Francesca Bertini and Mario Parpagnoli in L’ultimo Sogno, from Al Cinema, January 1923

From Brazil to Italy. Our second non-English language online resource with digitised silent film era journals is Teca Digitale piemontese. This is a collection of digitised resources from Italian libraries and archives. To find the film journals, select ‘Selezionare la tipologia del materiale che si intende consultare’ from the top menu, and ‘Museo Nazionle del Cinema’ from the second menu. Click on ‘Ricerca per Ente’. You will get this list of digitised journals:

• Bollettino di informazioni cinematografiche – 1924-1925
• Bollettino edizioni Pittaluga – 1928-1929
• Bollettino staffetta dell’ufficio stampa della anonima pittaluga – 1929-1931
• Cine Mondo: rivista quindicinale illustrata de cinema – 1927-1931
• Al cinema: settimanale di cinematografia e varietà – 1922-1930
• Eco film: periodico quindicinale cinematografico – 1913
• Figure mute: rivista cinematografica – 1919
• Films Pittaluga: rivista di notizie cinematografiche: pubblicazione quindicinale – 1923-1925
• Il Maggese cinematografico: periodico quindicinale – 1913-1915
• Rassegna delle programmazioni – 1925-1926

There are two icons beside each title. Clicking on that on the far left gives information on the publication. The adjacent icon leads to a list of years for that journal, then click on the blue circle to find the issues within that year (this part of the site requires Java to be installed). Double-clicking on a title opens up the full issue with a menu of pages. There is a suite of tools to resize, rotate or otherwise interrogate the individual pages. There is also a word-search facility, though I had limited success finding things that way (no results for the search term ‘maciste’? Surely not).

The journals are all, of course, in Italian. Content-wise the bias seems to be strongly towards Italian production, though there is plenty of coverage of American production. Photographs are thin on the ground, though do check out Figure mute: rivista cinematografica for a succession of striking colour advertisements. As a range of written resources for the study of silent film on one site, this may well have no equal, even if it’s a bit of a business drilling down to any one page. As indicated, all the journals come from the collection of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin.

My thanks once again to Teresa Antolin for alerting me to this site. Any other non-English silent film journal sites out there (or English ones for that matter)? Do let me know.