This annotation was created by Paul Merchant, Jr.. 

Journal of e-Media Studies, Volume 7 Issue 1: Early Cinema History (Understanding Visual Culture Through Silent Film Collections)

On the Reef (1910) Clip 7 - Tsivian_Khitrova.mp4 0-36.95

A cultured way of begetting an adultery, canonized by Dante in Inferno, is to fall in love over a shared book. “We read, one day, to our delight, of Lancelot and how love constrained him: we were alone and without suspicion,” confides Francesca. “Often those words urged our eyes to meet, and colored our cheeks, but it was a single moment that undid us. When we read how that lover kissed the beloved smile he . . . kissed my mouth all trembling. That book and he who wrote it were our go-between, a pander: that day we read no more.” Touched by Francesca’s tale, adds Dante, he “fell as a dead body falls.” Some nineteenth-century illustrations and canvases inspired by Francesca’s story—for instance those of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Gustave Doré—include a visual detail not mentioned by Dante: as Paolo’s lips near Francesca’s, the book is shown slipping out of her hands. There is no kiss to interrupt the intimate recitation—the passages the family friend is shown reading to Grace are from his own book—but the idea is much in the air, all the more so when he is about to drop the book. That day they read no more.

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