and long-abandoned editing tropes, and sometimes outright peculiar toning and tinting strategies, these compact little dramas -- most of them run under an hour -- induce the most arcane intoxication.
-- Guy Maddin
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