Mostra Internazionale d Arte Cinematografica Venice

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Pre-inaugural Evening (Tuesday, August 29th, 2017) of the 74^th Venice International Film Festival In the Sala Darsena at the Lido: the legendary silent film Rosita (1923) by Ernst Lubitsch, in a vivid new restoration by MoMA, with the support of The Film Foundation, and presented as a world premiere.

Live musical accompaniment by the Mitteleuropa Orchestra directed by Gillian Anderson, from her arrangement of the original score

Rosita (1923, 82’), famed as the single collaboration between two of the giants of the silent screen, the director Ernst Lubitsch and the star Mary Pickford, is the film that has been chosen for the Pre-inaugural evening of the 74^th Venice International Film Festival, which will be held on Tuesday, August 29^th in the Sala Darsena (Palazzo del Cinema) at the Lido.

Rosita, will be screened in a new 4K digital restoration effected by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, with the support of The Film Foundation; this will be the restored version’s world premiere.

The projection of Rosita will feature live music played by the Mitteleuropa Orchestra of Friuli – Venezia Giulia, directed by the musicologist Gillian Anderson, who has reconstructed the film’s original score by working on scores recovered at the Congressional Library in Washington, D.C.

The 74^th Venice International Film Festival, which will be held at the Lido from August 30 to September 9, 2017, is directed by Alberto Barbera and organized by the Biennale, chaired by Paolo Baratta.

Rosita is set in a mythical Spain where an engagingly lecherous King (Holbrook Blinn) has cast his eye on a popular but provocative street singer (Mary Pickford).  She, in turn, yearns for the handsome young nobleman (George Walsh, brother of the celebrated director Raoul Walsh), who has rescured her from the angry king’s gaurds and has been condemned to a dungeon for his troubles.

Following the American success of his German historical epics (Madame DuBarry, Anna Boleyn), Ernst Lubitsch was invited to Hollywood by Mary Pickford to direct her in what would become her first adult role, as a street singer of Seville who attracts the flattering but inconvenient interest of the King of Spain (Holbrook Blinn). The results are a thoroughly enchanting blend of the “cast of thousands” period films that Lubitsch had been making in Germany and his emerging interest in bittersweet romantic comedy. The film was, by all accounts, a major critical and commercial success on its first release, but in later years Pickford turned against it, for reasons that still remain mysterious, and decides to allow the film to decay (she did, however, preserve reel four, for reasons no less mysterious). Rosita vanished from circulation until a nitrate print was discovered in the Russian archives and repatriated by the Museum of Modern Art in the 1960s. A safety preservation negative was made from the nitrate print, but no further work was done on the film because of the expense and difficulty of recreating the English intertitles.  Happily, a copy of a complete continuity script, which includes all of the intertitles, surfaced in the collection of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Using the titles in Pickford’s preserved fourth reel as a template, new intertitles have been created to match the original. Working with this new material, MoMA has recreated this celebrated but severely damaged film in a form as close as possible to its original release. 

This film survives as an incomplete nitrate print with Russian intertitles, now lacking the final reel. Fortunately, the Museum’s preservation program previously made a full safety dupe negative and those two sources have been combined to yield the full Russian distribution version. We have also had access, through the Pickford Foundation, to the fourth reel that Mary Pickford copied from her own domestic print, which has been our guide to recreating the original English intertitles. The project began with a 4K wetgate scan of the incomplete nitrate print plus the final reel from the safety dupe negative. Digital restoration of the image would included removal of white dirt, scratches and other defects printed into the source materials, minor image stabilization where appropriate, and grading of the image to restore the original gray scale. The final step was output to a 35mm polyester preservation negative, and the creation of DCPs for exhibition in theaters not equipped for film. Musicologist Gillian Anderson has recreated the original theatrical score, working from the music cue sheets surviving at the Library of Congress. MoMA will produce a full symphonic recording of this score for use in venues that cannot provide live music.