Silent film FRATE SOLE (1918) on the life of St. Francis | Ferruccio Bartoletti organ improvisation

“Frate Sole” (Brother Sun) is a 1918 Italian silent film about the life of St. Francis of Assisi, written by Mario Corsi and directed by Ugo Falena, with set design and costumes by Duilio Cambellotti. It was a great production, which achieved enormous success. This video presents the film with the organ musical commentary of the Ferruccio Bartoletti, performed on May 12, 2019, in the Church of Agia Kyriaki Chrysopolitissa (The Church at St Paul’s Pillar) in Pafos (Cyprus). “St. Francis in Music & Images”, is a reduced edition of this film concert proposed in thirteen locations of Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Cyprus, Greece, Syria and Lebanon, with live improvised musical commentary on the organ within the Terra Sancta Organ Festival, on the occasion of the celebrations for the 800 years of the Pilgrimage of Peace of Saint Francis to the Middle East and the Levant. The original captions were translated from Italian into English, Arabic, Hebrew and Greek. For this film, an original soundtrack was composed by Luigi Mancinelli, which was performed live with the orchestra, because at that time there was still no technical possibility to insert audio into a video. Usually, however, the musical commentary on silent films was entrusted to the improvisation of the piano or organ. The Terra Sancta Organ Festival thus wanted to recover a musical practice as it was in use at the beginning of cinematography. Ferruccio Bartoletti: classically trained musician, he was among the first in Italy to create interactive improvisational works that combine narration, poetry and image. For many years, in addition to his normal concert activity as an interpreter, he has in fact dedicated himself to the sound reconstruction of cinematographic films of the early 1900s, by Italian and foreign authors, proposing the traditional figure of the improvising instrumentalist of that period. In 2016 he was appointed by the Bishop of the diocese of Massa-Carrara-Pontremoli titular organist of the Cathedral of Massa. IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT Dear friends, in these hard times for the organization of live concerts, the growth of a festival like ours depends on social media such as YouTube and Facebook.

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