TURIN. In the era of digital films, the restoration of old films remains the last chance to handle those long strips of celluloid that have made generations of spectators dream. It is super-specialized work, which only film libraries and archives are able to do. The Torino Film Festival has built a section around it, «Back to Life», which presents five gems from the past brought back to life. The oldest is “Don Bosco”, shot in 1935 by a Goffredo Alessandrini in his early thirties, a professionalism created between Turin, Castelnuovo and Monferrato (and the Fert-Microtecnica studios for the interiors).
The reconstruction, digitization and cleaning of the image were carried out for the National Corporate Cinema Archive by Ilaria Magni, Diego Pozzato and the manager Elena Testa, with the contribution of the National Cinema Museum, the Cineteca di Bologna and of the American George Eastman Museum in Rochester.
The result will be seen in Screen 3 of the Cinema Massimo – today at 12.15, Thursday 2 at 17 and Friday 3 December at 11.45 – even if the operation starts from afar. Those were still the times of Sergio Toffetti in the role of head of the Ivrea archive.
“We had acquired the entire film stock of the Salesians, which included 500 films of all kinds, including ethnic ones,” says the film historian. “Among those films was Alessandrini’s“ Don Bosco ”, long considered lost. It is an interesting work, which marks Riccardo Gualino’s production debut, even before he founded Lux Film. The subject was by Onorato Castellino, professor of economics at the University and for a certain period president of the Compagnia di San Paolo ».
The budget is considerable, two million lire available, with which 40,000 meters of film are shot (of which only 2,500 are edited). Director Goffredo Alessandrini will tell later: «In the film there is only one professional actor, the others were taken from the street, as they say. But the priests were authentic Salesians, who all lent themselves. I was also so interested in the places where we filmed. I remember certain convents like that of Chieri. And I have in mind that that winter Turin was a snow-white city, but with the sun and the blue sky ».
«The really beautiful parts are the scenes of nature», confirms Sergio Toffetti. «They are shot in a very suggestive, contrasting, almost Macchiaiolo black and white. Giovanni Bosco is played by Gianpaolo Rosmino, a supporting actor in many silent films, such as “But my love does not die”. Until that moment the director Alessandrini had only shot two comedies, while later he would have directed very beautiful films such as “Luciano Serra pilot”, “Giarabub”, “Noi vivi”. Today he is a somewhat forgotten director, and for this very reason the screening of his “Don Bosco” is an excellent opportunity to re-evaluate him and learn about his cinematographic history ».
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