The Sunday Intertitle: Parsifal Guy

PARSIFAL or, in this Dutch-titled copy, PARZIVAL, is a 1912 Italian super-production running a whole fifty minutes. Mario Caserini is the director, who would make THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII the following year. Sadly he died in 1920, which is early, though it might be possible to judge whether he was adapting along with the newish medium if one were to view his later films.

But this one is impressive — it begins with odd things on sticks, which I always think is a smart way to start off. A parade of knights, monks, and such — and they just keep coming. Caserini has found the ideal camera placement — high up and from the back, so these characters keep passing into view, each a delightful surprise in his odd vestments and his own individual odd thing on a stick, and they just keep coming. He manages to keep this shot going for a minute and a half. It’s like how you don’t get bored of the imperial destroyer passing overhead at the start of STAR WARS: you just get more and more impressed. I hate pageantry, normally — God, how I hate it — and this is certainly pageant-adjacent, but it honestly wowed me.

Then, since it worked once, Caserini does it again, to slightly less effect since we’ve already seen these blokes, but this time their passing into the castle or chapel or whatever it is where the Holy Grail is on permanent display. The gang crowding into the doorway put me in mind of the end of Keaton’s COPS.

As the film goes on, we get mysterious disappearance by both dissolve and jump cut, an angel, some barbarians executing a hoax, lovely depth compositions and mismatched left-to-right business where a knight exits screen right then enters a new shot screen right again, as if he’d somehow turned his horse around in an instant. So much to enjoy.

I’m playing it with Wagner as soundtrack, and I’ll let you know how it all turns out.

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