La ribalta
About La ribalta
Maddalena Grandier leaves her husband, the Count of Saint-Vanor, for the actor Claudio Bourgueil. He puts her on the stage and directs her. She becomes the better performer, and the jealous Claudio abandons her. To bring him back she asks him to rehearse a scene of a desperate woman about to die. During that rehearsal she has taken poison.
Cast & crew
More about La ribalta
Mario Caserini directed. Arrigo Frusta adapted Henri de Rothschild's 1909 play La Rampe. Giovanni Vitrotti photographed. Ambrosio, Turin, produced it. Febo Mari plays Claudio Bourgueil. Maria Gasparini, Caserini's wife, plays Maddalena Grandier. Oreste Grandi plays the count. A Finnish filmography also bills Mario Voller Buzzi and Ercole Vaser, without parts, and dates the premiere 5 April 1912. Catalogue length 754 metres. Caserini is the director, not a player in that cast list.
Themes
Making
Caserini directed Gasparini, his wife, as the noblewoman who outgrows the actor who trained her. Frusta's script comes from Rothschild's La Rampe.
Look
Giovanni Vitrotti photographed the Ambrosio production. The surviving piece is the rehearsal in which Maddalena poisons herself.
Preservation
Of the 754-metre original, a fragment of the climax survives, given as 81 metres. A blue-nitrate piece at the Cineteca di Bologna was restored in 2010 with the Museo Nazionale del Cinema. A copy of the fragment is on Wikimedia Commons.
Notes
- What survives is the last scene: she rehearses the death, and the poison is real.
- Stella Dagna's essay on the fragment describes a short blue-nitrate piece of that finale, kept at the Cineteca di Bologna.
- The filmography figure for the surviving piece is 81 metres.
- The commons file of the fragment runs 4 minutes and 27 seconds.
Scenes
- Claudio trains Maddalena, then drops her when her acting overtakes his.
- She asks him to watch a private death scene and has already taken poison.
Influenced by
- La Rampe
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (La ribalta (1912).webm)
