Cinema and literature in early twentieth century Italy
Michael the Great's Notepad
Stagehands, toolmakers, electricians, editorial secretaries, production inspectors, assistant directors, assistant directors, sound engineers, giraffe artists, set designers, stage photographers, crane operators, make-up artists, costume designers, operators, cameramen, seamstresses; and then again: noisemakers, headline writers, dubbers and editors. An army of little ants that made Italian cinema. My thanks as a cinephile go to them (Luciano De Crescenzo, “Croce e delight”, 1993).
-What work do you do?
-I work in the film industry.
-Ah well. You know, we have a DVD player at home and I don't think it works . There is a cable coming out from the back. Do you know where you have to go? (Dialogue between Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and Cate Blanchett during a reception at Buckingham Palace).
Perhaps music will be – or already is – the new record in our times, marked by the television Homo videns (copyright by Giovanni Sartori). And perhaps pop concerts are the new places to celebrate a mystery so absolutely modern that it no longer needs a hall, a museum, an organized space. But this century has just begun and, for the moment, the "seventh art" (copyright of the critic Ricciotto Canuto, who coined the expression in 1921), continues rather undisturbed the path begun in Paris by the Lumière brothers in December 1895. A path not without obstacles, especially in Italy. His first steps encountered resistance of various kinds, which complicated the search and conquest of an autonomous cultural identity.
Via Nomentana, 1905: thousands of spectators watch Filoteo Alberini's "Presa di Roma", a ten-minute and seven-picture film that reconstructs the day of the breach of Porta Pia (20 September 1870). It is the birth certificate of national cinematography, in which the creators and symbols of the unitary state are praised. In the last painting Mazzini, Garibaldi and Vittorio Emanuale II, at the foot of a "one, free and independent" Italy, see their dream come true. Chroniclers record the "enthusiastic acclamations" of the public, seduced by the representation of the popular myths of the Risorgimento. In 1911 Milano Films produced “Inferno”, a proto-colossal which received the honor of being screened at the Sorbonne and other temples of international culture. Between 1912 and 1914 a series of historical films (“Quo vadis?”, “Marcant Antony and Cleopatra”, “Julius Caesar”, “Spartacus”, “Cabiria”) rediscovers “the roots of a past whose lineage […], and interprets the spirit of a resurgent pan-Romanism destined to become a supporting structure in the decades of the fascist dictatorship" (Gian Piero Brunetta, Cinema , in La cultura italiana del Novecento , edited by Corrado Stajano, Laterza, 1996).
Let's now put ourselves in the shoes of a writer or literary critic of the first twenty years of the century: what must they have thought of these films (but at the time they used the feminine word, "la film") which were appreciated by all social classes? Let's not forget, they were silent films, in black and white, produced with still immature techniques, but this was precisely what increased the sense of their mechanical nature. The machine, therefore, "invaded that realm of Art and Beauty that many currents of thought and aesthetics proclaimed sacred, entirely ideal" (Giuseppe Petronio, Racconto del Novecento literary in Italia , Laterza, 1993). Furthermore, cinema, with its collective enjoyment in large halls, appeared as a dangerous competitor to the theatre. In fact, even cinema soon began to tell stories often taken from literature; but he told them with a technique very close to the theatrical one. In cinema as in theatre, in fact, the author tells the story through a third party, the actor; and already in ancient Greece Plato and Aristotle had posed the problem of the difference between "epos", i.e. the story, and "drama", i.e. the story represented and experienced on the stage by actors: "drama" derives precisely from a verb which means “to do”. In short: cinema, like theatre, also told stories through actors; only that their acting was recorded on film that could be replayed countless times. Was it or wasn't it a revolution? Why it was, the German sociologist Walter Benjamin will explain in a book, The work of art in the era of its technical reproducibility , the last draft of which dates back to 1939 (but only in 1966 the Italian translation will see the light in the Einaudi editions ).
In any case, what will become the leading art of the contemporary age, as Arnold Hauser states in his Social History of Art (1951), was making giant strides. In the 1910s, the number of producers and directors increased significantly. The first divas – Francesca Bertini, Lyda Borrelli – ensured notable takings and conquered foreign markets too. Gabriele D'Annunzio arrives at the cinema without complexes, attracted by the generous salaries. And he takes on a role as a guide for a group of writers who will follow his example. When he signs the contract for the captions of "Cabiria", he assumes the paternity of a work that is not his and gives it a license of artistic and cultural legitimacy which significantly changes the balance of the relationship between cinema and literature. Others, however, forced to reveal these relationships, confess their sense of guilt for having succumbed to the lure of economic sirens.
In 1910 Guido Gozzano, in the magazine "La Vita Cinematografica", admitted that he had reduced for the cinema "fairy tales for adults and children, scripted with a great synthesis of plot and cunning". Giovanni Verga addresses this plea to his friend Countess Dina di Sordevolo to whom he gives the subjects of many of his works: "I beg you and I beg you to never say that I have had my hands in this culinary manipulation of my things". Luigi Capuana comments with satisfaction on his earnings: “It seems that my business is doing well. I will owe the miracle to San Cinematografo”. D'Annunzio himself, in a 1914 letter addressed to the publisher Treves, recognizes that “Cabiria” is what “the good Pascarella would call nonsense. It is an ironic essay on art for the dry and saccharine crowd." Also in 1914, Luigi Pirandello implored him in a letter to Nino Martoglio: “Dearest Nino […], couldn't I do something too? I would have many many many arguments of any kind, you know it! And I really, really need to earn money right now, you know that! I am desperate for 500 lire which I need for immediate needs and I don't know how and where to find it. Could you arrange to have them for me for a job that I could do immediately upon request?” (see Gian Piero Brunetta, op. cit. ).
Yet the following year the Sicilian playwright published a novel, Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio editore , in which he harshly condemned the "cinema-machine" which dispossesses the individual of his humanity. In one of his most successful pages, the protagonist goes down to the photographic department of the production company that hired him and describes the working environment thus: “Here the work of the machines is mysteriously carried out. How much of life the machines have eaten with the voracity of beasts afflicted by a tapeworm spills out here, into the large underground rooms, barely darkened by dark red lanterns, which sinisterly illuminate the enormous basins prepared for the bath with a light bloody hue. . The life swallowed by the machines is there, in those tapeworms, I mean in the films wrapped in the frames. We need to fix this life, which is no longer life, so that another machine can give it back the movement that was suspended here for many moments. We are as if in a womb, in which a monstrous mechanical gestation is developing and forming […]. All I have to do is enter here, into this darkness plagued by the breath of machines, by the fumes of chemical substances, for all my 'superfluous' to evaporate” (Feltrinelli, 2017).
The prose is disturbing and the rejection of the cinema-machine is clear, but it wasn't just Pirandello who rejected it, there were – except the futurists – many. But, sooner or later, even the most skeptical intellectuals laid down their weapons in the face of an unstoppable technological innovation, which was clearly congenial to modern civilization. Enrico Thovez (1869-1925), a very acute literary critic, prophetically stated that it was not Guglielmo Marconi who gave his name to the twentieth century, but the invention of the Lumière brothers. The problem was therefore to find a place in the hierarchy of the arts that would allow it to flourish without harming the theatre, that is, "true art". In this sense, what Gozzano claims in a text entitled The celluloid tape and the serpents of Lacoon (1916) is interesting. The poet flatly denies that cinema can be an art, but it can offer intelligent people many "other things: the weekly news, the drama taken from the appendix novel, the detective film, sensational tricks, exotic landscapes; cheap trips to lands we will never go to." Not art, therefore, but a substitute for it that may have some practical use. And this was the most widespread opinion among the Italian intelligentsia, expressed in numerous conferences by the most illustrious names in journalism and the academic world.
Even personalities, such as Piero Gobetti and Antonio Gramsci, who are among the most attentive to social issues, do not escape this cliché. Gobetti's main concern was to preserve the theater "from the vapid ballets and lascivious songs" dished out in films. For his part, Gramsci observed: “The reason for the success of the cinema and its absorption by the public, who previously frequented theatres, is purely economic. The cinema offers the same, very same sensations as the vulgar theatre, under better conditions, without choreographic apparatuses of false intellectuality, without promising too much while keeping little. […] And no one can deny that the film has an overwhelming superiority on the stage in this respect. It is more complete, more varied, it is silent, that is, it reduces the role of the artists to simple movement, to a simple machine without a soul, to what they actually are even in the theater. […] There is no doubt that a large part of the public needs to be entertained […] with a pure and simple visual distraction: the theatre, by industrialising, has recently tried to satisfy only this need. […] The cinema, which can perform this task more easily and more cheaply, surpasses it in success, and tends to replace it (“Theatre and cinema”, “Avanti!”, 16 August 1916).
Side note: it is quite surprising that the founder of the PCI underestimates the hegemonic potential of the new technical means of entertainment. Other great exponents of international communism such as Lenin and Trotsky, however, immediately grasp the great power of moving images, decreeing their centrality in the struggle to eradicate bourgeois ideology from the conscience of the proletariat. In the Soviet Union it was Lenin "who launched the project of revolutionary propaganda through cinema by inverting the relationship between screen and spectator: no longer the spectator who goes where a screen is, but the screen which goes wherever a spectator is, through trains and boats […]. The agitation and propaganda practices of the communists even involve the use of a special train managed by Trotsky, equipped with a traveling cinema which must favor the diffusion of revolutionary ideals" (Marco Colacino, Celluloid and hammer , in "Clionet", 4 October 2021).
Cinema, to conclude, was considered a bit like prostitution: morally reprehensible, but necessary. In 1909 Enrico Novelli, alias Yambo, a well-known journalist and author of children's books, became director of an important film company. In the same year, Roberto Bracco and Salvatore Di Giacomo, highly respected men of letters, signed several collaboration contracts. In 1910 Milano Films boasted among its collaborators prestigious novelists, playwrights and novelists such as Enrico Annibale Buti, Giannino Antoni Traversa, Domenico Tumiati, Nino Oxilia. There were many who looked to cinema for generous additional income and a sounding board for their writings, a bit like what happens today with television and commercials.
To be fair, Pirandello was one of the last to fall into temptation. Between 1926 and 1936, the year of his death, he granted several times the right to script his works ("Le fut Mathias Pascal" by Marcel L'Herbier, "Steel" by Walter Rutman, "Ma è non un cosa serious” by Mario Camerini), turning his back on his old positions. However, in an article that appeared in the Corriere della sera in 1929, he reiterated that the original sin of cinema lay in its desire to compete with the theatre, a competition that would lead to its dissolution. He pointed out a new path to cinema, which Walt Disney later followed in a very famous film, “Fantasia” (1940), that is, a cinema that was “cinemelography”, the visual language of music: “The eyes that see, the ear that listens , and the heart that feels all the beauty and variety of feelings that the sounds express, represents in the images what those feelings arouse and evoke". Only in this way would the cinema have saved itself and would not have attacked the theater (see Giuseppe Petronio, op. cit. ). It will be blatantly denied in 1932, when the banker Ludovico Toeplitz, owner of Cines, the largest Italian production company, appoints Enrico Cecchi, one of the most authoritative literary critic, manager and artistic director. To him the cinema machine no longer appears, as it did to Pirandello, a sort of Moloch that devours the soul of intellectuals, but an activity which, in order to be relaunched, required production planning based on industrial criteria.
Nonetheless, the judgment of Baudelaire, who sees in the daguerreotype (the reproduction system developed by Louis Daguerre in 1830) a tool for impoverishing genius and creativity, will still weigh for a long time – first on photography and then on cinema. A judgment firmly opposed by the movement of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who in the Manifesto of Futurist Cinematography (1916), dismantles the thesis of cinema as a "diabolical machine" and, on the contrary, celebrates it as a magical machine capable of opening universes denied to others Arts. The push given by futurism to cinema will flow for a long time like a karst river. At the end of the 1930s, the slogan of the return to realism became the beacon of the group of intellectuals gathered around Luchino Visconti and the editorial team of the fortnightly "Cinema". A group of writers and directors leaves the cinema factories and goes to discover – in the countryside, in the urban suburbs, in the factories – the "fatigue of living" and the faces of farmers and workers. The Pontine marshes, the Tuscan countryside, Rome, Naples, Genoa, Sicily, are the privileged places of this research, which will culminate in Visconti's masterpiece "La terra trema" (1948), the first episode of that "triptych of misery " which should have represented – in order – the struggle of the fishermen, the miners in the sulfur mines and the laborers fighting to free themselves from ancient slavery. As Umberto Barbaro had already intuited in a 1943 article entitled “Neorealism, which appeared in the monthly “Bianco e Nero”, the Mussolini imagery linked to ruralist mythologies was a definitively closed chapter.
* The Sheet
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/cinema-e-letteratura-nellitalia-del-primo-novecento/ on Sat, 14 Oct 2023 05:46:48 +0000.