The Perfect Intoxication (La Perfetta Ebbrezza)

Italy, 1920. Director Alfredo De Antoni. 12min.

This 235-metre-long reel is the only surviving fragment of Alfredo De Antoni’s 1920 feature film La Perfetta ebbrezza (with the original length being 1550m). It is preserved in its French version in the collections of the British Film Institute and was recently identified by Mariann Lewinsky Strauli, one of the programmers of Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato.

La Perfetta ebbrezza was made in the milieu of Italian cinema of the 1910s, in which a circle of intellectual filmmakers sought to legitimate cinema as an art form. An example of the literature-driven ‘romanzo-film’ (film-novel), it tells the story of Sergio, a man who suffers from ‘amorous spleen’ and spends his life in a vain pursuit of fulfilment. Women come and go, one desire gives way to another, and at the end of each looms deadly boredom… No one can give Sergio what he is looking for, until his desire is finally awakened…

The final (preserved) part of the film shows Sergio, now middle-aged, meeting a beautiful young woman at a party. She is dressed in black, with her face partially covered with a black mask. When Sergio asks after her name, she replies: ‘My name is Mystery’. She then vanishes. Teased by this enigma, Sergio follows her all the way.

Past screenings

Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream – London
Saturday 18 March 2017, 15:00 | Curzon Soho
With introduction by fashion designer Phoebe English. Screened alongside Vertigo (1958).