Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema

333 Pages·2008·10.12 MB·English

by  Angela Dalle Vacche

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DDiivvaa
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DDiivvaa
DDeefifiaannccee aanndd PPassion in Early Italian Cinema
University of Texas Press Austin
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Diva
Defiance andd PPaassssiioonn iinn EEaarrllyy IIttaalliiaann CCiinneemmaa
by Angela Dalle Vacche
Foreword by Guy Maddin
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Material included in Chapter 4, “Wings of Desire: Aviation, Fashion, Circus Stunts,” is reprinted from Angela
Dalle Vacche, “Femininity in Flight: Androgyny and Gynandry in Early Cinema,” in A Feminist Reader in Early
Cinema,444–475, edited by Jennifer Bean and Diane Negra. Reprinted by permission. Copyright © 2002 by
Duke University Press.
Material included in Chapter 5, “Acting: Prostitution, Vertigo, Close-up,” is reprinted from Angela Dalle
Vacche,“Asta Nielsen: Motion, Emotion, and the Close-up,” Framework43:1 (Spring 2002), 76–94, by
permission of Wayne State University Press. Copyright © 2002 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit,
MI 48201-1309.
Material included in Chapter 8, “Nino Oxilia: Blue Blood and Satanic Rhapsody,” is reprinted from Angela
Dalle Vacche, “Lyda Borelli’s Satanic Rhapsody:The Cinema and the Occult,” Cinémas16:1 (Autumn 2005), 91–115;
special issue on “Femmes et cinéma muet: Nouvelles problématiques, nouvelles méthodologies,” edited by
Rosanna Maule. Copyright © 2006 by Cinémas. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Foreword copyright © 2008 by Guy Maddin
Copyright © 2008 by Angela Dalle Vacche
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2008
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:
Permissions
University of Texas Press
P.O. Box 7819
Austin, TX 78713-7819
www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html
The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements
of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dalle Vacche, Angela, 1954–
Diva : defiance and passion in early Italian cinema / by Angela Dalle Vacche ;
foreword by Guy Maddin. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn978-0-292-71661-2 (cl. : alk. paper) — isbn978-0-292-71711-4
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Women in motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures—Italy. I. Title.
pn1995.9.w6d35 2008
791.430945—dc22 2007036402
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This book is dedicated to
Professor J. Dudley Andrew
Professor Robert P. Kolker
Ms. Adrienne Mancia
Ms. Giuliana Mazzotti
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Publication of this book was aided by generous support from The School of Literature,
Communication and Culture at The Georgia Institute of Technology.
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CCoonntteennttss
Foreword Silent Divas of Italian Cinema by Guy Maddin ix
Acknowledgments The Geography of a Book xi
Time Line Cultural Events and the Diva Film xv
Introduction Mater Dolorosa 1
theory and technology
chapter1. The Shape of Time: Élan Vital and Memento Mori 25
chapter2. Laocoön’s Filmstrip: Classicism, Marxism, Vitalism 39
chapter3. Orientalism: Ballets Russes, Occultism, Canudo 79
chapter4. Wings of Desire: Aviation, Fashion, Circus Stunts 105
history and analysis
chapter5. Acting: Prostitution, Vertigo, Close-up 131
chapter6. Modern Woman: Minor Stars and the Short Film 171
chapter7. Tropes: Obsessions and Traumas of a Genre 199
chapter8. Nino Oxilia: Blue Blood and Satanic Rhapsody 225
Conclusion Beyond the Femme Fatale 253
Portraits Biographical Profiles of Actresses 259
Archival Locations and Filmography 265
Notes 269
Bibliography 283
Index 297
Attached inside the back cover is Diva Dolorosaby Peter Delpeut, a companion DVD
of film clips from 1914–1920.
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FFoorreewwoorrdd
silent divas of italian cinema
When on a shopping spree for Savagely lashed by her own tresses while
anguish, rapture, martyrdom, Destiny blasts her soul, the diva cries out for
comas, counts, rapes, bastards, vengeance, cries out with her entire body, and
orphans, dogaressas, philtres, sirens, suicides, this is what is most spectacular about the diva
mistaken identities, flower festivals, and sud- film—the vocabulary of the body! Aided only
den fatal loves—even a tattooed baby—one in part by as many as thirty drool-inducing
need look no further than the Italian Diva costume changes per film, the diva’s body
Film, a vast clearinghouse of art nouveau twists and ripples in endless metamorphoses
decors and nineteenth-century melodramatic expressing wave upon wave of inner tumult.
devices still in wondrous working order. Ever so slowly—for the film’s time is the diva’s
Within these pages are the gaudy invento- time!—and in a fashion completely alien to
ries of these diva films, which flourished on the our New World eyes, do the torso and its
continent between 1910 and 1920, and which limbs strain toward an unprecedented posture
starred cinema’s first divinities: Lyda Borelli, of prurience enmarbled, and upon achieving
Pina Menichelli, Francesca Bertini, and other this shocking pose, move on to the next as-
Olympian ancestors of the merely mortal stars tonishing attitude, unfurling the fingers first,
of Hollywood history. languidly allowing these digits to splay about
Gathering into one deeply conscious the face and the bosom of the diva and in so
glance all the beauty scattered so sublimely doing inscribe upon those marvelous surfaces
through that last hour of the fin de siècle, the the plots of all stories from all times.
Italian film diva is both the movie’s center and During the screenings you can’t help but
the movie itself; she is the eye and the hurri- imagine you sit next to Wayne Koestenbaum,
cane. Indolently we bathe in her fragrant mys- that great curator of history’s taxidermied
ticisms and sensualities, while all about her, opera divas, chronicler of their conduct, and
rent hearts and havoc are strewn with the vi- exegete of their every signifier. You pretend
olence of Armageddon. Even she is consumed you’ve introduced him to these florid films
by the force of her own storm—babies are and by doing so you’ve struck him dumb.
ripped from her arms, leering roadmen are The cine-diva’s vocabulary smites him with
thrust into their place. She is buffeted by be- its vastness, strangeness, and uncanny acces-
trayals. Her purses are torn away. Her hands sibility—like hieroglyphics made suddenly
are pelted by ducal kisses innumerable. readable.
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