‘A santanotte

Introduced by Giuliana Bruno, Notari Scholar

One of the only three known extant features directed by Elvira Notari, Italy’s first and most prolific female film director, ‘A santanotte is a traditional Neopolitan melodrama about a downtrodden young woman forced to marry another man to save the one she loves. With its documentary-like exterior scenes of Naples and familiar stock characters, the film is representative of Notari’s oeuvre, and was a big hit for Dora Films, the family-owned production company that she ran with her husband Nicola.

Restoration Credits
The restoration has been executed by CSC – Cineteca Nazionale, from a safety negative duplicate, with original Italian intertitles, and a nitrate negative duplicate held at the George Eastman Museum, in Rochester, which included some missing sequences of the film. In the absence of a complete original print to use as a reference, the reconstruction of missing intertitles and of the colorized sequences has been made possible by handwritten notes found on the nitrate duplicate’s tails. The restoration was completed at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory between November 2007 and March 2008.