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Silent Italian Cinema: A New Medium for Old Geographies1

Giorgio Bertellini

The scholarship on Italian cinema has traditionally privileged the year 1905 as the starting point of national film production, in conjunction with the first fiction film, La presa di Roma—20 settembre 1870 (The Capture of Rome (20 September 1870), Filoteo Alberini). This timeline is rather misleading, as many Italian films (nonfiction admittedly) were produced earlier than 1905. Fiction productions’ subsequent tremendous worldwide success between 1908 and 1915, in both sheer number (about 6000 titles out of about 10000 for the whole silent period) and popular appreciation, was not the miracle of a three‐year‐old film industry. Its impetus and form largely depended on a popular and resilient visual tradition that preceded the invention of cinema, that encompassed other media (e.g., painting, prints, and photography), and that included the contribution of foreign manufacturers of both fiction and nonfiction productions.

The strength of this intermedial repository impinged upon the notion that Italy entertained a relationship of unshakeable continuity with its remote past. Investing such past with both cultural and anthropological connotations, foreign and Italian image‐makers projected ideas of permanency and of “arrested development’” onto the peninsula’s physical and social geography, encompassing pristine coastlines, interior forests, and active volcanoes as well as shepherds and brigands—all seemingly undomesticated by modernity. Two dominant aesthetic vectors emerged out of this framework: antiquity and the picturesque. Hence, the majority of Italy’s pre–World War I popular films were dramas that capitalized on the peninsula’s illustrious past and heroes and its timeless urban and natural landscapes inhabited by quaint characters. In reaction to the loss of foreign markets during the Great War, a counter position animated a number of post–World War I productions that, inferior in scale and international appeal, centered on futurist and experimental stances. This new, yet peripheral aesthetic mode informed scattered avant‐garde productions, including Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Thaïs (also known as Il perfido incanto, 1916), André Deed’s L’uomo meccanico (1921), and Corrado D’Errico’s Stramilano (1930), and affected certain stars’ cultural halo (e.g., Elettra Raggio), and the critical work of individual writers (e.g., Gian Piero Lucini and Sebastiano Arturo Luciani).

Historically speaking, filmmaking in Italy by non‐Italian companies followed the international image‐making tradition associated with the Grand Tour. Centuries before the turn of the twentieth century, illustrated collections of views and of picturesque journeys about Italy and its populations (e.g., raccolte di vedute and viaggi pittorici) anthologized familiar reproductions of natural and urban sceneries, as well as monuments and customs for the growing class of European tourists (Zotti Minici 1988). Similar views appeared in albums of daguerreotypes, photographic repertoires, and tourist postcards. The commercialized aesthetic of the Grand Tour provided the common international currency largely defining photographic representations’ subject matter, style, and mass marketability. Together, Italian and foreign photographers’ aesthetic and ideological contribution amounted to a visual encyclopedia of the peninsula’s architectural and natural patrimony—an aesthetic of ruins and charming backwardness—that affected practitioners and consumers of natural and historical subjects, whether produced through photography, engravings, postcards, or films.2

The standardization of Italian views was not indifferent to geographical variances: not all views, or ruins, were equal. If the North and the central part of the peninsula attracted historical representations, equating Venice with post‐Renaissance decadence, Florence with a patrician museum, and Rome with an archeological site (the Coliseum), the South attracted picturesque rather than monumental depictions. In aesthetically pleasing and highly codified ways, nature in the South appeared to overwhelm landscapes and individuals with the spectacular force of a volcano. What were left were sunburned valleys and hills, indexing an arrested development of human activity and progress, dotted by passionate individuals and brigands known for their eruptive temperament. In place of solitary buildings in deserted squares, the visual loci classici of the South included the celebrated views of Vesuvius from the Neapolitan bay, Mt. Etna from Taormina, or the plebeian crowds of urchins and urban bystanders around Porta Capuana or Santa Lucia.

The emergence of motion pictures was unquestionably a new phenomenon in Italy, one that introduced new manufacturing and spectatorial dynamics, and that over the decades contributed to the cultural unification of the peninsula. Still, the resilient issue of the nation’s geographic and geocultural diversity profoundly affected early film culture, beginning with emerging practices of film production, circulation, and consumption.

Before 1905: Films about Italy

The absence of a domestic film industry did not preclude the manufacturing of films about Italian subjects. Between 1896 and 1904, Lumière film operators shot more than 100 films in Italy. The Lumière’s Italian illustrative project was not aimed at being geographically exhaustive. Instead, it revealed choices of tourist and political relevance consonant with the firm’s ambition of international appeal and its penchant for official subjects, including military parades, royal ceremonies, sports events, urban and natural landscapes (Bertozzi 2008). Particularly famous were the Lumière views of Venice, with the first “tracking and panning shots” of the city’s architectures obtained by placing the camera on a moving gondola, as in Panorama de la Place St. Marc pris d’un bateau, Venise (1896). As Lumière’s hegemony in Italy was over by the second half of 1897, other foreign operators distinguished themselves for their Italian subjects, including W. K. L. Dickson, Thomas Edison’s former chief engineer; the British photographers Birt Acres and Henry Short; and the British film pioneers Charles Urban and George Albert Smith. The cooptation of Italy’s reigning political and military personalities and of renowned natural and architectural attractions was part of early film producers’ strategy to endow the cinema with cultural prestige, educational value, and moral respectability. In Italy, these films fostered the perception of the medium as an instrument of national self‐exploration and display, not simply as a foreign purveyor of famous and exotic attractions. Before the establishment of a national film industry, in fact, Italian filmmakers, whether affiliated with major foreign firms or working independently—preferably as photographers—duplicated this fashionable taste for patriotic history and symbols. Their names may not be well known, but their impact was significant as they combined their technical, scientific, or journalistic interests with a contribution as local exhibitors. In their films, Francesco Felicetti and Filoteo Alberini in Rome, Giuseppe Filippi and Italo Pacchioni in Milan, Vittorio Calcina and Roberto Omegna in Turin, Luigi Sciutto in Genoa, Rodolfo Remondini in Florence, Giovanni Troncone in Naples, Raffaello Lucarelli in Palermo, and even Luca Comerio, the famous photojournalist based in Milan but active all over Italy and the world, corroborated familiar notions of touristic and national relevance by filming renowned urban sceneries and actual events of momentous and solemn significance, including state funerals and ceremonies, army parades, and religious celebrations (Dagrada, Mosconi, and Paoli 2007). Between 1896 and 1905, domestic nonfiction production reached about 160 titles, dwarfed in comparison with the more than 2500 foreign travelogues and actualités that were distributed in Italy during the same period (Giuliani and D’Osualdo forthcoming). Films’ circulation followed familiar geographical variances.

The very first moving picture presentations occurred in Italy between 1895 and 1896 (Bernardini 2001, 153–165). As opposed to dozens of northern centers, however, the only southern cities involved, apart from Naples, were Catania, Palermo, and Messina in Sicily, and Sassari in Sardinia. Correlated to this geographical divide was a social one. Throughout the country, early film exhibitions of mostly French, American, and British films took place at first in professional photographers’ laboratories and ateliers, attended by members of the local urban bourgeoisie and aristocracy. Thus, the novelty of the medium matched the social exclusivity of its experience.

Moviegoing in Italy did not become a popular national entertainment until the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century, again with remarkable geographical differences in terms of venues and modalities of film exhibition. In the regions around the Padana Valley, films circulated widely by entering the interclass circuits of Italian and foreign traveling exhibitors known as ambulanti. Active before the emergence of motion pictures until the establishment of permanent theaters in the mid to latter part of the decade, ambulanti brought film shows—mainly by Pathé Frères, Gaumont, and Georges Méliès—frequently and efficiently to the populations of northern smaller towns (Bernardini 2001). Itinerant exhibitors hardly ever visited the imperviously located communities of the countryside of the central and southern Italy: the difficulties of the trip and of local mobility, combined with the hardly rewarding gains of a southern tour, were known obstacles.

Similarly, the post‐1905 establishment of permanent movie theatres was also more frequent and widespread in the North and the central part of Italy than in the South. In 1907, there were 27 such theaters in Naples, 33 in Rome, and 40 in Milan, where their number doubled a year later (Bernardini 2001, 175–180; Caneppele 2001, 293–317). Overall, north of Rome, cinema became a popular entertainment earlier and to a greater degree than in the South. In contrast with the social diversity of northern film audiences, until the early 1910s southern Italian film patronage was mainly an urban, middle‐class affair. In the South, cinema expanded its spectatorial appeal only when film showings began to be included in lower‐end variety theaters and café concerts, amid stage performances and singing attractions. This occurred mainly in and around Naples, when films’ stories and protagonists began to be identified with the musical and performative traditions of the annual music festival of Piedigrotta and, later, of the sceneggiate—stage and filmic dramatizations of vernacular songs.

Domestic Production

The growing number of movie theaters competing with itinerant exhibitors and the social expansion of film patrons led to a higher demand for films. Domestic production responded to that. Italy’s first film factories were located in the nation’s political, economic, and cultural centers—Rome, Turin, and Milan—where ambitious noblemen and resourceful bourgeois intertwined cultural and financial goals. Then there was Naples, whose firms marketed the city’s vernacular appeal, filtered through national and international traditions, to local and national patrons and, eventually, to immigrant communities.

At the forefront of Italy’s film industry were the Roman film company Cines, created in 1906 out of Alberini & Santoni (1905), and several Turinese firms, from Ambrosio Films (1906), Aquila Film (1907), and Itala Films (1908), which emerged out of Carlo Rossi & C. (1907), to Pasquali & C. (1909), and Film Artistica Gloria (1913). In Milan, the firm Milano Films (1909) resulted from the incorporation of previous companies, Luca Comerio & C. (1907) and Saffi‐Comerio (1908). Other companies emerged in and around 1907, including Fratelli Pineschi (Turin) and Fratelli Troncone (Naples).3

The pattern of development of the largest and most ambitious of these companies was fairly similar. Their founder‐managers traveled abroad, mainly to France—in 1908 Arturo Ambrosio also visited New York—to buy the newest equipment and familiarize themselves with established modes of production or with larger film markets. Then they built large studios, lured foreign artistic and technical personnel, particularly from the giant Pathé Frères, and opened distribution offices abroad. Very quickly, these firms achieved strong domestic and, especially, international recognition through adaptations of Shakespearean dramas and tragedies, Italian historical works, and French revolutionary melodramas (Brunetta 1980; Martinelli 1995).

As members of the upper class, several Italian film producers felt a social and ideological attachment to the nation’s past and recent history, the political imagery of the Risorgimento, and the imperial authority of the Rome of the Caesars—much less than to the historical and spiritual sovereignty of the Popes. Their ambitious productions mobilized classical visual, literary, and theatrical traditions and made cinema gain both aesthetic legitimacy and commercial viability. The production of La presa di Roma— 20 settembre 1870 occurred in the context of the architectural restoration of the nation’s capital, evident in imposing government buildings, as well as monuments devoted to the heroes of the Risorgimento. Most notably, this included the National Monument of Victor Emmanuel II, known as Altare della Patria (Altar of the Fatherland) or Il Vittoriano, decades in the making, and inaugurated in 1911 in time for the 50th anniversary of the formation of the nation. Exhibited for a few years after 1905, La presa di Roma—20 settembre 1870 showed how the cinematic recreation of history could become a precious opportunity for political pedagogy and commerce, which later historical reconstructions and literary adaptations also sought to replicate. At the film’s center was Filoteo Alberini, an all‐around inventor, for years employed as photography technician for Italian military institutions, then successful film exhibitor. Alberini was also a fervent patriot and an active member of the nationalistic Freemasonry that had played a crucial role during the Risorgimento and that was strenuously engaged in defending the laity of the new state against the Vatican (Lasi 2006). In 1907, Gualtiero Fabbri wrote Al Cinematografo, an eloquent fictionalized ethnography of the heterogeneous responses to Italy’s then most spectacular film (Fabbri 2013).

With foreign markets in mind, however, the setting of the most imaginative pre–World War I Italian historical films was ancient Rome and antiquity in general, not the heroism of the Risorgimento. As a cosmopolitan “beaten track” and repository of narratives of national officialdom, Latin antiquity was a more universal basis for both political and commercial designs in its combination of patriotic impetus, antiquarian taste, and cultivated sensationalism. Large‐scale historical epics were the most ambitious film output of Roman and northern Italian film companies. No other genre could effectively merge so many narrative and aesthetic forms (historical and religious play, love melodrama, circus shows, and tableaux vivants). The year 1908 was crucial for the commercial self‐awareness of Italian film companies. Ambrosio Film released Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii, 1908), an ambitious one‐reeler directed by Luigi Maggi that capitalized on the established intermedial attraction for ancient calamities and Edward Bulwer‐Lytton’s 1834 bestselling novel. Although foreign trade periodicals mistook the Italian film as a production of its non‐Italian distributors (Warwick Company in England, and Raleigh & Roberts in the United States), praise for its realistic mise‐en‐scène became prototypical of the criticism reserved for, and proudly enjoyed by, later Italian productions.

In 1908–1909, a financial crisis resulting from overproduction, foreign competition, and errors in distribution and marketing strategies threatened the domestic industry. The crisis was overcome by the arrival of managers with industrial background, the preference for Italian or Latin subjects of worldwide appeal, and the experimentation with multi‐reel “feature” productions and higher spectacular standards (Redi 1992, 7–17). In 1909, Ambrosio Film started its flagship series, Serie d’Oro (Golden Series), which opened with the toga‐drama Nerone (Nero; or The Fall of Rome, Luigi Maggi). By then, the familiar conflicts between Christians and Romans had become an internationally routine spectacle on the wave of the domestic popularity of Pietro Cossa’s 1872 eponymous play, but mostly on the international exposure of Barnum and Bailey’s famous pyrodrama, Nero, The Destruction of Rome (Wyke 1997, 110–46).

By adapting a classic pantomime, the other Turinese company, Itala Film, released in 1911 La caduta di Troia (The Fall of Troy), directed by its visionary director‐manager Giovanni Pastrone. At two reels in length, it was the world’s first colossal film, and it could only come, as Moving Picture World (1911, 935) boasted, from the old country whose “history is more prolific of incident.” La caduta di Troia was also groundbreaking in its rendering of an ancient three‐dimensional space. Similarly, directors Mario Caserini and Enrico Guazzoni brought worldwide fame to Cines by abandoning painted backdrops in favor of sumptuous mise‐en‐scènes at a time when American cinema still opted for the former solution. A lifelong painter, Guazzoni adapted Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar to make Bruto (Brutus, 1911), which inaugurated Cines’ profitable agreement with the Chicago distributor and Edison Trust member, George Kleine. Attuned to the international correlation of Italian art cinema with large‐scale historical representations, Kleine—who also distributed films by Ambrosio and Pasquali—launched the film as “a marvel of magnificence, staged in splendor, wrapped in grandeur” and catered to the affluent American middle class. At Cines, Guazzoni’s colossal productions included the three‐reeler La Gerusalemme liberata (The Crusaders, 1911), adapted from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem; Marcantonio e Cleopatra (Antony and Cleopatra, 1913), from Shakespeare; and his spectacular masterpiece, Quo Vadis? (1913), from Henryk Sienkiewicz’s 1909 eponymous bestseller.

With the most modern and well‐equipped film studio in early 1910s Italy, Milano Films poured a series of major successes into the national and international markets, most notably with 54 scenes of La Divina Commedia. Inferno, also known as L’Inferno (Dante’s Inferno, 1911), was directed by Adolfo Padovan, Francesco Bertolini, and Giuseppe De Liguoro (Welle 2004). Distributor Gustavo Lombardo creatively promoted the film, the first Italian production to be deposited for copyright, through exclusive premiere invitations to journalists, authorities, and the elites. Italian and international reviewers regarded it as one of the noblest expressions of Italian art and praised it for having made Dante intelligible to the masses. The film’s production and public circulation of the film benefitted from the close collaboration between Milano Films and the powerful Dante Alighieri Society, which lent its stamp of artistic and patriotic approval and, through its international offices, contributed to its worldwide promotion.

The convergence of historical appeal, literary recognition, and high production values reached its apex between 1912 and 1914, after the patriotic celebrations of 1911 and following Italy’s colonial campaigns in Libya (1911–1912). Inferences regarding militant nationalism are hardly out of place. Cines was financially dependent on Banco di Roma, a banking institution controlled by leading national industrial groups and by the government; the pressure to produce films that could patriotically convey a sense of ancient pride and contemporary solidarity was remarkable (Redi 1991, 8). Key historical films included Cines’ aforementioned Quo Vadis? and Cajus Julius Caesar ( Julius Caesar, Cines, 1914)—all directed by Guazzoni. For its part Ambrosio released in 1913 Spartaco (Spartacus, Giovanni Enrico Vidali, 1913), adapted from Raffaello Giovagnoli’s widely translated and staged 1874 novel, and a multi‐reel remake of its 1908 Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (Mario Caserini and Eleuterio Rodolfi) forcing Pasquali to retitle its almost identical production as Jone (The Last Days of Pompeii, Ubaldo Maria Del Colle and Giovanni Enrico Vidali, 1913) to avoid litigation. A third version, by Film Artistica Gloria, was scripted but never produced. With Itala’s gargantuan Cabiria (1914), Pastrone composed a “scenario‐palimpsest” of renowned historical and visual references, with erudite intertitles authored by the iconic decadent writer and poet Gabriele D’Annunzio (Alovisio and Barbera 2006, 70–79, 202–9) (Figure 3.1). The complexity and high quality of these productions showcased the sophistication of screenwriters’ craft in early 1910s Italy (Alovisio 2005).

Photo displaying a scene from the film Cabiria by Giovanni Pastrone, 1914. People are interacting in on the steps of stairs flanked on each side by ornate statues of elephants on pedestals, in a palatial hall.

Figure 3.1 Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914). Author’s personal collection.

The historical epics became Italy’s most identifiable genre. Other nations were making history films or adaptations of literary classics, but without what historians have recognized were distinct Italian traits: a misura grande (Brunetta 2000, 39–44) and plasticità (Mosconi 2006, 357–73), referring to these films’ grand scale and their unique use of spatial depth at all levels of film production, from the script to dramaturgy and characterization. Italian adaptations of literary classics also adopted these features.

Highbrow historical and literary dramas were not the only types of work widely distributed before the Great War. A discussion of the early film genres in Italy should prominently feature comedies, whose total output amounted to about 1500 titles. A broader European phenomenon more than strictly a national one in terms of key performers, style, and routines, comedies gave Italian companies access to the lucrative market share of populist and interclass entertainments. Borrowing from circus shows’ clown and acrobatic practices and from the slapstick humor of popular theatre, vaudeville, and café chantants, comedies playfully subverted bourgeois customs and rules regarding dress codes, courtship, dance, sport, and driving. The established neighboring French film industry provided examples to follow and actors to lure. In 1908, Itala’s artistic director Giovanni Pastrone hired away stars André Deed from Pathè, where he had become famous with the character of Boireau, and renamed him Cretinetti, after a popular cartoon. Deed found new popularity in France, this time as Gribouille, and became famous in most English‐ and Spanish‐speaking countries as, respectively, Foolshead and Toribio or Don Toribio. At Itala, the minute Deed starred in more than 90 films, some of which he directed, mainly impersonating two apparently respectable, yet restless and highly destructive, characters: the good family boy donning a sailor suit, and the distinguished bourgeois, sporting light color outfits. No matter what sub‐role Deed was playing, his surrealist display of anarchic energy remained similar. He would return to France in 1912 and then back to Italy in 1915–1916 and 1919–1922 (Gili 2005, 41–73, 113–161). Other comedians included Ambrosio’s Marcel Fabre, Ernesto Vaser, and Gigetta Morano, known respectively as Robinet, Fricot, and Gigetta, and Cines’ Lea Giunchi (Lea) and Ferdinand Guillaume, known as Tontolini until he moved to other firms and became Polidor (Cherchi Usai and Jacob 1985, 5–145; Mosconi 2000, 75–95).

In the mid‐1910s, with mounting competition from American slapstick comedians, Fabre and Deed switched to feature films and did double duty as actors and directors. Their Le avventure straordinarissime di Saturnino Farandola (1913) and L’uomo meccanico (1921), while beloved by the futurists, were unable to revive the genre. Still, what comedies taught Italian producers was the practice of serial production, consisting of character recognition, formulaic narratives, and intertextual repetition. Branding film after film with consistency was one of the key ingredients for the emergence of another popular genre, known as “athletic‐acrobatic,” made of self‐contained episodes centered on the figure of the forzuto (strong man). If in the historical epics of the early 1910s the forzuto had been upgraded from circus attraction to majestic icon, from the mid‐1910s until the mid‐1920s it represented serials’ familiar and benign hero (Farassino and Sanguineti 1983, 9–106; Dall’Asta 1992). For a decade after Maciste (1915), the eponymous and most successful of Italian strong men dropped his slave costume and his blackface make‐up to wear the patriotic uniforms of Alpine soldier, policeman, or virtuous film star (Reich 2011). Throughout the series, Maciste used his sheer strength to defend the helpless and served as a model for the adventures of countless forzuti, including Ausonia (Mario Guaita), who first appeared in Spartaco; Ursus (Bruto Castellani), first introduced in Quo Vadis?; as well as Sansonia (Luciano Albertini), Galaor (Alfredo Boccolini), Ajax (Carlo Aldini), and Saetta (Domenico Gambino). These heroes also anticipated, and participated in the formation of, Fascism’s masculine ideal of physical strength. The athletic‐acrobatic genre also saw the casting of Giovanni Raicevich, the world wrestling champion and interpreter of a few popular films, and a few strong women, including Sansonette (Linda Albertini) and Astrea (Countess Barbieri).

Arte Muta, Dive, and Auteurs

As elsewhere, Italian film culture was infused with debates about the medium’s artistic merits, developed in conjunction with films’ complicity with mechanical processes of photographic reproduction. One key effort to grant artistry to moving pictures was the emphasis on nonindexical elements by way of analogies with music’s antimimetic expressiveness. Crucial in this effort was writer and poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who, in a 1914 Corriere della Sera composite essay–interview on film form, adopted the expression arte silenziosa. Absorbing the theories of Ricciotto Canudo and Walter Pater, D’Annunzio argued that cinema held artistic merit because it was “a silent art, deep and musical‐like silence” (D’Annunzio 2013, 118). By 1915, arte silenziosa and arte muta were formulations commonly used to describe and designate, together with teatro muto, scena muta, or dramma muto, film’s specific and highest mode of expression. Concretely, the most effective influences of dannunzianesimo were on historical films and sentimental melodramas featuring actresses known as the donne mute, from Lyda Borelli and Pina Menichelli to Francesca Bertini, Italia Almirante Manzini, and Leda Gys. By casting them as sophisticated femmes fatales in exotic and aristocratic settings and by engaging them in complex plots of sentimental catastrophes (jealousy, ruin, and suicide), the diva film genre participated in a distinct modality of cinematic representation and reception. Films like Ma l’amor mio non muore (Love Everlasting, Mario Caserini, 1913), La donna nuda (The Naked Woman, Carmine Gallone, 1914), and Carnevalesca (Amleto Palermi, 1918) displayed a decadent and antinaturalistic inclination for symbolic audiovisual representations (Figure 3.2). The heightened expressivity ascribed to the genre’s female protagonists derived from their eloquent, albeit mute, acting style. In place of audible words, divas were praised for communicating with a silent, pantomimic, yet aural expressiveness that stimulated spectator absorption and contemplation. Intercut with erudite intertitles and resonating with decadent pictorial suggestions (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ernest Herber, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Alphonse Mucha, and even Edvard Munch), the diva’s operatic gestures and expressions produced a semantic and symbolic overload. If historical epics taught Italian audiences how to appreciate their national genealogy through an uplifting experience of cultural archeology, diva films taught how to experience evocative visual melodramas unfolding like an artistic musical melody (Jandelli 2006; Dalle Vacche 2008).

Photo displaying Lyda Borelli in Carnevalesca by Amleto Palermi.

Figure 3.2 Lyda Borelli in Carnevalesca (Amleto Palermi, 1918). Author’s personal collection.

Indebted to the film and stage stardom of Asta Nielsen, Sarah Bernhardt, and Eleonora Duse, the diva films were also heavily linked to Italian literature. Consider Assunta Spina (Francesca Bertini and Gustavo Serena, 1915), with Bertini, loosely based on Salvatore Di Giacomo’s 1909 Neapolitan play and eponymous 1914 short story; Tigre Reale (Giovanni Pastrone, 1916), with Menichelli, from a Verga 1873 novella; Cenere (Febo Mari, 1916), with Duse, from Grazia Deledda’s 1904 story; and Malombra (Carmine Gallone, 1917), with Borelli, from Antonio Fogazzaro’s 1881 novel. Italian film periodicals devoted much more space to female stars than to their male partners or to the famous muscle men. Still, while diva films had some success in Europe, they gained very little recognition in the United States where distributors doubted the dive’s acting style would ever become popular. Known for their lavish contracts and capricious behavior, the dive contributed significantly to the decline of the film industry between the late 1910s and early 1920s.

The bypassing of photographic reproductions was also at the core of futurists’ poetic approach to cinema. Unfortunately, in contrast to France and Germany, where avant‐garde authors managed to produce films that impacted mainstream productions, the landscape of Italian filmic experimentations is dotted by countless projects and productive theorizations, but all too few finished works. Despite Bragaglia’s visionary treatise Fotodinamismo futurista (1911), futurism’s major exponents (who initially did not include him) resisted embracing cinema as a productive experimental medium, as a result of a Bergsonian prejudice against photographic reproductions.

A few attempts at futurist filmmaking were marginalized as inauthentic or fraudulent. These included the painted films of Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra who, in the symbolist spirit of “chromatic symphonies,” believed their antimimetic and intermedial synesthesias to be translations of the futurist artist Umberto Boccioni’s painterly dynamism. Similarly excluded from the movement’s accepted poetics was Mondo baldoria (1914), a feature‐length adaptation of an artistic manifesto by Aldo Palazzeschi, directed by the independent Aldo Molinari. Marinetti rejected these films, without being able, however, to exclude the medium from futurist ruminations. Cinema in fact held for many members of the movement a special fascination. They recognized their own attitudes toward art’s antibourgeois and vitalistic obligations in the oneiric photographic inventions of Spanish cinematographer Segundo de Chomón, active in Italy between 1912 and 1925; in the restless transformism and self‐reflexivity of stage star Leopoldo Fregoli; and in the boundless grotesque energy of comedian André Deed. Eventually, futurism had to embrace the new medium.

Through the notion of synthetic theatre and a closer rapport with the music‐hall tradition of gestural and sensorial immediacy, experimental films of note, even when strictly identified as futurist, originally tinkered with costumes and art direction, as in Bragaglia’s oneiric Thaïs. The same year and in collaboration with Marinetti, artists Corra and Emilio Settimelli completed Vita futurista and collaborated (with others) on the manifesto La cinematografia futurista. If the film, a compilation of unrelated situations chronicling futurist life, hardly found any distribution outside experimental circles and ended up almost lost, the manifesto managed to capture the antirealist impetus of the movement, amounting to an idea of cinema as a sinfonia poliespressiva of multimedia analogies and movement. A year later, Marinetti planned the filming of “Velocità,” which remained unrealized. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, the independent filmmakers Mario Bonnard, Lucio D’Ambra, and Luigi Maggi produced experimental works while the futurist artist Fortunato Depero announced several film projects, including “Il futurismo italianissimo,” which would never be completed. By then, most exponents of the Italian movement were operating within the poetic ranks of Parisian movements, but without much to show to their surrealist and cubist friends and contacts (Lista 2010). In 1930, two rarely discussed films concluded the adventure of the Italian film avant‐garde: D’Errico’s city‐symphony Stramilano (1930) and Velocità (1930), directed by Tina Cordero, Guido Martina, and Pippo Oriani. Both films paid homage to key European avant‐garde artists, including Dziga Vertov, René Clair, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray—all figures who, according to critics and even Marinetti himself, had actually managed to practice fully the theoretical intuitions of the Italian film manifesto.

Vernacular Realism

Italian cinema’s other poetic inclination, realism, was apparently on the opposite side of the aesthetic spectrum, although its intersections with cinema dannunziano and experimental filmmaking have still not been fully explored. Not to be identified solely with actualités or newsreels, Italian cinematic realism since the latter part of the first decade generally conveyed distinct geographical connotations indebted to the picturesque aesthetic of social and natural views. Southern Italian melodramas occupied a privileged space in this film poetics. They interpellated the spectator’s social and geographic stance through a combination of landscape views, ethnographic appeal, and the emerging popularity of Neapolitan and Sicilian vernacular theatre. Nature too played its role.

Early in the twentieth century, a series of telluric and volcanic activities struck Naples, southern Calabria, and eastern Sicily. In these regions, such natural calamities had never been exceptional events, but, in conjunction with the development of new means of image‐ and news‐making, the sensationalist gravity of the 1908 earthquake in Messina and the eruptions of Vesuvius and Mt. Etna attracted filmmakers and photographers from all over the world. Italian film companies (Fratelli Troncone, Ambrosio, Itala, Cines, Saffi‐Comerio, and the Milanese Croce & C.) sent their best cinematographers on location, including Giovanni Vitrotti and Roberto Omegna, to provide film reports. Vitagraph, Kleine‐Gaumont, and Lubin did the same. Their works relayed an aesthetic of destruction and desolation that Italian and foreign audiences associated with a long‐standing painterly and print tradition of representations of the South as an unredeemable land of misery and agony. Filmed catastrophes had become a successful genre, concocting a form of pathetic realism (in the literary sense of pathos), which was not limited to so‐called films dal vero, or views of real life. Those highly documented and newsworthy calamities also served as a pretext for the creation of realistic fictional narratives that incorporated news footage. Against the background of the 1908 earthquake, Saffi‐Comerio released Dalla pietà all’amore (Pity and Love, Luca Comerio, 1909), a romantic story of rescue featuring a Sicilian girl and her British liberator, while Ambrosio produced L’orfanella di Messina (The Orphan of Messina, Giovanni Vitrotti, 1909), a story of tragic family losses redeemed by adoption.

Furthermore, and differently from its northern counterpart, film production in the South established a crucial relationship with the vernacular stage and music scene. Consider the case of the Fratelli Troncone from Naples. After entering production in 1905 with the fiction film La camorra, in 1909 they founded Partenope Films and began to lure the city’s most famous dialect performers (e.g., Vincenzo Scarpetta and Raffaele Viviani) to film stories such as Fenesta che lucive (Roberto Troncone, 1914) that were rooted in the city’s culture of vernacular pochades, stage melodramas, and songs. Other companies displayed a comparable strategy but marketed their grief‐stricken local melodramas and tourist actualités both to the city’s elite and to foreign markets, especially in the United States. This was the case of Vesuvio Film and, more successfully, of Dora Film.

Headed by the educated Elvira Coda and Nicola Notari (they married and Elvira Coda took Notari’s surname), Dora Film began production in 1909, first with urban travelogues and vernacular melodramas. In the early 1910s, Dora Film maintained its attachment to Naples’ social and cultural cityscape, with such films as A Marechiaro ce sta ‘na fenesta (Elvira Notari, 1914), but also engaged in productions addressing the patriotic subject of colonial wars (Bruno 1993, 89–90; Bertellini 2013, 123–34). Dora’s bi‐focal combination of local and national narratives illuminates Neapolitan cinema’s dialogic self‐positioning within Italy’s aesthetic public sphere. In the 1920s, countless Neapolitan productions, including Dora Films’ ‘A Santanotte (The Holy Night, Elvira Notari, 1922) and Core ‘e frate (Elvira Notari, 1923), found a way into the world’s “little Italies,” where they often competed with two rereleased older films, Sperduti nel buio (Nino Martoglio, 1914) and Assunta Spina (1915). Both were set in the dark alleys of popular Neapolitan neighborhoods, featuring southern Italian iconic actors (e.g., Giovanni Grasso and Francesca Bertini) but produced by Roman companies (Morgana and Caesar Film), and their highly stylized narratives and performances came to represent the most emblematic forms of vernacular realism. In their combination of authentic street realism and performers’ melodramatic eloquence, many critics saw a major artistic achievement.

Another important marker of Neapolitan film companies’ self‐conscious regional character was local vernacular music. The familiar repertory of Neapolitan songs inspired filmic narratives, and their articulation, mode of exhibition, and reception accorded with the successful late 1910s intermedial practice of sceneggiate. If the practice of music accompanying films was fairly widespread in Italy in the 1910s and 1920s, the Neapolitan sceneggiate went much further as they determined films’ titles, narrative, and mode of spectator engagement, much akin to a musical performance. Italian audience’s familiarity with songs, narratives, and actors’ histrionics was interpellated, encouraged, and even exploited. As a result, from the late 1910s, the production and international distribution of Neapolitan films blossomed. It was one of the few production genres capable of weathering the crisis caused by the Great War, and it did so despite the Fascist censorship that prohibited the circulation of works deemed too vernacular and plebeian (Masi and Franco 1988).

In the other southern film center, Sicily, moving‐picture production began in Palermo, where in 1906 local merchant and exhibitor Raffaello Lucarelli began producing the Giornale cinematografico Lucarelli, a series of newsreels about local events and customs. On the other side of the island, in Catania, a solid film culture infusing theatre and film periodicals preceded the 1914 beginning of an intense but short‐lived period of film production. The well‐financed Etna Film catered its works mainly to the local and national upper classes and their cinematic tastes, even while promoting itself as open to interclass appeal. Differently from Neapolitan companies, however, the inability to coopt established local writers and playwrights (Luigi Capuana, Giovanni Verga, and Nino Martoglio) for the creation of proudly regional, and thus popular, works decreed the end to the short season of the Sicilian film industry. Etna Film closed shop in 1915, and so did three other companies of similar highbrow national ambition, Sicula Film, Katana Film, and Jonio Film (Gesú and Genovese 1995).

The Great War and Beyond

The war’s financial and military demands on the nation destroyed the ability of northern Italian film companies to produce and distribute films on a regular basis at home and abroad. George Kleine, who had just financed the construction of new film studios—the Photo Drama Producing Company in Grugliasco, near Turin—retreated from the Italian film scene. Meanwhile, as the center of production moved south, to Rome and Naples, the Italian film industry, unable to compete with foreign firms, sought to create monopolistic vertical integration in the form of various government‐sponsored and private initiatives. The most famous, or infamous (as we shall see shortly), was the Unione cinematografica italiana, the Italian film union known by the acronym UCI. Constituted in 1919 and backed by two major banks, UCI brought together many different firms, mostly based in Rome and Turin, and intended to consolidate their production and distribution strategies, particularly for foreign markets. A company that remained independent and that competed with UCI was the FERT studio (Turin), which in the 1920s produced the ever‐popular Maciste and Saetta films.

The economic crises of the 1920s, including the 1921 collapse of one of UCI’s funding institutions (Banca italiana di sconto), brought the industry to ruins (Brunetta 2008, 273–99). If in 1921 the films seeking a censorship visa were more than 350, in 1924 their number decreased to 60 and, by the end of the decade, to fewer than 10. Throughout the 1920s, the industry kept producing expensive historical dramas, such as Leopoldo Carlucci’s Teodora (1921), and costly remakes of older successes, including Georg Jacoby and Gabriellino D’Annunzio’s Quo Vadis? (1925) and Carmine Gallone’s Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii, 1926). They all failed.

In 1926, in a last ditch effort to save the UCI from financial disaster, one of its parent companies, the Società Anonima Stefano Pittaluga (SASP), named after its founder and powerful film exhibitor and distributor, took control of the Italian trust, its 60 movie theaters, and several of its production firms (e.g., Cines, Celio‐Palatino, Itala, and Caesar Film). It was too late: SASP only produced films of dubious commercial quality that did not obtain profitable foreign distribution. Pittaluga remained a major player in the industry until his death in 1931, only months after the historical release of one of his last productions, Gennaro Righelli’s La canzone dell’amore (1930)—Italy’s first sound film. By then, important policies had begun to rationalize (and protect) national production and distribution.

Two factors had decreed the demise of the industry in the 1920s: a general lack of industrial initiatives and government’s legislative and financial measures aimed at countering rising production costs, a devalued currency, and stars’ spiraling salaries. Even more damaging had been the loss of competiveness at home and abroad, caused by widespread resistance to technical and artistic innovation, which resulted in the failure to drive the best talent (e.g., Mario Camerini, Lucio D’Ambra, and Carmine Gallone) toward dramatic experimentation and forced many gifted directors (e.g., Augusto Genina) to migrate to more enterprising and profitable European film industries (Reich 2013, 135–42).

Still, one important novelty appeared in the Italian cinema of the 1920s. Between the Great War and the October 1922 March on Rome, the government had shown occasional interest in motion pictures, limiting its role to censorship or war coverage. (In conjunction with the Italian Turkish War, 1911–1912, Luca Comerio, Ambrosio, and Cines had produced newsreel series, soon followed by the Regio Esercito‐Sezione Cinematografico.) By World War I, the government intended to exercise full control over the film coverage of the war. After the mid‐1920s, the situation changed as the Fascist regime embraced nonfiction filmmaking as a unique propaganda instrument capable of covering Italians’ civil life, beginning with the impact of the regime’s new policies. The formation of the Istituto Nazionale Luce (initially known as L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa, or LUCE) was aimed at broadcasting the regime’s new achievements, such as increasing wheat production or the draining of marshes, and at building a cult around the figure of the Duce (Laura 2000, 59–81, 101–106). From the middle of the decade, Italian spectators started watching government sponsored educational and scientific documentaries. In 1926 this became an injunction, mandatory in conjunction with every screened fictional film. After 1927, a steady diet of newsreels (Giornali Cinematografici Luce, or cinegiornali) covered every aspect of national life, whether related directly or not to the regime. This exposure fostered a culture of documentary realism that historians have recently associated with the emergence of neorealist poetics (Ben‐Ghiat 2001).

Film Discourse

Early journalistic reactions to the emergence of cinema welcomed its wonderful spectacles and prodigious new technology. Within a few years, the most articulate interventions focused on the medium’s broad cultural novelty, ranging from its unique replication of modern human experience in terms of individuals’ enhanced mobility and new psychological life, to novel aesthetic status. In 1907, critic and author Giovanni Papini discussed cinema’s formal links to the radical changes affecting Italian urban and social life. The same year the novelist Edmondo De Amicis mobilized the notion of cinematografo cerebrale (cerebral cinema) to draw parallels between the ways in which film and the human mind worked, thus establishing an equivalence soon embraced by experimental psychologists and psychiatrists interested in film reception (Alovisio, Mazzei, and Spinosa 2010). The question of cinematic artistry was variously argued according to assumptions of medium discontinuity. The emphasis on cinema’s difference from other means of visual representations led Luigi Pirandello, for example, to a dystopian position. His novel Si gira (Shoot!, 1915/1926) underscored actors’ biological and humanist degradation before the camera’s repetitively reproductive automatisms. On the other hand, Ricciotto Canudo, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, and the futurists embraced, as we already suggested, cinema’s radical aesthetic departure from previous media as an aesthetic gain. Writing as silent film theorists ante litteram they emphasized cinema’s unique capacity to transcend its own indexical proclivity through “absolutely precise speed” (Canudo 1994, 27) and unique “visual rhythm” (Luciani 1980, 290) toward “a new aesthetic of movement” (D’Annunzio 2013, 118). Thus, the argument for film artistry downplayed any emphasis on cinema’s reproductive impetus by praising the medium’s artful “constructedness” of dynamic framing and shifting tableaux through frequent analogies with the formal and nonreferential expressiveness of musical rhythm (Bertellini 2002, 30–82).

Still, a large portion of Italian film discourse privileged the notion of cinema’s continuity with the visual arts of painting and printmaking, but also with the verbal arts of theater and literature. While resisting concessions to film’s expressive uniqueness, Italian critics and practitioners mobilized the oldest and most intermedial artistic practice of pantomime on the ground of its familiar expressive status, cultural history, and interclass appeal. Pantomime fueled an emphasis on performance over narrative cogency that profoundly affected mainstream dramaturgical and acting practices and that, over time, distinguished for better or for worse Italian cinema from other national film productions (Mosconi 2006).

One significant consequence of these debates was a resilient discursive attachment to silent cinema poetics well into the 1930s. Italian film theory, in fact, continued to mobilize an artistic rhetoric of music, silence, and pantomime long after the introduction of synchronized dialogues opened the medium to both realistic and nationalizing pressures. What ultimately hindered the arte muta tenets were the country’s resilient geographic and linguistic differences. Pretending that certain films could effectively, even suggestively, show Italy to Italians had been one thing; expecting that the vernacular idioms of plausible film characters could be widely understandable to the country’s populations was a different thing altogether. Once “listening in” shifted from novel, but flawed, mimetic possibility to a groundbreaking and full‐fledged aesthetic opportunity, however, silent cinema was finally over.

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Notes