Cheap Lyrical Nitrate (Video) (Peter Delpeut) Price

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Customer Reviews of Lyrical Nitrate

Sublime and incredibly beautiful
So beautiful, and yet so sad, to look at these people and scenes of 100 years ago. Fragmented and even choppy, much as our memories would be, if we could look back that far. It is as though you could visit with or at least dream about your great-grandparents at the time of their youth. The music, too, is emotional and evocative; for example, Enrico Caruso, recorded in 1903, singing from Bizet's "Fisher of Pearls" during the perfect little "Shipwreck" drama. Lyrical Nitrate moves me deeply on many levels. I will watch this often for years.

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Nitrate means melancholy
When I first saw "Lyric Nitrate" - a successful Dutch documentary, shown at the 16th São Paulo Film Festival in 1992 - I concluded that this kind of feature can be very melancholic. There are, at least, three reasons that sustain my point of view. First we are told, in the opening credits, that most of nitrate-made films - a perishable product that doesn't last very long - were lost forever. That is, the memory of the cinema irremediably gone by. The second reason: what we see in the fragments of silent films - collected in the 1905-1915 period - are scenes of death, passion, crowded and disorganized cities, desolated beaches, everything that gives us a tight in the throat. These two reasons combined produce a third and fatal reason. In the age of Dolby-Digital sound and pure, digitalized images, we feel very lonely and sad seeing those pictures. A loneliness that hurts so much - in a word, only existed in portuguese, "saudade" - the solitude that provokes our deepest and sadest feelings.