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Earlier in 1909, Vitagraph had made a studio-based King Lear, directed by and starring Billy Ranous and also featuring Julia Swayne Gordon as Cordelia. But the Lear we are going to see now

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emerged from a very different stable and was driven by a very different set of performance priorities. [STIRRING MUSIC]

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It does perhaps remember the Vitagraph production in having the fool occupy Lear's throne in its opening sequence. The first and most striking thing to observe about the film is its startling use of colour.

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Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised by this since Giovanna Fossati of the University of Bologna has estimated that between 1895 and 1930s, something approaching 80% of films were projected in something other than plain black

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and white. Judging by how particular contemporary comments on the use of colour could be, this estimate may be on the high side.

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But certainly many films that were distributed in coloured prints now only survive in a black and white version, so it is easy to be misled about the overall numbers. This is partly because the preservation of colour in films

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from the presound era is a tricky business, since the dyes used were highly mutable and prone to fade, even under exposure to the electric arc tones of the projector on its early exhibition run.

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And also because the preservation of colour has not always been the archiving priority it has more recently become. Sometimes, it was simply that it was a black and white print

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of a film that was archived, the coloured versions seeming to be a slightly overdecorated or even diversionary alternative from a purist point of view. But this exotically coloured film has survived more or less

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intact, although with a few sequences that have clearly been damaged and replaced by the equivalent section from another merely mono-tinted print. Since not much is commonly known about the use of colour in this

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period, I'm going to delay discussing other aspects of the film for a couple of scenes in order to explain what some of the options were for colouring and how the particular effect we are watching here was produced.

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Three of the most commonly used ways of applying dyes to a black and white print after photographic processing were hand colouring, stencilling, and tinting. And we're actually now looking at a violet-tinted section

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of footage here that has been spliced in to replace a damaged section of the more varied and excitingly garish stencilling in evidence for most of the film. We've also seen some slightly faded examples of colour tinting

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in the Clarendon Tempest, in which whole sections of film, usually corresponding to a scene, but also including the title cards, have been dipped in a solution of aniline dye to give

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particular scenes a mood-evocative effect and to vary the way in which the scenes unfold. Hand colouring was a much more painstaking process than tinting, involving the manual application of a colour with

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a brush one frame at a time. Since the colour might vary slightly in intensity frame to frame, hand-coloured prints usually look a bit flickery in their blocks of colour when shown at a standard projection

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speed. What we see both here and in The Merchant of Venice that appears later on this DVD, however, has been stencilled. And in fact, the production Company, Film d'Arte Italiana,

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like the French Company Pathé, also were known for their stencilled films. Stencilling was a pretty intricate business. It involved using multiple copies of the print,

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as many copies, in fact, as you wanted colours on the final projection print. In practise, this might mean anything up to six prints could be used as stencils to produce six different colours.

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The bits to be coloured, say, blue, would be cut out from each frame of the stencil print designated for the blue wash. This intricate cutting had been done by hand.

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But by 1910, when this film was made, a mechanised version of the cutting process was being introduced using a pantograph and a needle. And then when each stencil for each colour had been cut,

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they would be attached in turn positioned with great precision over the projection print and the colour dye could then be applied. Again, this was initially done by hand with a brush.

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But by 1910, this process too was mechanised so that the print with stencil in place on top could be run across a dye pad that dispensed its colour automatically. Although, preparing the stencils was a complex business,

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once they had been prepared, then multiple prints for the distribution circuit could, of course, be run off from each set of stencils with minimal extra hassle or expense.

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And the film we're looking at here is, I think, the result of five colour stencils and five separate colour washes. Although, the effect achieved of course exceeds five different

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colour tones since any one colour will take differently on different shades of grey on the black and white print. The company that produced this film was called Film d'Arte Italiana or FAI.

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It had been founded in Rome by Charles Pathé in 1909 as the Italian equivalent to Filmdas in France. It shared FilmDas' aim to nurture a literary and theatrical cinema as a prestigious alternative

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to a more populist agenda. Other Italian film studios of the time, Cines, Milano, Ambrosio, and in due course also Rodolphe Film also made Shakespearean films to offer a star vehicle

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to particular actors and to confirm their own cultural pedigree. But it was strategically part of FAI's charter to distance itself from more downmarket moving

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picture entertainments. And Shakespeare was then, as now, quite useful tool in establishing such credentials. They made four Shakespeare films in total.

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As ever, of course, they sound somehow more delicious in Italian, Otello, Re Lear, Il Mercante Di Venezia, and Giulietta e Romeo, also sometimes known as Romeo e Giulietta.

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In their effort to court elitist cultural associations and simultaneously to celebrate in recorded form something about Italian culture, they even dabbled in making films of Verdi operas.

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The idea of silent opera films is likely to raise a smirk not unrelated to that silent Shakespeare is prone to elicit. Of course, at the moment of exhibition,

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though, neither Shakespeare films nor opera films from this period were genuinely silent. They would have been accompanied, as a bare minimum, by live music and also, at times,

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by a live lecturer or actor in the venues that could afford such a thing. To match the prestige of the dramatic material, they needed prestigious names.

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And in both this film and The Merchant of Venice, we have Ermete Novelli, who was an eminent tragedian and star of the Italian classical stage. He has a powerful screen presence

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and is marvellously expressive. He was sufficiently a name to have constituted a significant selling point for the films in himself.

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Though, as seen on the screen, his acting style does sometimes feel as if it is played out in too high a key for the arena in which he is now working. His grand pantomimic gestures seem designed to reach the back

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row of a large theatre, untempered by the awareness of the film camera at far closer range than that. George Orwell in his essay on "Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool," instructs us to, and I quote, "shut your eyes and think

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of King Lear, if possible, without calling to mind any of the dialogue." He goes on, "what do you see? A majestic old man in a long black robe with flowing white

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hair and beard wandering through a storm, cursing the heavens in company with a fool and a lunatic." Presently, the scene shifts and the old man still cursing, still understanding nothing,

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is holding a dead girl in his arms. The point seems to be that images from Lear are so seared into our collective visual imagination that the play can be more or less evoked

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as a series of cameo pictures. Part of its poetry, if we use the word with some licence, is inherent in its story, its pictures even. And so its broader dramatic poetry still

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has some existence independent of its words. Nicci Gerrard, writing in The Observer, suggested that watching this film is a bit like watching Orwell's imagined version, the one that stays with you after

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you've left the theatre, stripped of coherent narrative sense and boiled down to a series of crystallised tableaus. Certainly, this film pares away a lot of the busyness of the play, including

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the whole of the Gloucester subplot, of course, and is happy to offer itself as a series of heart-wrenching, painterly, iconic moments or even visual clichés that attach to the play, touchingly animated

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by heartfelt performances. In contrast with Novelli, the actress who plays Cordelia has often been commended not only for her beauty, but also for the eloquent interiority of her screen acting

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style. In 1910, Francesca Bertini was an emerging star. She had come to prominent notice the previous year in Il Trovatore and was set to become one of the greatest

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divas of early Italian cinema in films such as Odette, Assunta Spina, La Perla Del Cinema, and indeed, Film d'Arte Italiana's own Romeo e Giulietta. It's perhaps worth pointing out that we only ever get

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a fully fixed, frontally placed camera in this film and that all entrances and exits are blocked, as if theatrically for a standard proscenium arch stage. So these characters would never, for example,

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exit towards the camera, which would implicitly breach the assumed fourth wall. In the Clarendon Tempest, both Ferdinand and Ariel do, at times, scuttle out of shot past the camera,

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disrupting the more usual pattern of theatrical style entrances and exits. But The Tempest oscillates in its medium allegiances, sometimes wishing to advertise a self-conscious staginess,

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at other times celebrating its cinematic distinction from theatre. So there is room for such moments of untheatrical choreography in that film.

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This Film d'Arte Italiana Lear, by contrast, is less conflicted in its allegiances, signalling its reverence for the stage in its casting, in its acting in its blocking, its shooting style, and even its editing,

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since it makes no distinction between scenes and shots. The tone of the whole film comes into focus the more clearly by thinking about this Lear-Cordelia reunion scene alongside the equivalent seen in the American Vitagraph

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Lear. In this Italian film, the set has been designed to create two planes of action, one in the foreground and another slightly more in depth

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of field and space and time are allowed for the acting, which is certainly never rushed. Nothing is allowed to distract from Bertini's beguiling grace, Novelli's gradual transport, and the high seriousness

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of their reunion. In the Vitagraph equivalent scene, by contrast, there is a slight tonal collision between what takes place at the centre of the action and what is visible

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at the edge of the frame. That is, while Lear and Cordelia are reunited, a loosely strung lyre is being played with exaggerated sentimentality by a bearded servant who

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plucks away, eyes dreamily skyward, like an improbable angel. After the big father-daughter embrace, they then exit frame left, leaving the lyre player

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with a brief moment of solo on-screen time in which to continue his lyrical accompaniment. It might be thought a daring decision to risk detracting from the emotional intensity

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of the Lear-Cordelia reunion by adding the eye-catching distraction of a lyre player. But it was not the first time that Vitagraph had included a potentially comic touch

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in the corner of a big scene, having already absurdly and wonderfully inserted a snoozing senator into the high drama of the capital scene in Julius Caesar.

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The studio was clearly aware of the fun that could be had by juxtaposing dramatically contrasting tones of action within a frame. And this dalliance with a skittishness in such contexts

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perhaps suggests a slight uncertainty about how best to pitch the register for the big moments. The Film d'Arte Italiana Lear feels none of this potential embarrassment

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about the earnest, silent gesticulations of its tragedians and emotionally charged character of the climactic scenes, and so allows itself time to try and bring off such effects without apology,

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dilution, or distraction. Here again, as at the end of the last scene also, the stencil print must have been damaged, so the same section from a tinted print

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has been spliced in to replace it. The hyper-intensity of the stencilling is a wonderful thing, but it has to be admitted that it's also more easeful on the eye to be given a rest from it sometimes,

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as here. Coming up now, we have one of those grand visual Shakespearean moments that has become enshrined in the common consciousness and silent Shakespeare films

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necessarily trade upon their capacity to give life to such moments. Like the picture of Macbeth holding the bloody daggers or Hamlet holding the skull, the image of Lear

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staggering downstage, or here, out of depth of field into the foreground with Cordelia dead in his arms now almost has a life of its own, almost bigger than the play from which it springs.

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It's the moment that Samuel Johnson declared unbearable, a scene that he could not bring himself to return to read again until he simply had to to be able to edit the play.

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The simplicity of Laura Rossi's score for this film, written for solo piano, offers its own modestly unintrusive, almost painfully innocent commentary on Lear's agony in the face of the daughter whom he would like

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to believe is still breathing, but who isn't and who won't again.