LA GUERRA E IL SOGNO DI MOMI

The students of the Composition course of the Ravenna Conservatory, at the end of the training project conducted by prof. Paolo Marzocchi, will set to music a very singular work by Segundo de Chomón, pioneer of fantasy cinema. The War and the Dream of Momi, a medium-length film shot in 1917 and restored by the Turin Cinema Museum, is in fact the result of the Italian collaboration of Segundo de Chomón with Giovanni Pastrone, director of Cabiria, here as screenwriter.

Little Momi is at home with his mother and grandfather, while his father left as a soldier. He lives in a comfortable and elegant house but in the letters that arrive from the front, he hears stories about the horrors and violence of war. Some things can't be shut out the door. So one evening, falling asleep on the sofa, he is woken up by his favorite puppets, Trik and Trak who, after becoming animated, begin a military escalation. Stop-motion masterpiece by special effects wizard Segundo De Chomón.

Restoration carried out by the National Cinema Museum of Turin. The intervention was created starting from a defective nitrate print, soaked and toned, preserved by the Cineteca Italiana in Milan, from 35mm safety copies printed in the 1960s and from 16mm material printed in the 1980s preserved by the Turin Museum. The production notebooks and the censorship certificate for the film, documentation materials preserved by the Museum, made it possible to correct editing and captioning errors. The period colors were reproduced by reproducing the tinting and toning techniques used at the time of the film's production. The restoration, dedicated to the memory of Maria Adriana Prolo, was carried out at Bruno Favro's laboratory in Turin in 1991. The National Cinema Museum of Turin and the Strade del Cinema Cultural Association of Aosta have published the edition of the restored film on DVD in the volume Omaggio in musica a Segundo De Chomón (edited by Claudia Gianetto and Enrico Montrosset, 2012 ) Original length: 833 m – Copy length: 762 m – Captions: Italian – Censorship approval: 12583 of 24/3/1917 – First Roman viewing: 15/04/1917