Well, when I say ‘now’, I mean ‘several months ago’. Last year, I went on holiday to Europe (including taking in Il Cinema Ritrovato), and while in the Netherlands, I picked up several issues of the Dutch journal Cinema en Theater from the early 1920s. Back home, I made high-resolution scans, and submitted the issues to the Media History Digital Library. I imagine many readers are familiar with this brilliant resource, which provides access to digitized copies of books and magazines about films, broadcasting, and recorded sound.

You can find the Cinema en Theater issues linked here on the Global Cinema Collection page, but I thought I’d point out an interesting thing or two about each issue here on Silents, Please. As you’ll see, the visual design of the magazine is really lovely. Plus, there’s a blog-only exclusive that involves Pola Negri!

A quick background note about the journal: Cinema en Theater was a Dutch film and theater magazine, published in Leiden. It was launched on 08 Feb, 1918 as De filmwereld [Film World], becoming Cinema en Theater in 1921. At the beginning of 1924, it was retitled Het weekblad cinema en theater [Cinema and Theatre Weekly]; in 1942 the name reverted to Cinema en Theater. The last issue was published in 1944. As per the name, it covers screen and stage entertainments of the day, both domestic and international.

The issues that I bought each had 12 pages. The paper has a lovely quality/texture, with almost a slight shimmer to it.

Cinema en Theater no. 12, 1921

Highlight: The two-page photo spread of Asta Nielsen in Irrende Seelen (DE 1921; De dwaas), based on Dostoyevksy’s The Idiot. This film isn’t extant, which is a shame, because the pictures look great. (More images here).

Also: Reviews and pictures of Sept de pique (FR 1917; Schoppen zeven); King Spruce (US 1920, Het geheim van het woud); and William S. Hart’s Wagon Tracks (US 1919, De gids der prairiën).

Read the issue here.

Cinema en Theater no. 14, 1921

Highlight: Review and photo spread of Fernanda (IT 1917), starring Leda Gys. Gys co-starred with Gustavo Serena in this melodrama based on the Victorien Sardou’s 1870 play Fernande.

Also: A page called ‘Die vrouw, die lacht’ (‘The woman, the laugh’), showing a range of notable Dutch woman—including film actress Annie Bos—laughing and/or smiling. Reviews and photos of Wallace Reid in The Roaring Road (US 1920; De Kilometervreter); Rosa Porten serial Auri Sacra Fames (DE 1920); Een vrouwelijke demon (? – despite Cinema Context listing this film as Satan Junior [US 1919], judging by the plot and imagery of Satan Junior, I think it’s a different film).

Read the issue here.

Cinema en Theater no. 21, 1921

Highlight: Dance diva Stella Fontaine interviews Asta Nielsen. According to Fontaine, Asta was the most “warm, simple, charming hostess imaginable”. She visits Die Asta on the set of Die Geliebte Roswolskys (DE 1921); her wardrobe is “a jewel of luxury and taste”. Naturally Asta loves Holland, and wishes to come for a holiday, or to act in a Wedekind work in the Netherlands.

Geraldine Farrar

Also: Reviews/photo spreads of William S. Hart’s Truthful Tulliver (US 1917; Drie schoten knalden in de nacht) and Geraldine Farrar’s The World and its Woman (US 1919; Uit woelige dagen; available here on the EFG). There’s also a fun page of pictures taken at a society event.

Read the issue here.

Cinema en Theater no. 29, 1921

Highlight: Review and double-page photo spread of Lucy Doraine vehicle Herzogin Satanella (AT 1921; Good and Evil). This film partially survives—I know because I’ve seen it in the flesh. Large chunks of it were in very poor condition.

Lucy Doraine

Also: Reviews and photo spreads of Pitfalls of a Big City (US 1919; De gevaren eener groote stad), starring Gladys Brockwell, and The Pretenders (US 1916; De Benzine-baron), starring Emmy Wehlen.

Read the issue here.

Cinema en Theater no. 55, 1922

Highlight: two-page photo spread on Sex (US 1920), starring Louise Glaum.

Also: full page Sessue Hayakawa and Tsuru Aoki advert; spread on De koning der woestijn (The King of the Desert; most likely Allein im Urwald), an adventure film which has colonialist/ethnographic overtones; review of Was she guilty? aka Thou shalt not (GB/NL 1922; Gij zult niet dooden).

Read the issue here.

Unknown issue

I also ended up with several loose pages that aren’t from any of the issues above. Luckily, they contained a spread and photopage of Pola Negri in Sappho (DE 1921)!

I’ve seen this one. The first thing you should know is that despite the title, it is NOT GAY. Boo. Pola is Sappho, a femme fatale type decides to reform when she finds true love. However, true love has a mad brother who is contained in an asylum: he has been driven insane by the wiles of a wicked, wicked woman. Was that woman Sappho? Yes, yes it was.

The most notable thing about the film is that Alfred Abel plays the mad brother, and he goes nuts with it. I always think of him as such a stately, dignified presence, but here he’s running around gesticulating wildly, doing a lot of eyebrow acting, and generally hamming it up. It’s pretty fun, and definitely livens up what I remember as a pretty boilerplate film. Pola, of course, is her usual awesome self.

Yes, this is the man you remember from Metropolis, L’Argent, etc.

– – –

Anyway, I was very pleased to make a (small) contribution to such a great project! If you ever come across any film magazines that aren’t on there, hit them up.

Not long ago, a major project of mine came to fruition. A chance infatuation with the adverts for a particular film grew into a fruitful research project which involved early newspaper comic strips, international media coverage, and two Italian silent films. Now, my article on this particular collison of comic strip history, pop culture, and silent cinema has been published in the journal Feminist Media Histories.

The article is called From the New York Herald to the Italian screen: Fluffy Ruffles, la donna americana, and you can find it here.

It’s a research article, but also has a visual component: I produced hand-drawn illustrations to accompany the text. They’re mostly in pen, with some ink, and some use of collage. The illustrations are all based on archival materials, primarily adverts, that I unearthed in the course of my research. (Originally the concept was to produce something more zine-like in nature, but for several reasons it worked out differently).

Here’s the abstract:

The popular 1907–9 American newspaper comic strip character Fluffy Ruffles was an iconic embodiment of contemporary American femininity between the eras of the Gibson Girl and the later flapper and “it” girl. This article discusses Fluffy Ruffles as a popular phenomenon and incarnation of anxieties about women in the workplace, and how she underwent a metamorphosis in the European press, as preexisting ideas of American youth, wealth, and liberty were grafted onto her character. A decade after her debut in the newspapers, two films—Augusto Genina’s partially extant Miss Cyclone (La signorina Ciclone, 1916), and Alfredo Robert’s lost Miss Fluffy Ruffles (1918)—brought her to the Italian screen. This article looks at how the character was interpreted by Suzanne Armelle and Fernanda Negri Pouget, respectively, drawing on advertisements and the other performances of Negri Pouget to reconstruct the latter. The article is illustrated with drawings and collages based on the author’s research.

The article is on freeview until the end of the week. (And if you come to this post later on and want to take a look, flick me an email!)

I’m thinking of following up with a ‘behind the scenes’ post about the project, if people are interested. Any takers?

Almost three years ago, I posted about London Symphony, a contemporary silent film production by British filmmaker Alex Barrett. For this project, Barrett has revived the silent-era genre of the city symphony—a cinematic portrait of a city, more poetic evocation than documentary—to celebrate the spirit of London.

I had the pleasure of viewing the rough cut last year, and it’s a wonderful film. Stylistically it’s impressive, with beautiful cinematography and an excellent score; a great synthesis between image and sound. London Symphony is stylish, evocative of the original city symphonies without feeling in any way like a pastiche. But what makes it such a truly ambitious film, I think, is the scope that it covers: London Symphony was shot all over the English capital, with space given to people from all different walks of life, different cultural groups, and of course a huge number of locations. I may not know London well, having visited only briefly, but I experienced it as a nuanced view of the city.

And yes, I am quoted in the trailer. :)

The world premiere of London Symphony took place in May at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, but another big date is coming up: the film’s limited UK release in September. The tour kicks off with a live orchestra screening at the Barbican on September 3rd, followed by a collection of other venues across England. (Screening info here).

It will be a great one to see on the big screen, if you can get there! For the rest of us, stay tuned: London Symphony has been picked up by Flicker Alley for international distribution, and it will be released on MOD Blu-Ray and VOD later this year.

Photoshop by Edith Prestegaard; found on YouTube.

At this point in time, it’s by no means a revelation that a number of Hollywood actresses in the 1920s and 1930s loved women, including major stars like Alla Nazimova, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich. The private lives of these women take centre stage in Diana McLellan’s book The Girls: Sappho goes to Hollywood, in which the author promises “a rich stew of film, politics, sexuality, psychology, and stardom”.

A heady mix indeed. First things first: this book is tremendously entertaining. I’ve read it a couple of times before, and it’s fun and breezy, with McLellan generally doing a good job of weaving different characters in and out of her narrative, and animating various figures in an engaging manner. The major caveat is that The Girls is, at best, highly speculative. McLellan was a gossip columnist for many years, and it certainly shows in the resulting work. The reader is apprised of this from the very start, when in the foreword, McLellan states a principle that guided both her former work in newspapers and her research for The Girls: “One big, proven lie reveals far more than dozens or widely reported ‘truths’—once you understand why it was told”. Well, then. QED?

The two leads of The Girls are Garbo and Dietrich, with Salka Viertel, Tallulah Bankhead, and the ubiquitous Mercedes de Acosta forming the major supporting cast. Though McLellan paints with broad strokes, and frequently ascribes motives and thoughts to her cast that she could not possibly know, her characterisations ring relatively true: Garbo, secretive, neurotic and misanthropic; Dietrich, worldy, confident, and generous; Tallulah, an unabashed libertine who was nonetheless a warm and loyal person.

McLellan’s story starts with Alla Nazimova. I’m a big fan of Nazimova: a very fine actress and a bold force as a writer and producer. She also has a reputation—not undeserved—as Hollywood’s original power lesbian. (McLellan asserts that Nazimova was initiated into the ways of lesbian love by famous anarchist Emma Goldman, although none of the references cited actually seem to confirm the liaison). But McLellan quickly introduces writer Mercedes de Acosta, in many ways the lynchpin of The Girls. De Acosta was neither a great literary talent nor a great beauty, but she was highly intelligent, with great charm and social ease. She was something of an eccentric too, embracing mysticism and vegetarianism, and dressing in black or white only. De Acosta’s lovers were legion, including many major stage and screen actresses of her era: Nazimova, Eva Le Gallienne, Garbo, Dietrich, the dancer Isadora Duncan. If someone drew a version of The L Word’s The Chart for The Girls, de Acosta would be at the centre of it.

Mercedes de Acosta

The book covers Garbo’s Hollywood career in depth, and the often tumultuous de Acosta-Garbo affair is given due page space (Garbo: controlling and private; de Acosta: passionate, enraptured by Garbo). But McLellan’s smoking gun in The Girls is the ‘evidence’ she has uncovered of a pre-Hollywood affair between Garbo and Dietrich. She contends that Dietrich appeared in a supporting role in G. W. Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse | The Joyless Street (DE 1925), Garbo’s last European film before she left for Hollywood. In McLellan’s telling, Dietrich (here black-haired) appears as a minor character, resident of the titular street, lowered to prostitution by the hunger of her young child. Per McLellan, it’s not just the woman’s face and gestures that mark  her as Dietrich, but also the appearance of Dietrich’s “instantly recognizable” hands. And why did Dietrich later consistently deny appearing in Die freudlose Gasse? Not just professional pride and a wish to present The Blue Angel as her ‘first’ screen role, but also to cover up the fact that she had, in fact, met Greta Garbo before … intimately. For their meeting on Die freudlose Gasse led to a personal affair that, nonetheless, bled onto the screen: “It is Marlene, and only Marlene, who catches [Greta],” McLellan states, describing how Marlene “gazes into her face, and holds her tenderly”. As McLellan says, “You cannot faint into the arms of someone who will let you down.” McLellan goes on to imagine their affair, complete with scenes of Marlene nurturing Greta with homemade goulash (!) The bitter end of the affair saw the ‘provincial’ Greta shamed and gossiped about by the worldly Marlene, leading to the Swede’s lifelong animosity towards the German.

If you are thinking that that sounds like a lot of conjecture, you are right. The biggest problem with this whole scenario—apart from the fact that the supposed affair is entirely imagined by McLellan—is that Marlene Dietrich did not appear in Die freudlose Gasse. The character McLellan refers to is played by Hertha von Walther, and named Else (although her name is not given within the film itself). While von Walther does bear some resemblance to Dietrich, especially in the main scene McLellan cites as evidence, anyone watching the film can see that the actress in question is not, in fact, Dietrich.

Not Marlene …Hertha von Walther as Else in Die freudlose Gasse

If the eye test doesn’t convince you, von Walther is also credited as Else in all the film historical sources, and indeed the credits of the DVD (I have the Filmarchiv Austria version).

A conspiracy spanning multiple film historians and archives over a period of decades?

One sees the appeal of a Garbo-Dietrich affair: two of the biggest stars of their era, both representing different incarnations of European glamour, both known to have loved women, and almost complete opposites in personality. I mean, part of me still wants to believe. But not only was their affair complete speculation to begin with, the setting of it never happened. Of course, given its publication here, the Garbo-Dietrich Die freudlose Gasse affair is now reported as fact or at least ‘authoritative rumour’ in other books (Gay LA is one example, if I remember correctly). Given that there genuinely was a thriving Sapphic community in Hollywood—really, the assertion that everyone was sleeping with everyone else is probably the most believable aspect of The Girls—it’s disappointing that McLellan leans so heavily on speculation in her book.

Admittedly, von Walther does look rather Marlene-like in shots such as this one.

Supposedly, late in life, Dietrich did admit to appearing in Die freudlose Gasse. The source for this? David Bret: not the most reliable of authors, to put it mildly. McLellan also undercuts herself by relating a comment Marlene made about the plot which supposedly proves her involvement in the film, but which is actually an obvious logical deduction that could be made by any viewer.

The former issue points to another big problem with The Girls. The author seems to have done some genuinely interesting research, especially in digging into the FBI files of Dietrich and Otto Katz, who she claims was Marlene Dietrich’s secret first husband. Yet McLellan is a very indiscriminating researcher and referencer, even by the standards of popular history. Amidst legitimate sources, McLellan directly cites the works of hack authors like David Bret and Boze Hadleigh—unreliable sources at best—as well as, most egregiously, anecdotes from Hollywood Babylon. I mean, come on. Even if most of that book’s claims hadn’t been debunked by the time McLellan published hers, anyone with a bit of sense would have thought twice before repeating its stories uncritically. Nor would I consider Confidential a trustworthy source. Such habits certainly damage McLellan’s credibility—and the fact that she’s posted rebuttals to all the negative reviews of this book on Amazon doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

McLellan details queer female Hollywood’s network of liaisons and shifting webs of alliances with warmth and glee: characters like the brazen and gregarious Tallulah Bankhead sail through the pages of The Girls. (Let me take a second here to recommend Bankhead’s autobiography: devastatingly witty, a truly sparkling read). Salka Viertel is another key player: the Austrian screenwriter and actress was one of Garbo’s main confidantes in Hollywood, and her house was at the centre of the European emigré social scene. McLellan characterizes Viertel as something of a puppetmaster: a woman who acted as both career adviser and social gatekeeper for Garbo, who used Garbo to bolster her flagging career, deliberately sowing discord between her and MGM, while also carefully playing de Acosta off against Garbo. Like many things in this book, there is probably a certain amount of truth to the dynamic between Viertel, Garbo, and the various people in their orbit, but it’s McLellan who ascribes “sly deviousness” to Viertel. An interesting detail that does seem substantiated is that Viertel knew Dietrich in Weimar Berlin (although she later downplayed this, probably so as not to rile Garbo).

As mentioned above, the other big ‘revelation’ of The Girls is that Otto Katz, international Soviet spy, was Dietrich’s first husband. He always claimed that the civic records in Teplitz (now Teplice, Czech Republic) would prove their union; unfortunately—and conveniently, for Katz’s story—the majority of marriage records of this era concerning Jews were destroyed by the Third Reich. Katz’s claim of marriage to Dietrich has never been substantiated, and Katz’s biographer concludes that he and Dietrich are unlikely to have been married, although “there is no reason to doubt” that they were lovers.

Of course, that’s not how McLellan tells it. In her narrative, Katz introduced Dietrich to Rudolf Sieber (her actual first husband), and Katz is the likely father of Dietrich’s daughter Maria Riva. Supposedly, Sieber married Marlene as a cover-up for her relationship and child with a Jewish Communist. Ironically, McLellan is very skeptical about what she calls the “purported” Sieber-Dietrich marriage; for example, she comments that “the ‘wedding photograph’ she [Dietrich] left her daughter looks like a staged costume shot”.

The photo in question. An obvious fake?

Katz later came to Hollywood, where he was at the centre of a clandestine Communist soft-power push under the name Rudolph Breda (and later, André Simone). That Katz was a loyal operative for the Comintern is indisputable, as is his role in the Communist front organization the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Less believable is McLellan’s assertion that Katz was the model for Victor Laszlo in Casablanca, or that the Party invested in Marlene’s goodwill regarding their Hollywood endeavours by bestowing an exquisite collection of Tsarist emeralds on her (!); which, of course, she covertly sold off over time to fund the Communist cause.

It’s largely Garbo and Dietrich’s trajectory that the book follows, making a late section devoted to Lizabeth Scott seem rather tacked on. Otherwise, McLellan does a good job of sustaining her narrative arc amid frequent diversions into the lives of the supporting cast, minor players, and other subplots. All in all, The Girls is a fun romp. But one should take it with a shakerful of salt.

– – –

The Girls: Sappho goes to Hollywood by Diana McLellan. New York: L. A. Weekly Books, 2000.

Cabaret show in Die freudlose Gasse

Regular readers will have noticed that things have been pretty quiet around Silents, Please! for the last year or so. Partly, this was because I channelled a lot of energy into researching, writing and drawing my Feminist Media Histories article: a very absorbing process, about which I’ll write more soon. Another reason was because I was putting a lot of energy into writing code rather than writing about film.

On occasion, these hobbies have intersected. Some months ago, I wrote a Bash/Python script that generates a rainbow grid from a film: it takes regular frame grabs from a video file, determines the dominant colour per image, then outputs a mosaic of images ordered by hue. Of course, I had silent film on my mind as I wrote the script – what better way to showcase the vibrant colours of this era? I revisited my code recently; so, it seems like a good time to present a few of my favourite outputs from the program. Enjoy! (And you can click on each picture to view the full-size image).

The Blue Bird (US 1918) lives up to its picturesque reputation:

Der Student von Prag | The Student of Prague (DE 1913), with Paul Wegener in the title role, is an excellent film that also scores highly in the rainbow stakes.

A range of jewel tones from L’Homme du large | The Man of the Open Sea (FR 1920):

Eye-popping brightness from Filibus (IT 1915); a wonderful film that I’ve written about here.

Some films had a more limited palette that still produced a pleasing effect.

For example, check out this mosaic of Vittoria o morte! | Victory or Death! (IT 1913):

And the output of the remaining parts of Homunculus (DE 1916):

Striking imagery and colourisation in Das Blumenwunder | The Miracle of Flowers (DE 1926):

Some serious style for Die schwarze Kugel oder Die geheimnisvollen Schwestern | The Black Ball; or, The Mysterious Sisters (DE 1913).

Okay, one more for luck. From Spain, here’s Margarita Xirgu vehicle El beso de la muerte | The Kiss of Death (ES 1916):

Those interested can find my code here.

Over the course of my research, I’ve noticed on a delightful quirk of Italian silent film advertising: a prominent and often repetitious use of question marks to build anticipation and enthusiasm for future film releases.

I’ve shared examples annually for the last couple of years, but the well is not yet dry, my friends. So, for the third excursion into this phenomenon, I’ve looked for examples that combine punti interrogativi with other punctuation. Andiamo!

Question marks and exclamation marks are a match made in heaven in this advert for Dollari e fraks, a four-part serial in Emilio Ghione’s long-running Za La Mort series.

La vita cinematografica no. 5-6 of 1919

What about Chaplin? Stefano Pittaluga has the goods, advertising Charlot falso Barone (Caught in a Cabaret, 1914), Charlot ortolano (The Tramp, 1915), and Il pianoforte di Charlot (His Musical Career, 1914).

La vita cinematografica (December 1918)

Tiber Film in Rome aren’t sure what to do with Maria Jacobini:

La vita cinematografica no. 31 of 1918

Jacobini made several films at Tiber that year, but then moved to Itala Film, where she had one of her big successes with the very good Addio giovinezza! (Goodbye Youth!).

Speaking of which, here is Itala Film advertising their 1919 picture Scacco matto (Checkmate) and communicating a strong possibility that the king may not in fact be in check.

La vita cinematografica no. 17 of 1919

Tornielli Film of Turin only ever produced three films, none of which have a title related to the cryptic repetition of P..y..n!? in this advert.

La rivista cinematografica n. 13 of 1920

The question mark followed by ellipsis is also a common device. Cines keep us guessing on who will play Salome in their upcoming film:

La vita cinematografica no. 21 of 1918

It was not a film that ever came to fruition, as far as I can tell. Likewise, Filmgraf (headed the prolific Gustavo Serena) teases us with the mystery of what is to come, all the while publicising other films that never saw the light of day.

La vita cinematografica no. 3-4 of 1919

Back in Rome, Fontana Film is in rationing, with Yvonne de Fleuriel and Amleto Novelli earning a ? and a ! respectively. The two costarred in the 1919 film Tutto!.

In penombra 05 of 1918

What is La gardenia rossa? Another phantom film.

Film n. 32 of 1919

For maximum impact, a combination of question marks, exclamation marks, and ellipses may be used. Maria Jacobini’s sister Diomira also worked at Tiber, where she was not neglected by punctuation:

La vita cinematografica no. 3-4 of 1919

The director cited, Alfredo de Antoni, directed and acted alongside Bertini in several of her big films, including Il processo Clémenceau (1917) and Frou-Frou (1918). (His acting career stretched into the 1940s, and included a role in the notorious 1937 fascist film Scipione l’africano).  De Antoni and Jacobini only worked together on one title at Tiber, I due volti di Nunù of 1920.

And last but not least, let’s appreciate this creative use of visual typography:

In penombra 02 of 1919

Avete domande?

Earlier this year, I posted about a film/media history article I’d published in the journal Feminist Media Histories, entitled “From the New York Herald to the Italian screen: Fluffy Ruffles, la donna americana”. The article traced the history of 1907-9 comic strip character Fluffy Ruffles, feminine type and pop culture phenomenon, and how she was the subject of two films in Italy in the 1910s. I also illustrated the article with hand-drawings and collages. It was a large piece of work, and an extremely rewarding project for me. Now that some time has passed, I thought I’d take the opportunity to reflect on the process of working on the article.

Genesis & development

I was invited to contribute to the Feminist Media Histories issue by my friend Maggie Hennefeld, a brilliant academic whose research focuses on early silent comediennes. She had seen a feminist silent film comic I’d made a couple of years beforehand, and she contacted me in late 2015 to see if I’d be interested in doing something similar for the issue on Gender and Comedy that she was co-editing. I loved the idea, although of course I was nervous about it: I’m not an academic, nor an especially talented illustrator. So, what would the comic/visual essay/drawing-based piece be about? We were both interested in me working on something Antipodes-related, but unfortunately I couldn’t find a suitable topic. Talking via email, the concept became focused around combining cartoon drawings with archival research with critical commentary: something to do with comedienne (archives) around the world. But I hadn’t found the right thread. Still, I’d been spending a lot of time browsing silent-era Italian film magazines, and a particular title had caught my eye. I started collecting adverts for this film—and when I googled the title, I found that in America a decade earlier, a cartoon character by the same name had lived a golden summer. Finally, I wrote back to Maggie, pitching the following:

“On the trail of Miss Fluffy Ruffles.” Fluffy Ruffles was a popular newspaper cartoon character of the late 1900s – the cartoon told the story of her assays into the workplace, always thwarted by the men around her. There was a big craze on her, although she’s all but forgotten now. In 1918, an Italian film story of the character (Miss Fluffy Ruffles) was released, starring Fernanda Negri-Pouget. I was browsing old film magazines and the title caught my eye – I developed a bit of a fascination, and have collected a whole bunch of adverts for this cinecommedia. The film was well publicised and it looks pretty fun – although we can’t see it today, as so far as I know, no copies are extant. The piece could be a ‘resurrection’ of this film incorporating this archival material.

Everyone was keen with this concept, and so it was agreed! I was really enjoying the idea of this visually-based ‘essay’: in my mind, it was going to be a zine-style kind of thing.

Research

I mapped out my areas of enquiry, as you can see below, and started researching. Quickly, I found out that Augusto Genina’s 1916 film La signorina Ciclone—a film I already knew about, even—also had a character named Fluffy Ruffles as protagonist. I looked at the Fluffy Ruffles comic and its coverage in international media. I investigated the career of Fernanda Negri Pouget, star of Miss Fluffy Ruffles, the film that was the genesis of the project.

I really enjoyed the research process: poring over newspapers and journals; interloaning books; note-taking, mind-mapping, and organising my research materials. With any kind of essay of this sort, you have to do a lot of research to say a little. In a blog post I can be more informal, but for a piece published in an scholarly journal, I wanted to make sure my statements were qualified and informed. So I researched a lot of different topics as background. For example, while early American newspaper comics aren’t totally unfamiliar to me—I’m a fan of artists like Windsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland, Dream of the Rarebit Fiend) and George Herriman (Krazy Kat, one of the greatest American creative achievements?)—obviously I needed more context on the era.

And while I think I can say that I have a good general knowledge of Italian silent cinema, I needed to research La signorina Ciclone and Miss Fluffy Ruffles in detail: primary and secondary sources, material on the personnel involved, info on the studios. La signorina Ciclone survives in part, and is also quite well-documented, but Miss Fluffy Ruffles has disappeared into oblivion. No copy is known to survive, and while I collected a good number of adverts, there do not exist a huge amount of written sources relating to the film: I hunted down every mention that I could. Therefore, as something of a lacuna, Miss Fluffy Ruffles presented a challenge: how could I talk about it in a meaningful way? Textual research aside, it requires an act of imagination to breathe life into this kind of absence, and my approach to this was two-fold.

Fernanda Negri Pouget

Firstly, I considered Fernanda Negri Pouget’s other performances, particularly her other roles from the late teens. She’s an actress I find very interesting, not your typical kind of film star—I guess that’s partly why the adverts for Miss Fluffy Ruffles caught my eye in the first place. Her film Lucciola (Firefly) was crucial here: it’s a starring role from a period in her career of which hardly any films survive. Without dipping overly into the speculative, what could I read into Miss Fluffy Ruffles based on Negri Pouget’s work in Lucciola?

Postcard for Lucciola

Secondly, the visuals became really important here. I used original adverts, redrawing and recombining them in order to suggest something about the film’s character or style. One creative action cannot recuperate another, but hopefully something can still be regained. In a way, it was also an act of devotion. So many films are lost to time.

I think a great deal about historiography, especially from a feminist point of view. What stories are told, how, and why? It’s a truism to say that feminine forces are too often neglected in mainstream narratives: an obvious example is Lois Weber, powerhouse in early Hollywood, who has been downplayed in film history to the point of erasure until recently. As I write this, I’m a bit too tired to eloquently address ideas around feminist historiography; suffice it to say that I kept these ideas close when I was working on the article, even if they are not too explicitly discussed therein.

As far as I can tell, no one had ever made a connection between the Italian films starring Fluffy Ruffles and the comic strip character. Given the different languages, countries, and scopes of research at play here, that’s not surprising, but even Fluffy Ruffles herself has not been the direct subject of scholarship. Yes, she’s an obscure part of pop culture, but I was surprised—and pleased—to discover that I had found uncharted waters here.

I also need to state that I benefited hugely from the input of my editors. The first draft was well-received, but even better, Maggie posed some excellent questions that forced me to think through and flesh out various aspects of the piece. My original word count of ~2000 grew to over 3000 within a few weeks, finally increasing to around 3600 words.

Lacunae

My research was as comprehensive as I could make it, but there are pieces of the puzzle that are, essentially, unrecoverable. The Fluffy phenomenon was reported on in Italy: one journalist took her up as something of a cause célèbre, writing a series of articles about her and lecturing on her in several cities in Italy, from which also resulted a book. Yet there is a gap of eight years between this Fluffy media presence and the film La signorina Ciclone. Why was the character revived these years later—what was Lucio D’Ambra’s source of inspiration? Did D’Ambra think back to the Fluffy of 1908 in the Italian media, thinking that this audacious American woman could be a great subject for a film? Or did the concept come first, and the idea to connect it to the Fluffy Ruffles of previous media fame arrive later? Lucio D’Ambra and Augusto Genina each wrote memories of their cinema lives, both informative, but neither providing the kind of smoking-gun connection that would be ideal here. Another mystery is that Miss Fluffy Ruffles was consistently advertised as being an adaptation of “the novel by W. [William] Hamilton”. I could find no trace of such a book—did something of the kind exist, or was it purely a publicity invention?

There were lucky breaks, too. It’s very fortuitous that the key behind-the-camera creators of La signorina Ciclone left autobiographical writings, even more so because they both worked with Negri Pouget and indeed admired her. Another example: I managed to get hold of a copy of the Italian Fluffy Ruffles book mentioned previously: Fluffy Ruffles, la fanciulla americana. The book states a print run of fifty: isn’t it bizarre to think that almost 110 years after its publication, one of these copies found a home in Aotearoa New Zealand?

Visual production

I mentioned earlier that all but one of the illustrations were created by me especially for the article. Even late into the process, I’d been thinking of the text as a kind of script for the visual side of the piece. However, with a pretty solid word count of ~3600, it eventually became clear that it couldn’t be as visually focused as I had originally envisioned. Another wrinkle was that the journal had certain restrictions as to layout. The upshot of all this was that I ended up making a series of illustrations to accompany the article, rather than a full-on zine/visual approach.

While the text was done on time, I only had a very short space of time to work on the illustrations. This ended up being, essentially, the week between Christmas 2017 and New Year 2017.

It wasn’t that I left it until the last minute out of lack of care. The reasons are a bit convoluted, but suffice it to say that the compressed timeframe was due to necessity. I knew that the end of December would be when I was working on my visual side of the article in an extremely concentrated burst: I’d planned for it and had all my visual research done, as well as having a few ideas and rough sketches/mockups in hand.

I ended up going to my parents’ house, in a different city than where I live, to work on the drawings. This was partly because Christmas plans took me in that vague direction, but mostly because I would have ready access to a pretty decent quality scanner. So, I drove a few hours north from the Christmas whānau gathering, and started drawing. I had the house to myself, but my brother was around since he was working in between Christmas and New Years—in the evenings, he’d turn up with dinner and we’d kick back and watch a movie. I’m not sure why it worked out this way, but we watched a programme of Nicolas Cage films: Vampire’s Kiss, Con Air, Face/Off, The Rock. I worked and drew all day, and then gave my hands a rest during the night-time Cage film festival.

This is where I should add a disclaimer: I’m really not any great shakes as a draughtswoman. My focus for the article was primarily to reinterpret existing graphical sources: pen and ink may have been the chosen medium, but I took a collage approach rather than a generative fine art approach. I am not the originator of the images I used, just their translator: as such, I considered myself more interpreter than artistic creator. The last thing I would want to do is claim artistry I do not possess. My hope was that by working with these original sources, I could weave them together in ways that would ultimately say something different than simply reproducing them would.

The extent to which I succeeded may be considered an open question. Some images I think are very successful, though: for example, I combined Charles Gibson’s famous image of the Gibson Girl with one of Fluffy Ruffles to create this ink drawing:

An ambitious illustration was the ‘newspaper spread’ I created from a range of Fluffy-related media. The idea here was to provide a visual shortcut to Fluffymania. I could have taken a full collage approach, but most of the images are in fact hand-drawn from the originals, with a couple of the images composited in. (I did composite in all of the text, since that’s virtually impossible to do by hand without looking shonky).

Certain other drawings didn’t work so well, and if I’d had more time, I would have liked to revisit them. I don’t think there were any true duds though.

Drawing so much in a short space of time was challenging, both creatively and physically. I built myself some room to move by planning a number of ‘definites’ and a number of ‘maybes’ depending on what worked visually and how things went under the time constraints.

Some decisions were a mixed bag. I drew in ink for some of the images, partly because I enjoy it, and partly because it’s more practical than pen for images with large black areas. But I didn’t count on the fact that the ink drawings didn’t scan perfectly, due to the shininess of the ink and the fact that I couldn’t totally flatten the paper. That was easy enough to fix digitally, though.

Ink shine, before correction

Reflections and lessons learned

It’s always hard to read one’s own work, and with an article like this I have the double-cringe of having both text and image to contend with. Aie! Still, I reread the article as I wrote this post, and I do feel like it’s pretty solid on the whole. I can be proud of my research, and all of the things I brought together.

Because of the way I approached it, the article isn’t really structured like a traditional scholarly paper. While I think the piece hangs together well, I touch on a lot of things that I could have explored in more detail. It’s almost wholly a research article: I don’t, for example, theorise the relationship between printed visual media (i.e., the Fluffy Ruffles comic strip) vis-à-vis film, or deeply delve into the state of contemporary Italian womanhood, or reflect on the Fluffy Ruffles films in relation to dominant genres like the diva-film. In retrospect, I think it could have been productive to explore these connections with more depth, but it’s not the way things evolved.

It’s also interesting to me that although I’d set out to create a visually-focused, non-traditional piece of work, the final product did end up in a pretty conventional format. Yet, I approached the image component of the piece as integral, a creative response to and embodiment of my research, so hopefully it still works on those grounds. My editors were very gracious about the final product, straying as far from the original plan as it did, although part of me wonders if it indeed was satisfying.

I do think that I could have pushed things a lot further on the visual side: conceptually and artistically, there’s a lot of scope for development there. I’d love to do a future project that’s closer to my original comic strip or zine idea, or creates a synthesis between image and research in some other way. A couple of ideas are percolating, but if and when things develop, I’m not sure what the venue would be. I could post things here on the blog, but for the amount of work involved, I’d like that kind of project to be ‘officially’ sanctioned somehow.

I’ve been thinking lately about how information propagates through scholarship, including, at times, errors. I read quite a lot about silent film history, and it’s surprisingly frequently that I come across inaccuracies or oversights, even by established researchers. It pains me to admit that I recently noted that there are, in fact, a couple of errors in my article, even if they are relatively minor. One is something that slipped by me in the review process: a newspaper source is slightly misnamed in a footnote: think Times instead of Herald. In another footnote, I refer to a film as surviving in only one of the four original parts. This isn’t entirely my fault, since other sources referred to it as such, and the FIAF database also only lists the fourth part of the film. But wouldn’t you know it—this year a restoration was made, and apparently the surviving footage amounts to close to three of the four parts. Of course, silver lining: it’s great that it’s a lot more complete than I originally thought!

In conclusion …

Over 2500 (!) words later … one might wonder, why blog about all of this? This entry is different in scope to what I usually post here: almost diaristic in tone, and probably not that interesting to people other than me. But all in all, I wanted to reflect on this project with a bit of temporal distance, and writing helps me sort through my thoughts. Another reason is that I’m intrigued by labour, both as a general concept in society and as it relates to historiography and research. (For example, some readers might remember these interviews having some detail on the subjects’ research process). Maybe I am also influenced by my day job as a software developer, where we habitually hold retrospectives to reflect on the last project or unit of time. Or maybe it’s just simply to put a full stop on a project that was so rewarding, time-consuming, and stimulating.

Vive Fluffy Ruffles!

Fluffy Ruffles, as drawn by Wallace Morgan.

It’s that time of year again! In Diva December, now in its fourth edition, I look at examples of the ‘diva film’, or the genre of decadent female-led melodramas that were a mainstay of Italian cinema of the 1910s. I’ve outlined the diva film genre here before—take a look, if you’d like the basics!

I’ll be covering two or three specific films, but first: some eye candy. A few months ago I posted some rainbow mosaic images I’d made, using a script I wrote that takes screencaps at regular intervals throughout a video file, arranges them in hue order, and then outputs a combinatory grid of the results. Well, I couldn’t resist to give diva films the same treatment – so here are a few of the best results.

The great Carnevalesca (Cines 1918), starring Lyda Borelli, makes a true rainbow:

A more subdued palette for Caino (Corona, 1918):

Per amore di Jenny (Cines 1915), with Pina Menichelli, is heavy on the lurid yellow.

While Il fuoco (Itala 1915) predictably leans on warm reds and oranges.

The image generated from Borelli vehicle Madame Tallien (Palatino 1916) suffers from the fact that the available digital copy is a VHS transfer with washed out blacks, but still shows a lovely range of colours.

And a sneak peak for a film you’ll see more of soon:

Do not flee from me, for I am love. In his character’s introduction, Febo Mari sets the tone for this phantasmic film in which desire and mythology intertwine. In a reverse Pygmalion scenario, an artist’s model, her sculptor-love unfaithful to her, dreams a faun into life—the two fall in love, and escape to their own pastoral world, living outside civilisation. Yet they cannot remain undisturbed in their garden of Eden forever—the outside world intrudes, as well as the messiness of human emotion. Can love be stronger than myth?

The model and the faun

The characters in the film are more archetypes than individuals, and are named accordingly: Nietta Mordeglia is Fede (Faith), the artist’s model; Mari is Il Mito (The Myth), or the faun; Elena Makowska is Femmina (the Woman), also referred to as the Principessa; and Vasco Creti is Arte, the sculptor. (Interestingly, some of the characters are given regular names within the narrative too, which seems extraneous).

Febo Mari—director, writer, and star—presents the story with operatic flourish. An epigrammatic intertitle introduces the film: “I brandish the whip of Menippus,
I lash the luxuries, the customs and vices of my time and, for the sound spirits of the world, I sing first the song of love.” As such, Il fauno is explicitly allegorical, sometimes recalling the D’Annunzian decadence of Il fuoco, though more grounded in the real world than that classic Menichelli film—yes, even despite Il fauno‘s mythological focus. It’s an ambitious approach, and it’s to Mari’s credit that he basically pulls it off.

“Do not suffer. All men from the heart down are like me: beasts.”

Il fauno is an intriguing film in general, but I find it especially interesting because it so explicitly foregrounds female desire and subjectivity. While it’s true that Mari places himself at the centre of the film—indeed, he’s shirtless throughout!—it’s through Fede’s dreaming imagination that the faun is conjured up: a lover who is tender, who protects her, who laughs with her, who lives with her in their idyll. This aspect of the film is undercut in some ways: there’s a scene in which the faun forcibly cuts Fede’s hair, telling her, “I deprive you not to harm you, but to protect you.” Thus, even in their arcadia, proprietary masculinity encroaches. Or is it an intentional reverse-Delilah scenario? But nonetheless, Il fauno displays an interesting turnabout, in that sculpture, traditionally associated very much with the masculine, here becomes a vessel for female imagination.

Mari and Mordeglia were real-life partners, though they did not marry until the late 1930s, after Mari’s first wife passed away. The rapport and warmth between them is evident, and in some scenes they manage to generate real chemistry. Tell me there isn’t genuine tension in this scene:

Likewise, there is warmth and tenderness in their other interactions.

It’s not there all the time, but Mordeglia and Mari do a much better job of convincing me of their connection than your average diva film couple, in which the man is often more of a prop than a person. But then, the Italian teens were all about the female divas; aside from Maciste and the other strongman characters, Mari is, at least in my opinion, one of the stronger male presences, and he’s not just a divo but also something of an auteur.

Mordeglia had a short film career, acting in several of Mari’s other projects in the late teens, including Attila (1917), Cenere (1916—Eleonora Duse’s sole cinematic outing), and a 1919 adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll House, in which Mordeglia played Nora. She later played some TV roles in the 1970s. While she isn’t a knockout performer, I generally enjoyed Mordeglia’s performance in Il fauno. It would be very interesting to see how she would have fared opposite a different lead actor; but then, if you can play against Mari, why would you look elsewhere?

Makowska plays the second female lead, Femmina/the Principessa. Here we have her emoting as she vamps the sculptor:

And here, we see her shrink away from the statue of the faun.

In other words, it’s a standard Makowska role, and she does her typical schtick. I don’t mean that to sound too harsh—I’ve seen 7 or 8 of her films, and I’ve developed a real affection for her. But I can’t rate her too highly as either an actress or a diva, though I do remember enjoying her performance as Ophelia in Amleto—I should probably rewatch to find out if memory serves me well. Still, she’s an aesthetically interesting presence, with her pale eyes, washed out on the orthochromatic film, set in that cherubic face.

There’s also a great sequence of shots where Fede turns away from Femmina. Fede’s spin and Makowska’s pique are really delightful:

Visually Il fauno is a lovely film, and Mari and his cinematographer Giuseppe Vitrotti also sometimes make some interesting choices. I loved the opening and closing shots, with Febo Mari appearing as himself, theatrical impresario unveiling and subsequently drawing the curtain on the story.

There are great uses of silhouette, time-lapse sky-and-sea shots, man-to-faun transitions, and a generally good quality of shot composition. Some shots are simple, but just very well-executed, such as this great sequence where Fede and the faun circle each other around a bust.

Here’s an animated version of part of the shot:

I also really liked the blocking in one of the final scenes of the film, when Fede visits Femmina to try to regain the statue of the faun. Fede enters from stage right, approaching the faun at the back of the room, moving forward left, then to the right foreground. Femmina enters behind Fede and follows a similar trajectory, eventually occluding the view of the faun and then symbolically and physically coming between Fede and her lover. It’s a nice piece of tableau staging.

Apologies for the world’s laziest masking effort, ugh

The real show-stopper, however, is a sustained, tightly framed shot of Fede approaching a door (presumably to the sculptor’s studio), via which she eventually enters. Running around 50 seconds in length, we see Mordeglia approach the grille in the door and look through, framing her face in extreme closeup, before the camera pulls back and then to the side, as she opens the door and enters.

No surprise that the Museo Nazionale del Cinema Torino used this shot as the opener to their silent film showcase Lo splendore del cinema (2010)—it’s just a stunning shot, to which these GIFs really don’t do justice.

I’m writing about Il fauno as part of Diva December, but it doesn’t precisely fit this (amorphous) category: alongside its symbolic and mythological flavour, there’s a certain realist strand present; nor is it truly a female-led film. However, it deals in many of the classic diva trappings: mirrors used to represent a character’s duplicity or split morality; wonderful dresses and hats; the ubiquitous knee-length length necklace; symbolic naming.

The sculptor faces his shadow-self; Femmina and her long long necklace

And of course, flowers as a motif for feelings.

Il fauno is unlike the mainstream of its time, and your mileage may vary on its effectiveness, but there’s no doubt that it’s a heartfelt and ambitious work. I leave you with the words of Signor Mari that close the film:

My story, inspired by love, I gift to gentle souls. But should it not bring joy, then I say—in the words of Manzoni—believe that it was not my intention.

– – –

Il fauno. Dir. Febo Mario. Torino, Italy: Ambrosio, 1917. Restored in 1994 by the Cinemathèque Royale Belgique (now Cinematek), from original nitrate prints from the Cineteca Friuli and the Museo Nazionale del Cinema Torino.

Aristocracy, hubris, and hauteur: these are the main ingredients in Itala-Film’s Il padrone delle ferriere | The Master of the Ironworks (1919), starring the majestic Pina Menichelli. I’d intended to cover another 1917 film in this Diva December entry, but when the Museo Nazionale del Cinema Torino uploaded this film a couple of months ago—for me, a longed-for title—my path was clear. In this tale, the course of true love is never smooth; but the ride is pure, unadulterated melodrama, and therefore a lot of fun.

There are four main players in Il padrone delle ferriere: foremost is the divine Pina Menichelli, playing Clara di Beaulieu, a “young and haughty schoolgirl” who acts with all the assurance and entitlement of her aristocratic birth.

The introductory shot of Menichelli as Clara.

This young Marquise is in love with her cousin, Gastone, the Duke of Bligny, to whom she is betrothed. He behaves much as you would expect for a man who looks like this:

The dissolute Duke.

A more upstanding personnage is found in Filippo Derblay, played by the always capable Amleto Novelli. Even though he is from the lower classes, Derblay is—believe it or not—a worthy person. This is demonstrated clearly when, at the start of the film, we see Derblay risk himself to save another, lowering himself into a mine by a rope to rescue a man who has fallen. It’s an act that attracts the attention of Ottavio, Clara’s brother, who admires Derblay’s “great nobility of mind”. But not nobility of birth.

Rounding out the main quartet of characters is Atenaide Moulinet, a young woman guilty of the worst of all crimes: to be nouveau riche. Her father is an industrialist known as the ‘King of Cacao’; consequently, her classmates shun ‘Signorina Cacao’ socially.

Millefleurs as Atenaide Moulinet, among her schoolyard ‘friends’.

Though she doesn’t have a large part, one should also note the presence of Maria Caserini, grande dame of Italian silent cinema, as Clara’s mother, the Marquise di Beaulieu.

The plot is rather thin, even by the standards of diva melodrama. Clara is living happily in her rarefied world of snobbery, when due to plot necessity the imprudent fiscal management of Clara’s father, financial tragedy strikes the immensely proud Beaulieu family. When the Duke learns of Clara’s family’s ruination, he instead takes up with Atenaide, who is attempting to make her way among the social elite. When Gastone’s association with Atenaide becomes clear, this rejection by her cousin-fiancé enrages Clara so much that, in a fit of pique, she decides to marry Derblay, the titular master of the ironworks. Clara scorns Derblay for his proletarian origins; he hides his love for her beneath a veneer of indifference. Can these two wacky kids overcome their differences, transcend social class, and find true love? Will the plot be motivated by an above-average amount of contrived lack of communication? And will Pina smoulder with emotion while wearing a series of gorgeous gowns? Thrice affirmative, dear readers.

Of course, plot is not at the forefront of a film like this. Based on the wildly popular novel Le Maître de forges (1882) by Georges Ohnet, Il padrone delle ferriere provides a familiar framework through which to appreciate the talents of Pina Menichelli, who swaggers her way through the film with melodramatic flourish and not a little eroticism. She pouts; she seethes; she rages with the passions that continually stir her. There are volcanoes waiting inside her, which sometimes erupt in the most frenzied and unexpected ways.

I’ve written before about how Menichelli always insists on her physical presence on screen, on the power of gesture and her gaze, on her emphatic movement through space. Obviously, I’m a big fan of the stylised and almost feral histrionics she uses to realise her characters, but beyond that, I simply find her fascinating for the way in which she makes her body and gesture visible to an extent that few performers do. Her emotions are projected through her body in a way that is charismatic, purposeful, and unusual. It’s a style quite far removed from modern-day mainstream taste, but Menichelli has a unique and compelling combination of charisma, commitment, and confidence.

The kicker to this scene? It turns out that she is suffering from meningitis.

Of course, it’s not all high drama, and Menichelli actually does very well in some of the more low-key scenes. For example, the scene in which she learns her father has been taken ill:

I also liked the disdainful, semi-candid vibe of this shot, where Clara waves Derblay onto the tennis court.

Director Eugenio Perego was a quite prolific filmmaker of the silent era, directing well-known actresses such as Soava Gallone (La chiamavano Cosetta, Film d’Arte Italiana 1917) and Musidora (La vagabonda, Film d’Arte Italiana 1918); perhaps most notable, however, are the string of comedies he made with Leda Gys in the 1920s, often considered high points within that dark decade of Italian cinema. He collaborated several times with Menichelli, including on the extant La storia di una donna | The Story of a Woman (Rinascimento-Film, 1920).

Perego understood Menichelli’s talents well, and built Il padrone delle ferriere around them. However, Il padrone delle ferriere has more to offer the audience than just menichellismo (though what menichellismo it is!) Part of what makes it an interesting film to me is the fact that it is carefully made and crafted, yet also completely committed to melodramatic excess. So on the one hand, you have a film which is beautifully photographed: notably and unusually, Antonio Cufaro’s camera captures actuality-esque scenes of the ironworks and factory. The camera also pays attention to extras and supporting players beyond the usual cursory approach, adding a nice flavour to the film. Shot composition is of high quality throughout; Cufaro is fond of iris shots and frequently uses them as a dramatic intensifier, or to call attention to a detail of the scene.

I also really liked the sequence of shots showing the Clara and Derblay in the church: simple, but very strikingly composed.

On the other hand, the film goes all-in on the melodramatic tropes. For example: Pina doesn’t have just one dramatic collapse, she has three. Where other diva films use flowers as mise-en-scène and the focal point of a scene or two, this film is festooned with them.

 
Flowers as a proxy for emotion.

And the theme of class difference and prejudice is not just a plot point, it’s hammered home at every possible moment. Il padrone delle ferriere is not long on subtlety: Perego surely knew what the aim of the game was, and he seems to have had fun with it. Consider the wedding scene: preceded by an ironic intertitle, “Matrimonio d’amore?”, the whole ceremony is dispensed with in one shot. The camera is kept entirely focused on Menichelli, with Derblay not visible at all, except for his hand entering stage right to place the ring on Clara’s finger.

Obviously, all is not well in their marriage: Clara looks like she’s going to the firing squad as she and her new husband drive off in a carriage. “I love my husband!” she insists at the reception, looking like she wants to die. On their wedding night, there’s a confrontation where she begs Filippo to leave her alone: “Take everything, my dowry, my gems, but my person, no!”, she cries. (Derblay and everyone else has kept her in the dark about the family finance fuss, for … reasons). Derblay eventually vows that their relationship will be for appearances only. Drama!

A great reaction shot: Derblay tells his wife that he found the Duchess of Bligny charming.

Eventually, the truth about her family’s ruination comes out, which helps Clara see Derblay in a whole new light. And in true diva fashion, she will finally start to look at him with appreciation when he presents her with that essential piece of jewellery, an incredibly long necklace.

It goes without saying that pride and (yes) prejudice is the major theme of the film, and Perego does not skimp on establishing Clara di Beaulieu as a character much afflicted by these traits. We are first introduced to the young noblewoman at her school, in this perfectly pitched scene:

It’s a great, witty character introduction. And Clara is a true snob: she’s the Queen Bee of the schoolyard, leading a pack of Mean Girls against Atenaide, the nouveau riche interloper. Look at the way the other girls draw up behind Menichelli in this sequence, as Menichelli gives Atenaide the brush-off with her half-hearted handshake:

Atenaide is played by Lina Millefleurs, who was a quite popular actress of the late teens: I’m glad to finally have the chance to see her on film.

She’s also a devotee of the Menichelli school of flower-nibbling.

Millefleurs does a creditable job here, but the treatment of her character really undercuts the film’s ostensible point about snobbery, judgment, and social class. Atenaide’s introduction positions her as an underdog character who has done nothing to deserve the opprobrium of her classmates—apart from, of course, being afflicted with the terrible stench of new money. The rest of the narrative, however, reveals her as nothing but an arriviste who acts with self-interested calculation. Maybe this was meant as a counterpoint to Filippo’s narrative arc, or a warning about the corrupting influence of power/money, but it comes off as inconsistent and even sexist. Personally, I can’t really blame Atenaide for being ice-cold towards Clara, considering Clara’s earlier treatment of her. There’s a wonderfully passive-aggressive conversation between the two women where Atenaide reveals her betrothal to the Duke; I only wish Millefleurs had played it less straight.

Itala Film backed Il padrone delle ferriere with a hefty publicity campaign, and the film was a box-office success. Critical reaction was more mixed, however: some reviewers rhapsodised about Menichelli’s performance—”the ardent passion with which she makes the blood rush, with ardent intensity and vigour, is a truly magnificent spectacle”—while others criticised the lack of character depth and the film’s didactic dramatism.

Indeed the film is flawed, but I found it really rather enjoyable. And then as now, we can appreciate Il padrone delle ferriere as a delectable example of Menichelli at the height of her powers.

– – –

Il padrone delle ferriere [The Master of the Ironworks]. Dir. Eugenio Perego. Torino, Italy: Itala, 1919. Restored in 2005 by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema Torino, in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna. Available to watch online here, courtesy of the MNC.

It may not be a surprise that the Italian silent film industry was chock-full of couples. Today, for the Feast of Saint Valentine, let’s take a look at these duos with lives spent in film as well as love—sometimes both at the same time.

Soava Gallone (née Stanisława Winawerówna) and Carmine Gallone

Polish-born Soava Gallone was an accomplished and successful film diva. Though several of her films survive, she is today most known for the delightful Maman Poupée | A Doll Wife (Olimpus-Film, 1919), the film of hers which has been most readily available to researchers.

Her husband Carmine, whom she married in 1912, was her key collaborator, directing her in almost all of her film appearances. The productive Carmine was one of the leading directors of the Italian silent era, notably directing almost half of Lyda Borelli’s film appearances. He continued to have a very successful career in the sound era, with a prolific filmography that includes the notorious Scipio Africanus (1937).

Emilio Ghione and Kally Sambucini

Partners in crime

Versatile character actor and prolific film director, Emilio Ghione is best known for his character Za La Mort, who he portrayed in sixteen films or film serials between 1914 and 1924. Kally (Calliope) Sambucini was his partner in art as well as life: almost all of her film work was made in collaboration with Ghione, and she appeared with him in all but the first Za La Mort film, portraying his companion Za La Vie. Their partnership began in 1915, and would last until Ghione’s death in 1930.

I’ve written about the Za La Mort film Anime buie | Dark Souls (1916) here.

Leda Gys and Gustavo Lombardo

Lombardo and Gys in 1946

Like many of the couples detailed in this post, Gys and Lombardo were an actress-director couple. Gys was already a successful actress by the mid-teens, with her performance as the Madonna in Christus (Cines, 1916) generally considered to be her breakthrough role. Lombardo was an early devotee of the cinema, becoming involved in the film distribution business in 1904, and founding the magazine Lux in 1909. In 1919 he established Lombardo-Film, for which he engaged Gys as the prima attrice.

Together they made many successful films, including I figli di nessuno | Nobody’s Children (1921), La trappola | The Trap (1922), and Santarellina (1923). Lombardo Film also produced the string of Neapolitan comedies that Gys made in the 1920s. Gys and Lombardo’s union was lifelong.

Maria Jacobini and Nino Oxilia

Jacobini is one of the big stars of the Italian silent cinema: perhaps not a diva in the classic sense, but a very well-liked and successful actress. Having already achieved success as a poet and writer, Oxilia was a rising star as a film director when he died at the front in 1917, aged only 28. The next year, Jacobini would portray Dorina in the second film adaptation of the 1911 operetta Addio giovinezza!, for which Oxilia co-wrote the libretto.

Jacobini and Oxilia worked together on several films, including Il focolare domestico (Savoia Film, 1914), which you can watch here.

Maria Jacobini and Gennaro Righelli

Jacobini and Righelli’s association began in 1920, after Jacobini became the prima attrice at Fert Film. Righelli, a leading director of the time, was the main director for the production house. The two worked together on several films, including the extant titles La casa sotto la neve | The House under the Snow and Cainà: l’isola e il continente | Caina: the Island and the Continent, both 1922. After the Italian film industry tanked in the early 1920s, the two decamped to Berlin to continue their careers, where Jacobini made such films as Maman Colibri and an adaptation of Tolstoy’s The Living Corpse (both 1929), while Righelli directed prolifically. During this time they founded Maria Jacobini-Film GmbH, which yielded a single title, an adaptation of La bohème.

Jacobini is most famed for her silent films, but continued to work in the sound era in character parts. Righelli directed the first Italian talkie, La canzone dell’amore | The Song of Love (1930), and continued his successful directing career until the late 1940s, near the end of his life.

Mario Caserini and Maria Gasperini Caserini

A seminal couple of the pioneering days of Italian cinema. Mario Caserini was an early employee of Alberini e Santoni, which would become Cines, and in those early days specialised in classic literature adaptations (e.g., Shakespeare) and historical films. His vast directorial experience includes stints at Ambrosio, Gloria, Tiber, and Palatino. Perhaps his most lasting legacy is his direction of Ma l’amor mio non muore! | Love Everlasting (Gloria-Film, 1913), the Lyda Borelli vehicle often considered the first diva film.

For her part, Maria Gasparini was a classically trained dancer and theatrical actress who went on to work extensively in film. Her filmography includes titles like Otello (Cines, 1906), the first film adaptation of that play, Christus (1916), and indeed Ma l’amor mio non muore! In 1912 she appeared in short film La ribalta | The Stage, which film scholar Stella Dagna describes as Mario’s “most sincere tribute to Gasparini”, celebrating a relationship where “the man has technical ability but the woman has creative genius”.

Diana Karenne and Ernesto Maria Pasquali

Diana Karenne was an extremely talented actress who also wrote and directed, as well as being an accomplished graphic artist. She was considered the most cerebral actress of her time, and I find her extremely interesting—I’ve said it before, but it’s truly regrettable that so few of Karenne’s films survive, and none of her directorial work.

After working as a journalist and playwright, Pasquali founded the production house that bears his name, which found success with the Polidor series of comic films acted by Ferdinand Guillaume. Pasquali discovered Karenne, not well-known at the time, gave her her stage name (Karenne was born Leucadia Konstantin), helped launch her career, and supported her during the many censorship problems with her films.

After a lengthy illness, Pasquali died in 1919, aged 36.

Carmen Boni and Augusto Genina

Maria Carmela Bonicatti arrived at her stage name of Carmen Boni on the advice of her friend Diana Karenne. Boni established a successful career on the Italian screen before seeking further opportunities abroad in the mid-1920s, as so many Italian film industry people did, although she returned to Italy for films like La grazia (1929).

For me, Boni is an important European star of the 1920s: talented, naturalistic, incredibly charming. Certainly an actress I’d like to see more of than I have to date. Boni was a fresh, modern star: at European Film Star Postcards, Paul van Yperen compares her appeal to that of Clara Bow and Louise Brooks. Among her film performances are several ‘trouser roles’, such as L’ultimo lord | The Last Lord (Cinès-Pittaluga, 1926), Scampolo (Nero-Film AG, 1928), in which she plays a gamine Roman orphan, and the wonderfully-titled La femme en homme | The Woman Dressed as a Man (1932).

Due to the fame of Louise Brooks, Genina is probably most well-known internationally for early sound film Prix de Beauté | Miss Europe (FR 1930). However, I’d rate Genina extremely highly among the directors of the Italian silent screen—I’ve really liked all of his films that I’ve seen. He has a deft touch, helped by the fact that he worked with some of the best talent of the time.

Boni and Genina separated in the early-mid 1930s, which prompted an unsuccessful suicide attempt by Boni. She made several sound films before virtually retiring; Genina kept working prolifically, becoming one of the leading filmmakers of Fascism.

André Deed and Valentina Frascaroli

Frascaroli and Deed were early and prolific stars of the Italian silent cinema. The diminutive Frascaroli played in comic and dramatic roles alike, including the ‘Gribouilette’ comedy series; according to Angela Dalle Vacche, Frascaroli also used the screen name “La Farfalletta” (Little Butterfly).

Deed’s reputation rests on his performances as his comic persona Cretinetti, whom he portrayed in close to a hundred films. Also notable is his science fiction film L’uomo meccanico | The Mechanical Man (Milano-Film, 1921): Deed did triple duty as director, actor, and writer, and Frascaroli also appears in the film.

Luciano Albertini and Linda Albertini (née ???)

Luciano Albertini played the debonair Raffaele in Bertini’s Assunta Spina (Caesar-Film, 1915), but it was as an athletic daredevil actor that he made his name: in his film series as Sansone (Samson), he was something of a rival to Maciste and the other strongman characters.

After founding Albertini Film in 1919, he produced both the Sansone series and the Sansonette series, starring his supposed wife Linda, whose true identity remains unclear. Linda Albertini is notable as a athletic heroine of the silent screen: the image of her above comes from Sansonette amazzone dell’aria | Sansonette, Amazon of the Skies (1920), in which she performed daring deeds on horseback, in water, and in the sky.

Rina De Liguoro (née Elena Caterina Catardi) and Wladimiro De Liguoro

Together in 1958

Rina De Liguoro is often considered the last of the classic Italian silent divas. She appeared in several of the big blockbusters of the 1920s, including as the title character in Messalina (Guazzoni Film, 1923), Eunica in Quo vadis? (UCI, 1924), and Ione in Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei | The Last Days of Pompeii (Società Anonima Grandi Film, 1926). She played the title role in the 1930 version of Assunta Spina, and late in her life, appeared in Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Il gattopardo | The Leopard (1963).

Her husband Wladimiro was the son of famous actor-director Giuseppe De Liguoro. Wladimiro directed his wife in four of his five directorial jaunts.

Italia Almirante Manzini and Amerigo Manzini

I couldn’t find a picture of Amerigo Manzini, so have one of Italia Almirante instead. Italia Almirante Manzini was one of the great divas of the Italian silent screen, with a long and acclaimed career. Her most important role is probably Sophonisba in Cabiria (1914), but Italia went on to work at several of the major studios of the era, working with the leading talent of the time. I enjoy her work a lot!

Her husband Amerigo Manzini was primarily a writer and theatrical actor, but acted on screen occasionally, including several times with Italia. He also directed a single film, La musa del pianto e quella del sorriso (Comedia-Film, 1917), in which Italia appeared.

Hesperia and Baldassarre Negroni

Hesperia isn’t highly reputed today, but she was a successful actress in her time, beginning in theatre and becoming a popular cinema actress by the mid-teens. Negroni, who came from an aristocratic family, passed through several of the main production houses of the 1910s: Cines, Celio, Milano, Tiber. A prolific director, he is probably most well-known today for directing L’histoire d’un pierrot (Celio, 1914), an extremely charming and very successful film that starred Francesca Bertini—in a breakthrough role—as Pierrot, and Leda Gys as Louisette.

Negroni and Hesperia frequently worked together; the two married in 1923, after which Hesperia retired from acting.

Mercedes Brignone and Uberto Palmarini

Mercedes Brignone had a respectable career as a film diva, also participating much in the theatre, the milieu in which she grew up. Few of her silent films are extent, and therefore the surviving title Il quadro di Osvaldo Mars | The Painting of Osvaldo Mars (Rodolfi-Film, 1920) looms large in our awareness of her today. It is, indeed an intriguing film.

It’s hard to judge these things across such time, but I would call Mercedes Brignone a respected actress rather than a top-flight one. She made her talkie début in La canzone dell’amore (1930), the aforementioned first Italian sound film, and continued acting on screen, finding success in the ‘telefoni bianchi‘ genre.

Her partner was Uberto Palmarini, a well-known theatrical actor and producer who sporadically made cinema appearances.

Febo Mari and Nietta Mordeglia

Mari was notable as both an actor and director, acting alongside Pina Menichelli in Il fuoco | The Fire (Itala, 1915) and Tigre reale | Royal Tiger (Itala, 1916), and directing Eleonora Duse in Cenere | Ashes (Ambrosio, 1916), her sole cinematic outing. Mordeglia acted in just seven silent films, all directed by Mari; in the 1930s, she would work in radio, and make several TV appearances in the 1970s. Mari and Mordeglia’s collaborations included Il fauno | The Faun (Ambrosio, 1917), which I’ve written about here.

The duo did not marry until the late 1930s, after Mari’s first wife passed away.

Fernanda Negri Pouget and Armand Pouget

Fernanda Negri Pouget is an actress with whom I am notably fascinated—a more extensive post on her is forthcoming. Negri Pouget was a leading lady who nonetheless played character roles, specialising in offbeat characters. Her husband was French actor Armand Pouget. Honestly, his career seems rather minor: among his filmography, the main titles that stand out to me are the aforementioned Il quadro di Osvaldo Mars (1920), and the two Maciste films Maciste imperatore (Fert, 1924) and Maciste contro lo sceicco | Maciste in Africa (Fert, 1926).

Lea Giunchi and Natalino Guillaume

Lea Giunchi was an important early comic actress in Italian cinema, indeed considered Italian film’s first comedienne. As her comic persona, simply ‘Lea’, she appeared in over thirty-something films, causing anarchic mayhem wherever she went. She partnered with several male comedians, including Ferdinand Guillaume (then known as Tontolini), from which sprung her solo series, and Kri Kri (Raymond Frau). Giunchi also performed dramatic roles, such as Licia in the seminal Quo vadis? (Cines/Kleine, 1913).

Guinchi’s partner Natalino Guillaume was the younger brother of the more famous Ferdinand (Tontolini, Polidor); Natalino’s filmography includes a bunch of acting roles and three directorial credits. After Natalino died in an aviation accident in 1919, Giunchi retired from acting.

Letizia Quaranta and Carlo Campogalliani

Letizia and her two sisters Lidia and Isabella were all actresses, with Lidia having the highest profile due to her starring role as the title character in the seminal Cabiria (Itala, 1914). Letizia Quaranta was nonetheless a successful actress in her own right, appearing in several of the Maciste films among other titles. She was frequently directed by her husband Carlo Campogalliani, who is most revered for his sound-era career.

And an honourable mention to Gero Zambuto and Claudia Zambuto (née Gaffino); unfortunately, I was unable to find a photo of Claudia, and only a poor one of Gero.

The two started out as stage actors before being employed by Aquila Film in Torino, often working together. Gero also worked as a film director, directing fellow Sicilian Pina Menichelli several times; one of these collaborations is La moglie di Claudio | The Wife of Claudius (Itala, 1918), which I’ve written about here. Gero Zambuto was also a voice actor, providing the Italian voice of such diverse personalities such as W. C. Fields, Wallace Beery, Emil Jannings, and Charles Laughton.

– – –

Postscript: blog note! I’d intended to do an end-of-2017 roundup post, but that ship has well and truly sailed now. Suffice it to say that this year, I’m aiming to post on a roughly monthly schedule, and I’ll generally be steering things in a more international direction than they’ve been in the last while. Thanks to all who read along!

Flowers and chocolates and clichés, I don’t care, but I really like the idea of reclaiming Valentine’s Day as a time to express your feelings for the important people in your life. I have so many amazing friends, they mean the world to me—and sometimes you just have to say that! So, what better than to send out a bunch of film postcards to my best pals?

Several were silent film-themed: let me share them with you.

Die Asta at her gothic best as Hamlet

Anna Sten in the wonderful Девушка с коробкой | Girl with a Hatbox (USSR 1927)

Brigitte Helm in a publicity still for Metropolis. Maximum glam!

The multi-Moz

Triple Pola

An alarmed Bertini in La piovra (1919), which incidentally is quite a good film

Solo Pola

This is a semi-annual tradition of mine. See my 2015 cards here!

And remember what they say: Roses are red, gender is performative, mass market romance is heteronormative!

The camera never lies. This cliché is now so discredited that even its antithesis is something of a truism: images are almost infinitely manipulable, via both technology, context, and human interpretation. Ultimately, El sexto sentido puts stock in both the idea of the camera as truth-recorder and that of the fallibility of human interpretation; as one of the opening intertitles of the film states, “To know [the truth], we must add the precision of mechanics to our imperfect senses.” Yet as the film shows us, images without context are all too easily misunderstood.

The guiding figure of El sexto sentido is Kamus, an eccentric man who is “part artist, part drunkard, part philosopher”, and who believes that in cinema he has found a “sixth sense”, liberated from distortion and bias. We are introduced to Kamus at his projector, in a shot that seems to have escaped from a German Expressionist film:

Meanwhile, the protagonist of the film, Carmen (Antonia Fernández), is having a picnic with her boyfriend Carlos, and their friends, the couple León and Luisa. Happy couple Carmen and Carlos are very cute together, and Carmen is delightful as she dances to the record the group is listening to. Conversely, León quickly establishes himself as the stick-in-the-mud of the group, disapproving of Luisa grooving along to the music.

Chez Carmen, Carmen’s father (the character is not explicitly named) is upset that he can’t go to the bullfight. When Carmen arrives home, he sees the ring Carlos has given her—A ring is a link joining two lives, as an intertitle tells us—and flies off the handle, accusing her of loose living, and spending on her time on frivolities while he is working. His hypocrisy is outrageous, given that he does not work, while Carmen does have a job (as we are shortly to see), from which she gives all her earnings to her father. He even goes for the heavy-duty parental guilt-trip: “I gave you life!” In short, Carmen is browbeaten into going to sell the ring. She gets ripped off, and she is late to her rehearsal at the theatre.

Carmen is a dancer in some kind of revue, and she can high-kick with the best of them—too bad, then, about the theatre director, who dresses Carmen down for being late and eventually gets handsy with her. Carmen’s father, at the rehearsal for some reason, is overcome with rage, kicking the director to the ground. He then evinces some compassion: “My poor girl! How you’ve suffered!” He vows to work for the two of them so that she never has to come back to the theatre again. I suppose this is meant to be the start of Carmen’s father’s redemption arc, but it’s hard to wash away the callousness of his earlier actions.

Meanwhile, León and Carlos discuss their different natures: León tells Carlos, “You always see life through rose-tinted spectacles”, to which Carlos responds, “And you’re always too gloomy”. Who is right? León, whose most notable actions so far have been to tell off his girlfriend, disapprove of music, and grumpily drink a glass of milk while the others enjoy wine, decides that this conundrum is impossible to solve without the counsel of Kamus.

The scene at Kamus’ place, however, is one of the most interesting in the film. Kamus shows León a variety of footage that he’s shot. This is seemingly included to demonstrate the dynamism of technology—or as Kamus describes it, “Madrid without literary defomation” (!)—and it’s effective. There are very appealing location shots around the city, as well as a prism shot that reminded me of Mikhail Kaufman‘s camerawork, though it’s unlikely that director Nemesio M. Sobrevila had seen The Man with a Movie Camera (USSR 1929) prior to shooting El sexto sentido. Kamus declares that the camera is much better than literature in evoking the sense of summer: it even feels refreshing! León is into it. Of course he is! He gets the sense of things without any of that messy business of, you know, real-life interaction. The camera provides mastery over the world: observation, capture, division, deconstruction and reconstruction.

But not all of Kamus’ motives are so philosophical. He goes on to say that he’s seen “some incredible things. Without them knowing”. Ohhhh. Inevitably, the footage includes … wait for it … Carmen. Kamus has surreptitiously filmed her in her dressing room at the theatre, the camera lingering on her legs and calves as she changes her shoes.

Shots of womens’ shapely ankles and calves are well-established in early and silent cinema: Edison’s The Gay Shoe Clerk of 1903 is often cited as an early example of the closeup, and an examplar of Tom Gunning’s ‘cinema of attractions’ theory. But the real goods are that we see Carmen meeting Another Man—yes, it’s of course her father—and money changing hands. Qué escándalo!

The scenario where a person overhears/oversees something and draws the worst possible conclusion (in the face of many other, more likely explanations, and without any actual communication with the person concerned) was far from fresh even in 1929. This is one of my least favourite tropes, and honestly, even by the standards of this film, it’s pretty contrived. And here it goes hand in hand with one of the other worst tropes in fiction: people meddling in their friends’ relationships. Holy boundaries, Batman! But this situation is what the plot demands. León breaks up with Carmen on Carlos’ behalf, coldly informing her that Carlos “knows about yesterday” and doesn’t want to see her again. Thankfully, the resolution is relatively swift: Carmen’s Dad redeems himself (slightly) by beating up Kamus, and León’s “proof” of Carmen’s affair is resolved by an actual look at the filmstrip in question.

The evidentiary power of film.

The Spanish film industry was not highly developed in the silent era. While there was certainly homegrown filmmaking in the teens—some of which I’ve written about before—the Spanish film industry suffered from a lack of infrastructure and a solid industrial base, and few production companies lasted long. Cinema was extremely popular, especially in Spain’s film capital Barcelona, but it was largely imported films that filled the screens.

And indeed, El sexto sentido looks outwards in several ways. The character of Kamus reflects the debates of the 1920s about the nature of cinema; Carmen bears the influence of Hollywood in both her appearance and her job in an American-style revue; and the cinematography is clearly influenced by the techniques of the avant-garde.

 
Madrid’s architecture seen anew … the Telefónica Building (left), Cine Callao (right).

The plot may suffer some clichés, but on the other hand El sexto sentido is a formally accomplished film, and the cinematography is considered and generally high quality. Look, for example, at the way shadow is used in this shot:

There is a judicious use of chiaroscuro throughout, particularly in the way that Kamus—technological alchemist, lecherous hobgoblin—is shot.

Another of El sexto sentido‘s biggest assets is Antonia Fernández as Carmen, who brings a great deal of charm to her role. Given the nature of the character, Carmen is more to be looked at than to do the looking, but we do occasionally see Fernández deploy the power of her gaze; it’s welcome, even if it doesn’t counterbalance the way that Carmen’s body quite literally drives the film’s plot.

It’s hard not to read Carmen as embodying tension around the role of women in society, punished by the men around her according to their whims. Yet, there’s another scene which I found particularly interesting in regard to the gender politics of El sexto sentido. The household of Carmen and her villainous father is motherless, yet we do meet a mother in the course of El sexto sentido, and it’s a bizarre and ambivalent portrayal.

At his cinematic lair, Kamus has recently acquired a kid assistant: “Yesterday I snatched him from his mother”. Parallel to the Kamus-León conversation, there’s a nice bit of pantomime from the assistant in question: inspired by the illustrated Tom Tyler story (entitled El molino trágico) that he’s been reading, he acts out an armed struggle with himself, eventually jumping up onto the desk, ‘pistols’ drawn and ready. But more intriguing is the way that Kamus describes the mother-son relationship, pronouncing it “an interesting case of the deformation of maternal love”. The mother would apparently prefer for her son to return to his job in a bank than spend all his time with an aging drunkard/peeping-tom/philosopher. While this seems like solid parenting to me, Kamus disagrees: “She’s revealed herself to be a monster,” he sniggers.

Intercut with the kid projecting film, we see the “maternal monster” appear; the mother-son argument, framed in tight closeup, is followed by her literally chasing her child around with a broom, before finally beating Kamus himself.

The monstrous mother

The editing here suggests that Kamus, León, and the kid (as well as us, the audience) are watching footage of the mother preceding or even alongside her actual apperance chez Kamus. Primed by the scene showing the kid-assistant’s absorption into cinematic imagery, there’s an odd blurring of boundaries here. An unruly female character as disruptive force is nothing new, of course, but what does this scene add up to? Feminine, emotional intrusion into Kamus’ palace of “scientific truth”? A nod to the psychoanalytical mumbo-jumbo that was so in vogue in the 1920s? Certainly, it’s further proof of Kamus’ misogny; it’s a grand joke to him, who says that this is how he wants “this phenomenon” to be perceived.

(Side note: throughout this scene, León hides under the table on which the projector is placed, but still ends up with a lampshade falling onto his head. Also, after the mother departs, Kamus attempts to take a drink … only to realise that it’s his camera that he’s trying to drink from, not a bottle of wine.)

Nemesio Sobrevila, the director of El sexto sentido, was an architext by training. Wealthy, highly cultured, and an enthusiastic participant in film culture, Sobrevila began his film career in Madrid in 1927 with the now-lost Al Hollywood madrileño. As with those of El sexto sentido, Al Hollywood madrileño reportedly enjoyed high production values, with the sets—constructed by Sobrevila—considered the best seen in Spain to date. Yet Sobrevila did not achieve commercial success with either film; El sexto sentido was screened just once commercially, though it was also screened privately several times. I wouldn’t be surprised if the film’s generally good condition is due to this lack of commercial exploitation, rather than restoration techniques.

El sexto sentido had, however, a strange afterlife. It was released on DVD in 2003, but unfortunately—and inexplicably—the distributor botched the release by switching the order of the middle and last reels, making the film seem to be much more avant-garde than it is in reality. Rather than a work of true experimentalism, El sexto sentido is better understood as a work of meta-cinema that uses a conventional narrative to comment on film theory and play with a range of styles.

– – –

El sexto sentido [The Sixth Sense]. Dir.  Nemesio M. Sobrevila. Madrid, Spain: Sobrevila & Ardavín, 1929. El Sexto Sentido is preserved by the Filmoteca Española. A copy taken from broadcast is available on YouTube here.

‘Yesterday again today’ is the slogan for the Time Cinema, one of Wellington’s true hidden gems. Located in the suburb of Lyall Bay on Wellington’s south coast, what looks like a typical suburban house turns out to include a 39-seater cinema out the back, along with a large lobby housing the Time Cinema’s museum displays.

As well as hosting private functions, the Time Cinema runs screenings four times a month on alternating Wednesday and Saturdays. Generally, the films shown come from the Cinema’s own collection of film prints, and the programming is heavy on American titles from the 1950s and 1960s. The screenings also often include a newsreel or other short from the NZ National Film Unit (NFU; 1941-1990), the governmental film-making body that issued regular newsreels between the early 1940s and early 1970s.

However, the Time Cinema’s museum displays are just as big as an attraction—maybe an even bigger one. Floor to ceiling, almost every wall in the L-shaped lobby space is crammed with vintage film equipment and cinema memorabilia: projectors, film posters, cameras, splicers, books, interesting knick-knacks, a Steenbeck, even a little cabinet entirely devoted to film cements. There are a bunch of nods to local film culture, too: a lot of equipment here is ex-PRP or ex-NFU, a platterised print of The Return of the King hugs the wall in a corridor, and the Penthouse Cinema‘s former analogue projector stands in the main lobby. I’m a huge nerd about film technology and even have a small collection of my own items, so this kind of place is a dream to me.

It’s not all film-related: for example, there’s a whole cabinet dedicated to obsolete phone technology, and a large shelf of wax cylinder recordings. And everything is bundled together with a healthy dose of Kiwiana so gloriously tacky that only a local can truly appreciate it. Vintage Tip Top signs! A floor covered in 1980s AirNZ carpet! There’s lot of weird and fun stuff, like how in one corner ceiling a person-sized stuffed Pink Panther is hiding behind a bunch of projectors.

Oddly enough, my family had the same Pink Panther toy when I was a kid.

The Time Cinema was founded almost forty years ago by John Bell, a collector and cinema enthusiast. Apparently he started collecting film-related items at the age of eight, and judging by the sheer number of treasures on display at the Time Cinema, it appears that he didn’t really stop until his recent retirement. The museum is orderly—and things are secured pretty well, in deference to the fact that we’re in earthquake country—but it’s a lot. This is the most wonderful kind of cabinet of curiosities.

As the pictures show, the Time Cinema really is like a stroll back in time. It’s the kind of place where screenings have an intermission, during which you are served sausage rolls, lamingtons, and cups of tea in those once-ubiquitious glass mugs.

Last Saturday we convened for a double-bill of Buster: Cops (1922) and The Navigator (1924). Cops was presented in a watchable but rather soft 16mm print, The Navigator was shown digitally. There’s not much I can say about such well-established classics—I’ve seen them both several times before, but it’s been a few years. Buster does some of his best work in these films, so if you haven’t seen them, stop what you’re doing and watch them right now! They’re both fantastic! (Okay, with the caveat that The Navigator is marred by the section with the ‘island natives’).

The cinema itself. (source)

The excellent piano accompaniment was provided by David Beattie, who compiled bespoke scores for each film from music of the era. David’s deep knowledge of Keaton’s films was evident—his piano playing was perfectly calibrated to the images, with all the accents on Buster’s pratfalls flawlessly timed.

Music and silent film is part of David’s heritage; during his introduction to the screening, he explained that his grandmother had been a silent film accompanist in the 1920s, in the South Island town of Oamaru (which, incidentally, is the steampunk capital of Aotearoa New Zealand). Her portrait sat atop the piano during the screening. David fell in love with silent film when he saw Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) back in the late 1970s and it seems he never looked back. We had a nice yarn during the intermission too, it’s always great to meet a fellow silent film nerd.

Wellington is the film capital of Aotearoa: most of our film industry is based here, and companies like Weta (special effects) and Park Road Post (post-production) are internationally reputed; it’s also home to ANZ’s national audiovisual archive, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision. And of course, we did not escape the Lord of the Rings marketing blitz. However, the Time Cinema is not that well-known—even some of my most film-loving friends had never been before the Keaton screening. (In fact, this was only my second outing there, even though I first visited two or three years ago, when a friend celebrated her birthday there). Later this year the Time Cinema will go silent again for a screening of Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei | The Last Days of Pompeii (IT 1913), starring my gal Fernanda Negri Pouget. I’m already looking forward to it!

In less than two weeks, the magnificent film festival Il cinema ritrovato (‘Cinema rediscovered’) kicks off in Bologna, Italy. And yes, I’m going to be there!

This will be my second time attending Il cinema ritrovato. I had a blast at the festival when I attended in 2016, and I’m thrilled to be returning. It’s probably the last time I’ll visit Europe for some years—living in such a remote part of the world as I do, international travel like this is a big deal for me, logistically, financially, and time-wise—so I will be making this holiday count!

So, what’s on the agenda for Cinema ritrovato? Although all of the details of the lineup are not finalised until shortly before the festival begins, a lot of information about the programme is on the festival website.

There is a healthy presence of female filmmakers in the programme. I’m absolutely thrilled to see a section devoted to Elvira Notari, the very successful Neapolitan director. Her films are much discussed in books and scholarship, but very difficult to see outside the archives. Even better, this section of the programme even includes a carbon-arc screening of several of her films! Other female filmmakers represnted are Ella Bergmann-Michel, a German pre-Bauhaus visual artis, and Cécile Decugis, editor and filmmaker; I’m not familiar with either, but looking forward to seeing some of their work.

The section The Rebirth of Chinese Cinema, 1941-1951 looks great. I have seen a bunch of Chinese silents (and more recent films), but nothing from this era, even big name films like Spring in a Small Town (CN 1951). This will be really interesting! And speaking of Chinese (or rather Chinese diasporic) cinema, several King Hu films have been restored and shown in festivals in recent years—I missed 俠女 | A Touch of Zen (1971) when it showed locally a year or two ago, and I’ve regretted that since. Sadly for this wuxia fan, it doesn’t look like we’ll see any King Hu in Bologna.

In terms of silents, the Cento anni fa section contains films by Feuillade, Chaplin, Vladimir Mayakovsky and others, alongside familiar titles. Powerhouse Turinese studio Ambrosio is represented in the programme Arrigo Frusta and the Writing Workshop.

The selection of outdoor screenings in the Piazza Maggiore is heavy on classic films that I’ve never got around to watching: 7th Heaven (US 1927), Gilda (US 1946) by Charles Vidor, Ladri di biciclette | Bicycle Thieves (IT 1948), The Earrings of Madame de … (FR 1953), The Deer Hunter (US 1978). I’m also excited to see Rosita (US 1923), the legendary collaboration between Mary Pickford and Ernst Lubitsch, in the lineup. This one has been doing the film festival rounds in the last while, so I was hoping it would be screened at Il cinema ritrovato.

There’s so much on display that this preview doesn’t even really scratch the surface. It’s going to be a hell of a week! Look out for a review post at some point following the festival.

Me, my pal Matti, and Marcello

Six weeks after the fact, you say? From the Department of Better Late than Never comes my recap of Il cinema ritrovato 2018: a wonderful festival of archival film of all eras and countries. Spoiler alert: I had a blast!

Sunday was my first day of film-viewing, and the highlight of the day may just have been Mary Pickford-Ernst Lubitsch collaboration Rosita (USA 1923), screened under the stars in the Piazza Maggiore. Due to the film’s relative unavailability and the fact that Pickford famously denounced it—to the extent of overtly discouraging its preservation—interest was high. Would Pickford’s high-spirited hoyden type be a match for Lubitsch, transitioning from the earthy humour of his German films to the high-society sophistication of the Lubitsch Touch? I enjoyed Rosita, but was left thinking that these two huge creative forces never quite harmonised. Rosita was made the same year as Pola Negri vehicle The Spanish Dancer: the two films have essentially the same story, both being adaptations of the opera Don César de Bazan. I’d also rate The Spanish Dancer as ‘good but not great’—it’s interesting to think about what each film might have looked like with a switch of stars (or directors).

Pickford and Lubitsch on the set of Rosita

Rosita includes some great Lubitschian moments, such as the perfectly staged and edited scene where Rosita sneaks morsels from the royal fruit bowl as she flits back and forth across the room. Though it’s absolutely Pickford’s film, Rosita benefits from a good supporting cast: the always excellent Irene Rich shows up as the Queen; Holbrook Blinn commits to the role of the slimy King; and as Pickford’s love interest Don Diego, George Walsh knows his place and mostly hangs around smouldering appropriately.

Strangely enough, Rosita was preceded by René Clair’s Entr’acte (FR 1924), the Dada film scored by Erik Satie. This programming worked to my advantage, as this avant-garde classic scared off a few film-watchers, freeing up some seats for me and my friends!

More Lubitsch (and can one ever have enough?) was on offer earlier in the day with the existing fragment of Der Fall Rosentopf (The Rosentopf Case, DE 1918), one of the ‘Sally’ series of films in which Lubitsch stars as the titular Jewish Berlinese man-about-town. Lubitsch plays it broadly, and as always, he is great fun to watch. The same screening programme included Gräfin Küchenfee (Countess Kitchenmaid, DE 1918), starring Henny Porten as both the dissolute and vulgar Countess Gyllenhand and the kitchenmaid Karoline, a wannabe actress who ends up impersonating the Countess. Though nowadays not enjoying the reputation of some of her contemporaries, Porten was one of the most successful and beloved actresses of the German silent screen; she would later establish her talkie career with Kohlhiesels Töchter (Kohlhiesel’s Daughters, DE 1930), another dual role.

Henny Porten in Gräfin Küchenfee

I’ve never ‘got’ Henny Porten before—she’s seemed pretty staid to me in other films. But with a film like Gräfin Küchenfee, one can well understand her popularity. Porten is playing both roles to the hilt and clearly having a ball, and the result is very charming indeed.

Another notable German silent was Christian Wahnschaffe (DE 1920), directed by Urban Gad, aka the former Mr. Asta Nielsen. I only caught Weltbrand (World in Flames), the first installment of this two-parter. Conrad Veidt plays an industrialist playboy who swans around emoting in delicate kimonos, then renounces his bourgeois life after he falls in with a group of revolutionaries. However, the ‘Christian among the proletariat’ plot mainly occurs in the second part of the film (Die Flucht aus dem goldenen Kerker; Escape from the Golden Dungeon); Weltbrand focuses on Conny’s developing social conscience and his relationship with Eva Sorel, a Parisian dancer who is part of the Nihilist/anarchist movement. As the female lead Eva, I really liked Norwegian actress Lillebil Ibsen (also seen in Pan, NO 1922). Ibsen was primarily a dancer—and there’s a wonderful scene of her cutting a rug in Weltbrand—but she’s also very likeable as a screen presence. Christian Wahnschaffe shows a panorama of society, and tempers its moral message with a healthy dose of melodrama. Not one of my greatest hits, but nonetheless interesting to see.

To France! Rue de la Paix (1926) was a treat: a love triangle set in the Parisian fashion world. The plot was relatively boilerplate, but what dresses, darling! And who could forget the scene set in the orangutan-themed nightclub?

Rue de la Paix (1926)

Following this jazz age merriment, we returned to 1918 with Louis Feuillade’s  Vendémiaire. The title refers to the grape harvest, and wine cultivation is not just part of the plot, but a metaphor for La France herself. Vendémiaire takes place at the end of the first world war, but the news that the war is over has not yet diffused to the Castelviel estate, busy with the grape harvest. While weary soldiers head home, escaped German prisoners are attempting to pass themselves off as Belgian farmworkers. Several Feuillade regulars show up, including Judex himself, René Cresté, and Édouard Mathé (Philippe Guérande in Les Vampires). I only caught the first part of the serial, but friends assured me that the malicious Germans got their comeuppance, and harmony was restored at Castelviel.

In terms of French film, the uncontested highlight for me was René Clair’s Les deux timides (The Two Timid Souls, 1928). It was simultaneously one of my best and most testing screenings of the festival, being so full that many people were turned away, on top of which (or because of which?) the air conditioning broke. Challenging, considering that we were in thirty-plus degree heat! However, the film itself was absolutely wonderful. Much like Un chapeau de paille d’Italie (An Italian Straw Hat, 1928), which I happened to have watched shortly before Il cinema ritrovato, Les deux timides is a refined comedy of manners, enacted with great grace and visual elegance. Absolutely one that I’ll be rewatching and recommending to my friends.

Another high point of the festival, certainly for me the most anticipated part, was the strand of Neapolitan programme devoted to the films of Elvira Notari. Probably the most notable figure in Neapolitan silent film, Notari wore many hats at her company Dora Film: director, producer, screenwriter, distributor, and more besides. I was familiar with Notari’s work via Guiliana Muscio’s wonderful book, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (1992), a true landmark of feminist film historiography, but I had not before had the chance to see any of Notari’s films. Despite her prolific output, only very few of Notari’s films survive, and they are not easy to see outside archives.

Rosè Angione in ‘A Santanotte

The Notari programme included È piccerella (1922) and ‘A Santanotte (1922), two of the passionate melodramas that were a specialty of by Dora Film. The two films, both based on popular Neapolitan songs, shared many cast members: Rosè Angione as the female protagonist, Alberto Danza as the lovesick male lead (both times named Tore), and Notari’s son Eduardo, who appeared in a large number of her films as a melancholic street urchin type, always called Gennariello. All of the Notari films were grounded in their setting of Naples, and specifically the life of the bassifondi (slum areas or the underworld; architecturally, the term basso refers to a ground-level apartment opening to the street, and therefore to society). Vivid in their intensity, and simultaneously fiercely realistic and spectacular in their emotionally explosivity: these were striking films. The scores were wonderful and added greatly to the viewing experience—I must especially note the projection of ‘A Santanotte, outdoors in the Cineteca courtyard, which was accompanied by the brilliant E Zézi Gruppo Operaio, a group dedicated to traditional Neapolitan music.

Image from the fragment compilation L’Italia s’è desta showing stencil colouring, which was the genesis of the Notari’s filmmaking business.

Also part of the Naples programme was Vedi Napule e po’ mori! (See Naples and Then Die!, 1924), one of a series of Naples-themed comedies that Leda Gys, Eugenio Perego, and Gustavo Lombardo made in the 1920s. Leda Gys is a joy, playing Pupatella, a sunny young woman who goes to America to become a film star, but just as much of a character is Naples herself: Vesuvius, the tarantella, the Feast of Piedigrotta.

Turning back time a little more, another section of Il cinema ritrovato was devoted to the golden age of Ambrosio, one of the most important film studios of the Italian silent era. This was especially interesting to me since I’m currently undertaking some related research—watch this space!—but also because of the excellence of the films themselves. La madre e la morte (The Mother and Death, 1911) stood out for its surrealist fairy-tale atmosphere, whereas Una partita a scacchi (A Game of Chess, 1912) saw Febo Mari locked in a game of chess with a madman. One of the biggest treats for me was finally seeing the 1912 version of Santarellina starring the great Gigetta Morano, which was a breezy delight from beginning to end.

Gigetta Morano and Mario Bonnard in Santarellina, an adaptation of the operetta Mam’zelle Nitouche (1883)

Being Turinese films, the selection also included several films starring Fernanda Negri Pouget, who regular readers will know is a particular favourite of mine. In La lampada della nonna (Grandma’s Lamp, 1913), she plays the title character as both a young woman and her older self, recountering the story of how she fell in love. Mary Cléo Tarlarini, another of Ambrosio’s leading actresses at the time, also featured in several films, such as the Dogaressa in Sogno di un tramonto d’autunno (Dream of an Autumn Sunset, 1911), who “annihilates and burns love itself”.

And finally, as a diva film fanatic, I would be amiss if I didn’t mention the screenings of Avarizia (Avarice, 1918), one of Francesca Bertini’s Sette peccati capitali (Seven Deadly Sins) series of 1918-19, and Lyda Borelli vehicle Carnevalesca (1918), which was wonderful to see again on the big screen. (I skipped La moglie di Claudio (The Wife of Claudius, 1918), having seen it before). I should also note that the festival saw the release of a diva film box-set, Dive! Lyda Borelli • Francesca Bertini. This means that at long last, Rapsodia Satanica is finally on DVD! True reason for celebration. However, the other three films in the box set (Ma l’amor mio non muore!, Sangue bleu, and Assunta Spina) are already available on DVD as single releases, making Dive! a slightly disappointing release for the hardcore fans.

Lastly! I want to give an honourable mention to the Georgian comedy Приданое Жужуны (Zhuzhuna’s Dowry, GSSR 1934; KA: ჟუჟუნას მზითევი), which was my last silent film viewing at Il cinema ritrovato 2018. As is well-known, sound technology permeated the Soviet Republics rather slowly, and as in China and Japan, silents were made all the way into the mid-1930s. Director Siko Palavandishvili had apprenticed with Kalatozov on Соль Сванетии (Salt for Svanetia, GSSR 1930), but was best known for his acting career in films such as Гвоздь в сапоге (The Nail in the Boot, GSSR 1931). Sadly for the viewing public, Zhuzhuna’s Dowry would be Palavandishvili’s first and only film as director, as he committed suicide soon after the release of the film. (His obituary in Kino was written by Eisenstein).

The festival catalogue accurately describes Zhuzhuna’s Dowry as “a comedy about horse-thieves, collective farms, and love”—and that order applies. Protagonist Varden (Giorgi Gabelashvili) may not be totally above-board, but he’s much more lovable scamp than unscrupulous villain, especially after an unwitting stint on the kolkhoz puts him on the road to redemption. A well-executed comedy that runs on gentle irony rather than slapstick, depicting rural Georgian life with familiarity and affection, Zhuzhuna’s Dowry was an unexpected delight.

– – –

It wasn’t a steady diet of silents, however—about a third of the 30-ish screenings I attended were talkies. As a big fan of both Yukio Mishima and Philip Glass, I’d been meaning to watch Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (US 1985) for years. It’s a pretty unique take on the biopic, intercutting scenes from the infamous last day of Mishima’s life with imaginative realisations of several of his key works, as well as episodes from his childhood and adolescence. Cinematographer John Bailey was there to introduce the film, and his work on it was truly impressive, creating very distinct styles for each different section of the film.

Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven

Other highlights included Leave Her to Heaven (US 1945), part of the John Stahl programme: a Hollywood classic I’d never seen. A friend accurately described it as “a genre-breaker”: I enjoyed it thoroughly. I was also really glad to see La hora de los hornos part I: Neocolonialismo y violencia (The Hour of the Furnaces: Neocolonialism and violence, AR 1966-68); after watching this film, I really regretted not watching more of the Cinemalibero (revolutionary filmmaking) programme.

I caught a couple of the Chinese films, including 三毛流浪记 (The Winter of Three Hairs, 1949), which my friends and I picked purely based on the title. It’s an adaptation of the Sanmao (三毛) comic strip, which literally translates to Three Hairs, referring to the title character’s coiffure. These manhua roots showed in the film’s episodic structure, following Sanmao as he got into and out of all sort of scrapes—before communism arrived to save the day at the end of the film. The film’s assertion that the downtrodden masses would never go hungry again is, in retrospect, bleakly ironic.

Film Sanmao’s appearance mirrored that of his comics counterpart, complete with putty nose and those three hairs, which resembled small dreadlocks. A shot that stood out to me was when a character’s tattoo was animated, coming alive and scaring Sanmao—this comic-style visual trick didn’t recur, however.

Animation in The Winter of Three Hairs

Also interesting in terms of ideology was Марионетки (Marionnettes, USSR 1934), a political satire in which, via a series of shenanigans, a barber ends up king of Buffery, a nation in the grip of a power struggle between the fascists and the capitalists.  Marionnettes was directed by Yakov Protazanov, of whom I can’t say that I’m a big fan: I’ve seen a bunch of his films, and while they’re decent and enjoyable, I generally find him rather workmanlike. He was the big box-office director of his time, working for Mezhrabpomfilm, the most commercial of the Soviet studios. I didn’t love Marionnettes as a work of cinema, or even comedy, but it’s interesting to see one of Protazanov’s sound-era films. Peter Bagrov of Gosfilmofond’s introduction to the film was excellent, providing a lot of context about Protazanov’s career and attitudes to his work, as well as describing how Marionnettes was repeatedly re-released and revived—even as late as the 1980s!

Finally, I should mention Laughing Anne (GB 1953), based on a Joseph Conrad short story. Not an distinguished film (it’s firmly a low-budget/B-picture), or even a particularly good one, but really quite enjoyable: I loved the transformation of the title character and the way that feminine laughter was a theme of the film, even being deployed strategically at the film’s climax. And who could forget the scene where Laughing Anne (Margaret Lockwood), adapting to life on the high seas, decides to remove her makeup by slathering butter (!) all over her face … only to reveal a new face containing exactly the same amount of makeup.

There was a strange visual artefact in the film, where the colour wavered slightly within shots. Laughing Anne was restored in 2017 by Paramount from YCM separation negatives, so one assumes that these colour fluctuations are due to the original laboratory processing (or perhaps even shooting), though that seems pretty odd for Technicolor. I haven’t been able to find out any more information on this matter—does anyone know?

– – –

Films and films and films …. but a huge part of the festival-going experience for me is the social aspect. And this was just wonderful! I stayed in an apartment with several of my close friends, and caught up with many others besides—Il cinema ritrovato is a great place to form connections, as well as renewing far-flung friendships! So thank you to all you lovely people for making it so much fun.

I wrote about the delightful 1915 action caper Filibus a few years ago: a wonderful gender-bending tale of intrigue and adventure, one of my favourite silents. In particular, I praised the performance of Cristina Ruspoli as the title character Filibus, and her alter egos the Baroness de Croixmonde and the Count de la Brive.

“Who is Filibus? What is she doing?” asked contemporary adverts for the film. This question now takes on a deeper meaning: recent research by Milestone Films in preparation for their release of the restoration has revealed that the title character was not, in fact, played by Ruspoli—she is instead portrayed by Valeria Creti.

On reflection, I’m not really surprised about this. While I hadn’t actively given thought to the matter, I’d vaguely noted a difference in appearance between Filibus and Cristina Ruspoli as she appears elsewhere. Ruspoli is a hazy figure in film history, but I’d previously come across a couple of pictures of her, including the below portrait of Ruspoli from a contemporary film magazine: not a strong resemblance to Filibus, but the quality and angle of the photograph makes it hard to gauge.

Cristina Ruspoli

Once you start to consider that Ruspoli is not in fact the lead actress, though, it’s trivially easy to clear things up. A quick search of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema’s collections brings up these portraits of Ruspoli: clearly not Filibus herself.

As Lucia in I promessi sposi; as Jone in Jone o Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (both 1913)

Additionally, Ruspoli played the lead in Il supplizio dei leoni (The Torment of the Lions, Pasquali 1914)—good reminder for me to actually watch this—here’s a shot of her from that film.

Ruspoli in Il supplizio dei leoni (1914)

As for Filibus herself—what actress commonly worked for Corona-Film in that time period? Valeria Creti. As above for Ruspoli, looking up Creti’s name in the MNC’s collections brings up this photo from her 1915 film Il castello del ragno (The Spider’s Castle): a slightly strange angle, but it’s easy to see that here we have Filibus. And we can also ascertain that Filibus is Creti from other sources, of which more below.

So, how did this error in attribution happen? In this case, it’s a decades-long mistake: Ruspoli is credited as Filibus in all of the sources that I’ve seen, including the Martinelli filmography—which is not without errors or omissions, but is generally considered a pretty definitive source. Even the MNC’s listing for Filibus lists Ruspoli’s name, but not Creti’s. Contemporary adverts for the film don’t mention the cast. Ruspoli, having acted in big productions for a major studio, would have been the better-known actress at the time, so perhaps film historians past simply assumed that she played the main role.

It does seem bizarre that no one has corrected this error before, but it’s also understandable that people took decades of scholarship at face value. And of course, once an error like this is published, it’s near-impossible to dislodge. For example, you see everywhere that Asta Nielsen played the role of Mata Hari, in a film of the same title (or possibly called Die spionin, etc). She didn’t—although as Ivo Blom has detailed, she did play a Mata Hari-esque role in Die Tänzerin Navarro (Navarro the Dancer, 1922), which is most likely where the Asta-as-Mata Hari idea came from. (I’ve traced mentions of Asta’s Mata Hari movie back to books from the early 1970s—if not earlier: the ground zero for this myth is unknown—and so, no matter how many times I submit corrections to IMDb, the Mata Hari listings stick around). Another example: Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich didn’t have an affair while filming Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, DE 1925) together: they could not have done, simply because Dietrich does not appear in that film. We all might wish for them to have found some joy together on that miserable street, but this affair was made up from whole cloth by Diana McLellan.

Back to Filibus and its actresses: Ruspoli does appear in the film, but in the supporting role of Leonora, with whom Filibus flirts in her male guise. Here’s a shot of them on their date together (with Creti in her ‘Count de la Brive’ guise):

The flirtation they have is charming, and the two actresses have chemistry: a shame that this was their only collaboration.

Who were Ruspoli and Creti?

Little is known about either actress; they’re both minor figures in Italian silent film history. Both worked in the Torinese film industry, primarily in the early- to mid-teens, with Creti’s career having a longer tail than Ruspoli’s.

Ruspoli had probably the bigger career, with main roles in several of the early-teens wave historical epics produced by Pasquali: Spartaco (Spartacus, 1913), Jone ovvero gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompeii, 1913; not to be confused with the more famous 1913 adaptation starring Fernanda Negri-Pouget), Salambò (Salambo, a $100,000 Spectacle, 1914). She also starred as Lucia in Pasquali’s 1913 adaptation of I promessi sposi (not to be confused with the other 1913 adaptation by Ambrosio, starring Gigetta Morano). Ruspoli appeared in over 20 films for Pasquali and over 10 for Savoia, with a handful of additional credits for smaller/independent studios.

According to Dennis Doros of Milestone films, Creti (née Peretti) entered films with her husband Vasco, whose sister was actress Amelia Chellini. (Side note: Vasco Creti had a quite long career in films, appearing in important films like Blasetti’s Sole! [1929] and the 1926 version of Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei. He also appears in Il fauno [The Faun, 1917], his first of two collaborations with Febo Mari).

Valeria Creti’s husband Vasco as Arte, the sculptor, in Il fauno (1917)

Valeria Creti worked at Savoia in the same time as Ruspoli, but the bulk of Creti’s work was for Corona-Film, the studio that made Filibus. Corona-Film was also based in Torino, making films that were “for the most part adventure and small time features interpreted by second-rate actors,” (Cinema Ritrovato programme, 1997). Sample titles include Il ritorno del pirata (The return of the pirate, 1914), Il delitto del lago (The Crime of the Lake, 1915), and Il giustiziere invisibile (The invisible executioner, 1916), all of which starred Creti. Like many Italian film companies of the era, Corona-Film was short-lived, existing for the boom years of Italian silent film production and tailing off during the war.

At Corona, Creti worked often with Mario Roncoroni, the director of Filibus, and also with the director Giuseppe Giusti, director of Signori giurati … (1916). Now, this is where I have to hang my head, because I have seen Filibus several times and Signori more than once—putting me in what must be a very small club!—and have even written about both for this site. Now that I look again, I can easily see that the character of Hélène (Creti) is the same actress who plays Filibus.

Valeria Creti in Signori giurati ... (1916)

In retrospect, I feel unobservant and even surprised at myself for not making the connection. Then again, I watched the films months or years apart, and I wasn’t looking for it; also, it’s a very different role than those Creti plays in Filibus—as Hélène she brings an entirely different energy, and indeed hairstyle. In Signori it’s easy to be distracted by the beautiful tinting and toning, plus Fabienne Fabrèges’ drug-den/femme fatale shenanigans … plus at this point, a lot of actors in Italian films from this era have ‘that vaguely familiar look’ to me. Or perhaps the true answer lies in one of the charms of Filibus herself … the chameleon-like ability of Creti to embody different characters and disguises.

Valeria Greti [sic] in Signori giurati … (1916)

Creti pulled off a disappearing act worthy of Filibus herself, but after many years in the wilderness, it’s wonderful to see a fine actress get her due. Thanks to the people at Milestone, EYE and elsewhere who worked to restore her from obscurity! Look out for Milestone’s release, which promises an image quality astronomically better than has previously been available.

Look at the pixels on her!

– – –

Filibus recently screened at the Women and the Silent Screen/EYE International Conference 2019. My pal Hanna over at Thick Thighs and Bad Guys has a writeup here, go and take a look!