1899 Anno Quattro – Recovered and restored: Wide-gauge films from the Mutoscope & Biograph company 1897–1902

Not from the film Battleship Odin Firing All Her Guns. "SMS Odin war das siebente Schiff der Siegfried-Klasse, einer Klasse von acht Küstenpanzerschiffen der Kaiserlichen Marine" (Wikipedia).

Introducono: Bryony Dixon (BFI National Archive), Béatrice De Pâstre (CNC) and Mariann Lewinsky.
Musical interpretation: Stephen Horne.
Sala Mastroianni, Bologna, Il Cinema Ritrovato (Anno Quattro), 22 June 2019.

Bryony Dixon (Il Cinema Ritrovato): "The Biograph group of companies was a remarkable venture in the formative years of moving pictures. Its unique selling point was the quality of its sharp and steady images provided by the large 68 mm format, motorised camera and high frame rate. Biograph set up a company in London and from there, other European cities so guaranteeing the supply of films to its premiere venues in each of the countries. W. K. L. Dickson, one of the Company’s founders, travelled back to England in 1897 after his long career in the US to establish these links but despite being an engineer focused very much on the supply of content, rather than hardware, for the big screen and for its individual viewer, the Mutoscope. The chosen venue for the American Biograph, as it was always known, was London’s Palace Theatre of Varieties where it had an exclusive residency till 1902 for its premiere product. Dickson’s films were characterised by an international outlook with an interest in celebrity, royalty and entertainers, travel, sporting fixtures and industrial and military demonstrations. A European tour took Dickson to Italy in 1898 to film Pope Leo XIII and in 1899 to South Africa to report directly from the Boer war. A collection of 68 mm Biograph films was acquired by the BFI – National Archive in 1969 from the widow of Dr Rolf S. Schultze, formerly curator of the Kodak Museum in Harrow. Another cache of Biographs were discovered in the offices of a newspaper in the Hague in 1948 and is now held at the EYE Filmmuseum."

"A first restoration project in the 1990s led by the Dutch archive at Haghefilm lab transferred the 68 mm films onto 35 mm. In 2018, BFI – National Archive, again in collaboration with Eye Filmmuseum and Haghefilm, undertook the digital restoration of the BFI’s Biograph films and a selection of British made titles held at EYE. The size of the nitrate copies and their lack of transportation perforations, made rostrum shooting the best method of image capture of each individual frame by a digital camera at 8K." Bryony Dixon (Il Cinema Ritrovato)

Charge of the Carabineers, Aldershot •  Four Warships in Rough Seas •  Warships at Sunset •  Battleship Odin Firing All Her Guns.

The screening order is different in the printing catalog, but this was the actual order:

Charge of the Carabineers, Aldershot
Mutoscope & Biograph Company. DCP from a 68 mm nitrate print. D.: 18”. Year: 1898. Country: Gran Bretagna. Copy from BFI – National Archive.
    AA: A giant parade.

Four Warships in Rough Seas
Mutoscope & Biograph Company. DCP from a 68 mm nitrate print. Year: 1900. Country: Gran Bretagna. Copy from BFI – National Archive.
    AA: A brief view of magnificent ships.

Warships at Sunset
Mutoscope & Biograph Company. DCP from a 68 mm nitrate print. Year: 1900. Country: Gran Bretagna. Copy from BFI – National Archive.
    AA: A brief view of warships at sunset with trick photography.

Battleship Odin Firing All Her Guns
Mutoscope & Biograph Company. DCP from a 68 mm nitrate print. Year: 1900. Country: [Gran Bretagna] [actually: Germany, see the BFI website]. Copy from BFI – National Archive.
    AA: In this view there is a genuine 68 mm impact. Wikipedia: "SMS Odin was the lead ship of her class of coastal defense ships (Küstenpanzerschiffe) built for the Imperial German Navy. She had one sister ship, Ägir. Odin, named for the eponymous Norse god, was built by the Kaiserliche Werft Danzig shipyard between 1893 and 1896, and was armed with a main battery of three 24-centimeter (9.4 in) guns. She served in the German fleet throughout the 1890s and was rebuilt in 1901–1903. She served in the VI Battle Squadron after the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, but saw no action. Odin was demobilized in 1915 and used as a tender thereafter."

AA: I cannot assess the projection circumstances at Sala Mastroianni, but in this set only Battleship Odin Firing All Her Guns had a true 68 mm impact.