Thais, an Egyptian courtesan, is converted to a life of a penitant by Paphnutius, a holy man. She is taken to a convent in the desert and lives her life in the care of the abbess there. But Paphnutius is changed by the vision of Thais and becomes obsessed with gaining her love and retrieving her from the spiritual world for himself.

There's an uncompromising clarity to Blu-ray audio and video that really does bring the splendour of grand opera right into the living room. So it's all the more frustrating to get a compromised production as the final product. Jules Massenet's 1894 tragedy about a sex goddess humbled by an insistent Cenobite monk isn't produced very often, because of a demanding lead role and some difficult staging issues. But the music is gorgeous from beginning to end. When you have a great diva at centre stage, the three acts go by in a flash.

"Futurism" was an avant-garde artistic movement, created in 1909 ( as you can see your grandfathers were long haired and dangerous youngsters for a while ) that demands a rejection of tradition and the past while exalting technical innovations, especially the mechanical ones, present and future. This avant-garde artistic movement ( literature and music genres) found great acceptance in Italy where many artists developed the Futurism postulates. Herr Anton Giulio Bragaglia was a notable Italian Futurist who began experimenting with photography and published an important manifesto as a theoretical basis for Futurist photography, "Fotodinamismo Futurista". In addition to his career as set designer Herr Bragaglia had a short but intense film career, "Thais" being his debut as a Futurist director. In any case "Thais" is a film that combines in a strange way classicism and the ( Futurist ) modernism, a paradox since we know that the Futurists were people who rejected tradition and the"Thais" story is a very conventional one. It tells of a "femme fatale" who toys with and uses her admirers for her capricious purposes with the expected tragic ending. Classicism can be seen too in the beautiful images from evocative landscapes sequences as the ferry at the river or Bianca's race to the abyss ( "Naturalism" reminiscences?... ) or Herr Charles Baudelaire's poems ( "Impressionism" reminiscences? ) Only at the end of the film do we see the "Futurist" influences in the highly stylized and geometrical décors in which our heroine suffers her particular punishment, a sequence in which Herr Bragaglia's talent as a set designer is put to good effect. For those reasons for this German Count "Thais" is a kind of interesting film catalogue of many artistic movements ( curious artistic duality ) strangely mixed, a display of the spirit of those innovative early years that grants the film an artistic and remarkable balance as a whole.