Les Derniers / Gli Ultimi

Original 35mm master positive; unseen director’s cut; full hd; analog restoration and digitazation at cinedia, paris; Curator: Luca Giuliani; Technical supervisor: Camille Blot-Wellens; Grading and mastering: Pianetazero, trieste; Companies: la Cineteca del Friuli, Cinemazero, Centro espressioni cinematografiche; released on dvd january 2013 with 103 minutes of extra bonus ( alternative ending, trailer, cuts, actors’ test, tv coverage at the time).

June 2013, the dvd has been awarded at the Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna as best DVD of the year.

RESTORATION OF THE UNRELEASED VERSION

The original material was a first-generation duplicate positive with soundtrack, now conserved, with all the other original material from the film, in the climate-controlled archive of the Cineteca del Friuli.

For preservation purposes a duplicate negative was printed at the Cine Dia laboratory in Paris under the supervision of Camille Blot-Wellens, which was followed by the production of the full-HD master used for the distribution DCP and the Blu-Ray and DVD versions. Only some of the defects from the original printing process were removed (dust and filaments) digitally; to safeguard the integrity of the original it was decided to intervene no further.

The digital material was sent to Pianeta Zero in Trieste, where the soundtrack was cleaned up and colour grading carried out. Crucial in this phase was the contribution made by original set photographer Elio Ciol, who helped in the correction of the digital master colour tones.

THE DVD BOX SET

Fifty years after the film’s release (on January 31st 1963 at the Cinema Centrale in Udine) new life has been breathed into David Maria Turoldo and Vito Pandolfi’s Gli ultimi by the special DVD edition produced by the Cineteca del Friuli, the Centro Espressioni Cinematografiche in Udine and Cinemazero in Pordenone, with the support of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Udine e Pordenone and the Associazione Culturale Il ridotto di Coderno di don Nicolino Borgo and the collaboration of the Presidential Office of the regional government of Friuli Venezia Giulia.

In addition to the official version, the box set contains the unreleased soundtracked version presented by Turoldo and Pandolfi at the 1962 Venice Film Festival. That year the jury awarded the Lion d’Or jointly to Tarkovsky’s L’infanzia di Ivan and Zurlini’s Cronaca familiare, but did not consider Gli ultimi to be worthy of entry to the competition. Despite this, the film was shown in a small theatre on the Lido and some intellectuals and critics who saw it encouraged Pandolfi to make some modifications, which led to the version subsequently released and hitherto known to the public. The restored version shows Gli ultimi as it was presented in Venice and as the public has never seen it before now.

The box set is completed by a rich selection of period material regarding the production of the film, including the trailer, the alternative ending, production and editing out-takes, location inspections and actor’s screen tests carried out by Elio Ciol and Pandolfi. Among the recovered material hitherto unreleased, considerable human interest is to be found in Turoldo’s interviews with Siro Angeli, Riedo Puppo and Andrea Zanzotto for a television programme made in the regional RAI centre by Tullio Durigon. This remarkable background material is completed by an interview with Turoldo for the Canadian TV channel CBC, an interview made in 2002 with Adelfo Galli, who played the role of Checo, and an interview with Elio Ciol filmed in 2012.

A booklet supplied with the DVD contains Turoldo’s story Io non ero un fanciullo,on which Gli ultimi was based, and material on the film and the research carried out thus far. Concentrated in a special section are the comments and considerations of poets who have written about the film: Giuseppe Ungaretti, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Andrea Zanzotto.

The box set also provides links to the pages of the Cineteca del Friuli website devoted to Gli ultimi. They show hitherto unpublished signed documents, handwritten notes, provisional treatments and the screenplays which accompanied the various stages in the making of this film.