Viaggio in Caucaso e Persia
R / K / P: Mario Piacenza. It 1910
Print: Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino
Ital. and Engl. intertitles

“With the advent of cinema, and travel films in particular, the world suddenly seemed to shrink at dizzying speed. Mario Piacenza (1884-1957), a textile manufacturer from Biella, in Piedmont, with a passion for mountaineering, travel, and photography, was an exemplar of this ruling class, firmly rooted in its own region and at the same time involved in a dynamic and romantic expansion into the outside. In 1910, when he filmed the scenes of Viaggio in Caucaso e Persia, Mario Piacenza was 26, and shared with his brother Guido (1881-1939), himself a famous balloonist, the management of their thriving family wool business as well as a love of mountain climbing. Although the Matterhorn would always remain Mario’s favourite mountain, that summer he planned an expedition to a more exotic destination: the Caucasus Mountains, most of whose peaks were still unexplored.”
Museo Nazionale del Cinema

“In July of 1910 Mario Piacenza (…) set out on a journey to the Caucasus and Persia, along with Gino Galeotti, Giuseppe Levi and three Valle d’Aosta guides. The expedition ended in mid-November.
The scenes shot on this solitary journey teem with life. More than landscapes or local colour, what strikes the modern viewer is the portrayal of people, their actions, their gaze, and above all their rapport with the foreign eye of the film camera. The inhabitants of an entire village pose outside their mud homes; the bustle of traffic animates the broad streets of Tbilisi, overlooking the river with its mills, and the cheeky face of a little boy stares defiantly into the lens; politicians in Teheran make their stately entry into a Parliament opened only four years earlier, while veiled women walk cautiously, concealed from the eyes of the world; the chaos of the markets in Bukhara and Samarkand tells an intricate web of micro-stories, amid a riot of fabrics that cries out for colour film. Though spontaneous in their capture of unexpected moments, the footage frequently displays Piacenza’s instinct for formal composition and a particular taste for slow, contemplative panoramas. His shots of the oil wells in Baku, for instance, reveal an unforgettable landscape that seems almost the skyline of another planet.
The reconstruction of the film was carried out by Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino in 2017.”
Vimeo

The film restoration:
The reconstruction was based on positive and negative nitrate fragments, unedited and without intertitles, conserved at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin. The main sources used to establish the editing order of the shots and to prepare the texts of the intertitles were the letters written by Mario Piacenza on his travels, now held by the Fondazione Piacenza in Pollone.
Museo Nazionale del Cinema

More films by the Piacenza Brothers on this website:
>>> Climbing and Shooting
>>> Up the River Congo, 1912

Mario Piacenza