"It's a very important piece of cinema history, which was not known until Saturday night," says David Robinson, director of the Giornate del Cinema Muto, the annual silent film festival in Pordenone, north Italy. He's talking about a film that is just 12 and a half minutes long, but one that sheds light on the man he calls the "first artist of the cinema": Georges Méliès, director of hundreds of magical films, many of which have been lost.
Méliès's best known film is, of course, Le Voyage Dans La Lune, but Les Aventures de Robinson Crusoé, the newly discovered film, is an even more ambitious work; a landmark in the history of narrative cinema.