Sangue Bleu (1914)

Part of the Festival
Drama Queens: When Melodrama Meets Film
March 8-15, 2024
NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò (24 West 12th Street)

Presented by
NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò
NYU Department of Italian Studies

In collaboration with
Cineteca di Bologna

Program curated by
Mila Tenaglia

A festival of rare and restored films from the Cineteca of Bologna featuring Francesca Bertini and Lyda Borelli. If you think early cinema was silent and in black and white, think again! Many of these films were hand-tinted frame by frame, and had original scores by some of the major composers of the time, such as Mascagni and Pizzetti.

Screening
Sangue Bleu
(Italy, 1914, 64 min., silent)

Directed by
Nino Oxilia

Starring
Francesca Bertini

Live piano accompaniment
Ben Model

In this domestic melodrama, Francesca Bertini stars as a recently divorced princess who suffers humiliation at the hands of her ex-husband’s mistress and a corrupt actor.

Followed by a commentary by
Angela Dalle Vacche, Georgia Institute of Technology
Author of Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema
in conversation with Stefano Albertini (NYU)

In ENGLISH

Besides her extensive work on female actresses in early Italian cinema for her book Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema (Texas U.P. 2008), currently available on Amazon, Angela Dalle Vacche is the author of 3 more monographs, respectively on the representation of history in film; the relation of cinema and painting; and the film aesthetics of French critic Andre Bazin in Andre Bazin’s Film Theory: Art, Science, Religion (Oxford U.P. , 2020), currently available on Amazon.

Special thanks for making this program possible:
Guy Borlée (Il Cinema Ritrovato), Andrea Meneghelli (Cineteca di Bologna), RIPLEY’S FILM​, L’Immagine Ritrovata Laboratory, VIGGO, Eye Filmmuseum