FANGO E GLORIA

The film, made on the occasion of the World War I Centennial and the 90th anniversary of the Luce Historical Archives, tells the story of the millions of young men involved in that tragic event, using as a symbol the very one who will be chosen to represent the huge host of the anonymous fallen: the Unknown Soldier.

In particular, it is the story of Mario, his friends, and his girlfriend. Ordinary boys from the provincial petty bourgeoisie, enthusiastic and full of plans for a future that to many of them will be denied.

Mud and Glory, in addition to to containing a fiction part makes use of repertory material from the Luce Historical Archives, subjected to to coloring and sound procedures to make its enjoyment even more evocative and unprecedented.

The Great War, atrocious and absurd, the first global one, a ferocious steel storm that devastated Europe and in Italy alone broke six hundred and fifty thousand lives and wounded a million soldiers. The first war of machines, men and industries fought from everyone, interventionists and pacifists, from socialists and nationalists, from illiterates and great intellectuals.

"Mud and Glory" recounts it in a particular and unprecedented narrative style. In fact, the film is constructed with fiction and archive footage that continuously interact with each other to the point that the archive no longer represents, as is the practice, only and exclusively the past, the factual, the cold and incontrovertible testimony of what happened, but enters and exits the fictional reconstruction by substantiating it with the pathos of reality and stamping it with the mark of verisimilitude.

Characters migrate from the footage that represents and generates them to the repertory world and vice versa. To accomplish this, to interpenetrate footage and repertory as much as possible, I set as my first goal to "actualize" the historical footage, i.e. to to make it usable as if it had been shot today and not a century ago.

In Luce laboratories and other highly specialized ones, the precious films of the Historical Archives were then scanned in High Definition, restored from scratches and stains, digitally scanned, and digitally captured by varying the speed of scrolling - to eliminate the wavelike fluctuations that the from cameras of the time had and that caused the accelerated and ridiculous to movements we are used to.

Finally, the black-and-white images were colorized, but with full respect for philology and history, using a process that in its results closely resembles the bichromes of the early 20th century, such as Charles Urban's Kinemacolor.

"In search of the lost colors," one might say, to see places, people and things with eyes contemporary with them, to give new life to the thousand nameless faces fixed a hundred years ago on the films preserved in the Istituto Luce Archives and to make them to return to all effects the protagonists of the film's narrative, shoulder to shoulder with the actors who evoke them.

Strong, bold choices, which might not be shared from by those who regret the patina of ancient to images we are all accustomed to, but in which I firmly believe, because they were adopted not out of technical exhibitionism or a desire to captivate the audience, but, on the contrary, because they are necessary and decisive, because they generate drama and allow the viewer to immerse himself in the story in a way that is as vivid and participatory as possible. Yesterday's war is like today's, seeing it to colors and at the right pace accentuates its tragic actuality and induces to reflections on the nature of man.

The color operation, the first carried out in Italy to as far as I know, was taken care of from a pool of twenty "colorists" coordinated and guided from Marco Kuveiller while the elaborate and evocative photography is opera by Stefano Paradiso who shot with a RED camera in 4K.

The film's fictional locations are located to Verona and environs. The trench where some of the most dramatic scenes take place was built on the slopes of Mount Baldo with extraordinary accuracy under the direction of set designer and historical consultant Mauro Quattrina.

The film's protagonist is Mario, an ordinary boy from 1914. He was born in central Italy, in a deliberately unspecified location on the Romagna Riviera. Enthusiastic and full of plans for his future, a future he will never see.

Mario represents the five million of his peers who were called to arms during the three years of the conflict: they came from Sicily, Piedmont, Sardinia, Veneto, from every region of that young Italy, and it was in the mud of the trenches that they learned to to know each other and, according to some historians, even to concretely complete the unity of the nation.

Leonardo Tiberi