Salambo
(Arturo Ambrosio, Italy 1911, 65 min., 16mm)
The Battle at Elderbush Gulch
(D. W. Griffith, US 1913, 28 min., 35mm)
While natural light provided the best illumination for early motion picture stock, and Edison constructed his Black Maria studio to take advantage of this, filmmakers soon decided that the constraints of shooting on sets limited the types of stories they could tell, so some decided to move their crews outdoors. Thus, the epic was born. For the first two decades of cinema, the longest films produced were contained on two reels, or about thirty minutes. In the teens, Italian directors mined their historical tales for big budget productions that lasted twice as long, if not longer. In this program, one such example, Salambo, about a soldier who falls in love with a princess in North Africa, is paired with The Battle at Elderbush Gulch, one of Griffith’s precursors to his epic films, shot on location in the San Fernando Valley.
Live piano accompaniment by Dr. Philip Carli.