Buffalo e Bill

A flickering nickelodeon hallucination stitched from warped celluloid, Buffalo e Bill unspools inside a smoke-choked Genoa sideshow tent where Maria Aloy’s sharpshooter, corseted in crimson, fires at the silhouette of her own future. Emilio Graziani-Walter’s tightrope-walking journalist scribbles each gunshot into a notebook that later dissolves in bathhouse steam, while Adolfo Trouché’s one-armed strongman drags iron spheres that chime like cathedral bells across cobblestones. Between frames, Lisetta Paltrinieri’s trapeze mime keeps slipping off-screen into intertitles that read like ransom notes for lost time: “Yesterday was tomorrow if you blink.” The plot folds origami-wise: a bank heist rehearsed as circus act, a lovers’ pact inked on the back of a wanted poster, a dawn train that enters the town only to exit the same frame left, wheels squealing in reverse. Midway, the film combusts—literally, the nitrate bubbles, faces melt, and through the hole crawls a celluloid buffalo whose hooves stamp Morse code on the perforated edges. When the reel re-starts, the town is empty, the circus caravan has become a funeral cortege, and the only remaining sound is the echo of Aloy’s final shot, now looping forever inside the projector’s shutter.