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Another Shakespeare film from the Film d'Arte Italiana stable, again directed by Lo Savio, and again starring the classical stage actor Ermete Novelli. [THEME MUSIC]

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Laura Rossi says that in the score and instrumentation for this film, she was wanting to pay tribute to forms of music that had some connection with the fictional world of the action.

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The music's up tempo, even jaunty rhythms conspire with the significant number of eye dizzying jump cuts to create a slightly jerky, almost comic effect in the world we now view.

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[UPBEAT MUSIC] The jump cuts were not, of course, part of the film as originally exhibited, but testify to a few frames missing here and there that

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have been damaged beyond the point of possible restoration and so have had to be cut out creating mini ellipses in the action. As always, the prosaic matter of material contingency

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plays its part in the history of a film print. Now there's a little bit of actorly business coming up in which Shylock is insulted and even I think struck by a haughty Antonio

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and left a frame there, recovers his composure with impressive speed, feigns a sycophantic smile to his guests, but then allows himself a surreptitious, incensed look straight to camera in order to make clear

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where he really stands in relation to these would be borrowers. Only a few frames of that look survive. So you need to watch carefully to catch it.

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There it is. It's a sort of straight to camera soliloquy replacing look that Hector Dion would, in due course, make much more of as a wonderfully evil Edmund who

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repeatedly courts a conspiratorial intimacy with the audience in the Thanhouser multi-reel King Lear of 1916. And more recently, of course, it's the same look that has

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become more or less enshrined as part of the standard repertoire of a whole host of screen Iagos and Richard III's. But here we have Novelli employing that fourth wall breaching look in 1910.

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In this studio-based scene, we now see Novelli's Shylock as the voraciously mercenary and vengeful Jew, and Rossi's portent laden score at this point collaborates with the film,

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I think, in demonising Shylock, or at least of exposing the dramatic contrast between his public and his private selves. [GENTLE GUITAR PLUCKING]

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Novelli has to do a bit of improvisatory business here in order to recover the bag of money that's accidentally fallen from the table. [SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]

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And I love his crab-like exit there. [MELLOW MUSIC] Since Jessica is about to appear in order to elope with her Lorenzo, it's perhaps best

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to be clear about the credits, since occasionally elsewhere, Francesca Bertini has been miscredited as playing Portia in this film. As you will see as the film unfolds,

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the not inconsiderable Olga Giannini Novelli, Ermete Novelli's own wife, cuts a very different figure from Bertini. And so it's easy in this case to be categorically clear

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that it is Jessica, not Portia, that Bertini plays. [MUSIC INTENSIFIES] Like the Film d'Arte Italiana King Lear, this Merchant of Venice has also been colour stencilled,

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although on a slightly more limited palette than was the case for Lear. That's to say it will have used fewer separate colour stencils, perhaps only four, I think, for this film,

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and so run fewer colour washes across the projection print. It's also true, however, that the dyes used were very mutable, fugitive even, as Giovanna Fossati more poetically puts it.

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And so we are certainly looking at a much more colour muted, faded version of the film than early audiences would have been privy to on its first international distribution in 1910 or on its commercially minded re-release in 1913.

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But despite being one colour fewer than Lear, this film had something to boast which the Lear film could not. And that was authentic location shooting. Though some scenes are shot in studio space,

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we often escape the confines of the studio to explore the waterways and backdrops of Venice. This was a Merchant of Venice shot in situ. And in relation to Shakespeare, this

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was the ace up the sleeve of the Italian film industry more generally. A bunch of locations that were not only beautiful filmic backdrops, but were authentically Shakespearean

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in terms of the location of the action. I'll talk a little more about this in a moment. But I think I'll just let you enjoy Novelli's distress at the loss of his daughter and treasure

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first. [FRANTIC MELODY] Film d'Arte Italiana's first Shakespeare production had been a one reel Othello made in 1909 and also shot in Venice.

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The film itself has not survived, but some of the advertisements for it have. And so we know that the location of the shoot was one of its key selling points

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on the international market. Here was a drama shot in the very city in which it was partly set. The distributor's advertisement for the American release

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of the film boasted and I quote, "Many have seen Othello, but never in such a setting. The stage has been noted for wonders of scenic fidelity. But to enact this marvellous tragedy along the very waters

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and in the very gardens and palaces, as the immortal Shakespeare pictures them with his versatile pen, is to add an interest which could not be obtained in any other way."

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It was a marketing strategy that obviously worked since the company went on to dispatch a cast and crew to Venice and Verona respectively for the shooting of this Merchant of Venice

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and of their 1911 Romeo and Juliet, which again starred Francesca Bertini. The Romeo and Juliet film was more carefully choreographed than its predecessors,

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shot on attractive waterways, little bridges, courtyards, and stone staircases, and dominated throughout by a Catholic iconography. It was also more sensibly paced than the company's Lear

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and Merchant of Venice, since it had the luxury of unfolding not over one reel but now over two. The benefits of the longer length are obvious, leaving more space and time for memorable effect.

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It is overall a film that demands and holds the attention in ways beyond the scope of its predecessor films from the same stable. Over this final trial scene in which

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Shylock demands his pound of flesh, I'll just say a few words about how films in this period were able to enjoy an international distribution across different language communities.

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One of the reasons that Shakespeare films from continental European countries were able to compete on even terms was because the international distribution

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of films in different language prints was a relatively simple process. Film prints would typically be exported without their title cards and without any sections of film that depicted letters

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or other written material. Upon arrival in the country of exhibition, a new set of translated title cards in the appropriate language would be shot and spliced in,

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in accordance with the instructions about content and placement sent by the production company or distributor. Since import duties were paid per foot of film,

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calculating the total footage without the intertitles in this way could represent a considerable saving. Despite the slight discrepancies in prints that occasionally resulted when cards were spliced back in in slightly

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different places, the ease with which silent Shakespeare films could receive a multilingual distribution encouraged continental French, German, Danish, and Italian filmmakers to invest their energies

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in adapting Shakespearean material relatively frequently. So it is, for example, that the NFTVA's surviving print of the Vitagraph King Lear happens to have German title cards, which

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is simply an accident of which print happens to have survived. [THEME MUSIC]