Himself (archive footage)
The silent cinema had already created colossal movies based on ancient civilizations, but it is in the 1950s when peplums reach their apogee in Hollywood. Then, peplums take root at Cinecittà studios, in Rome, where cheap cinema is produced with bodybuilders as heroes. The genre decays in the late 1960s, but rises again decades later, when a modern classic is released in 2000.
Director
An anthology of tests of the Hypergonar system, ancestor of the CinemaScope, invented late in the 1920s by French astronomer Henri Chrétien. Anamorphosis-- That is, the deforming an image and then straightening it using a suitable mirror-- was once a popular curiosity. Henri Chrétien imagined lenses that make it possible to anamorphose the image when shooting, then to de-anamorphose it when projecting. Shot by Chrétien between 1938 and 1949, "Vues Hypergonées", as the film is also known, was restored in 1999 by the French Cinémathèque from a 269-meter nitrate copy, for the retrospective “Jeune, Dure et Pure! A history of avant-garde and experimental cinema in France".
