Mario Ruspoli, Prince of the Whales (With Collected Shorts by Mario Ruspoli) (Blu-ray)

Mario Ruspoli was a photographer, writer, gastronomist, zoologist, jazz nut, student of prehistory, painting enthusiast, amateur entomologist, and an all-around adventurer, and all of these passions fed into the filmmaking activity of this prodigiously gifted documentarian. Ruspoli was born in Rome but a resident of Paris for much of his adult life, and the breadth of his curiosity and free-ranging intelligence was as great as that of his good friend Chris Marker, who wrote the commentary for Three Cheers for the Whale (1972), and the innovations that he introduced to nonfiction filmmaking are still due for proper recognition and appraisal. And now, as Metrograph proudly presents sterling new restorations of his short films and the first-ever US release of Florence Dauman’s feature documentary Mario Ruspoli, Prince of the Whales (2011), that rediscovery can begin. Ruspoli’s short films were restored in 2K by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with Argos Films.