Bertellini Cinema Photography and Viceversa

Italian Silent Cinema:

A Reader

Edited by GiorgioBertellini

Contents��

Acknowledgements 1

Introduction: Traveling Lightness 3

PART I Methods and Objects

Chapter 1 Silent Film Historiography and Italian (Film) HistoriographyGian Piero Brunetta 17

Chapter 2 A Brief Cultural History of Italian Film Archives (1980–2005)Paolo Cherchi Usai 31

PART II Italian Silent Cinema’s Visual Cultures

Chapter 3 Italy and Pre-Cinematic Visual CultureCarlo Alberto Zotti Minici 39

Chapter 4 Photography and Cinema, and Vice VersaGiorgio Bertellini 49

Chapter 5 Visualizing the Past. The Italian City in Early CinemaMarco Bertozzi 69

PART III Production Companies and Contexts

Chapter 6 The Giant Ambrosio, or Italy’s Most Prolific Silent Film CompanyClaudia Gianetto 79

Chapter 7 The “Pastrone System:” Itala Film from the Origins to World War ISilvio Alovisio 87

Chapter 8 Rome’s Premiere Film Studio: Società Italiana CinesKim Tomadjoglou 97

Chapter 9 Milano Films: The Exemplary History of a Film Company of the 1910sRaffaele De Berti 113

Chapter 10 Southern (and Southernist) Italian CinemaGiorgio Bertellini 123

Chapter 11 Italian Cinema in the 1920sJacqueline Reich 135

Chapter 12 From Wonder to Propaganda: The Technological Context ofItalian Silent CinemaLuca Giuliani 143

PART IV Genres

Chapter 13 Non-Fiction ProductionAldo Bernardini 153

Chapter 14 In Hoc Signo Vinces: Historical FilmsGiuliana Muscio 161

Chapter 15 All the same or Strategies of Difference. Early Italian Comedies inInternational PerspectiveIvo Blom 171

Chapter 16 The Diva-Film: Context, Actresses, IssuesAngela Dalle Vacche 185

Chapter 17 Early Italian Serials and (Inter)National Popular CultureMonica Dall’Asta 195

Chapter 18 Futurist Cinema: Ideas and NoveltiesGiovanni Lista 203

Chapter 19 STRACITTÀ: Cinema, Rationalism, Modernism, and Italy’s “Second Futurism”Leonardo Quaresima 213

Chapter 20 Istituto Nazionale Luce: a National Company with an International ReachPierluigi Erbaggio 221

PART V Cinematic Words: On Paper, On Stage, On Screen

Chapter 21 Film on Paper: Early Italian Cinema Literature, 1907–1920John P. Welle 235

Chapter 22 On the Language of Silent Films in ItalySergio Raffaelli 247

Chapter 23 Famous Actors, Famous Actresses: Notes on Acting Stylein Italian Silent FilmsFrancesco Pitassio 255

Chapter 24 “Our Beautiful and Glorious Art Lives:” The Rhetoric of Nationalismin Early Italian Film PeriodicalsJohn David Rhodes 263

Chapter 25 Italy’s Early Film “Theories:” Borders and CrossingsFrancesco Casetti 275

PART VI Circulation, Exhibition, and Reception

Chapter 26 Disordered Traffic: Film Distribution in Italy (1905–1930)Chiara Caranti 285

Chapter 27 “Pictures from Italy”: Italian Silent films in Britain, 1907–1915Pierluigi Ercole 295

Chapter 28 Research on Local Moviegoing: Trends and Future PerspectivesPaolo Caneppele 305

PART VII Research

Chapter 29 Where Can I Find Italian Silent Cinema?Ivo Blom 317

Chapter 30 Cinema on Paper: Researching Non-filmic MaterialsLuca Mazzei 325

Bibliography

Reference Works 337

Primary Sources 339

Secondary Sources 345

Bibliographic Appendix: Film Exhibition and Spectatorshipby Paolo Caneppele 371

Contributors 375

Indexes – Film Titles; Names; Film Companies and Institutions 381

vi ITALIAN SILENT CINEMA: A READER

Chapter 4/Photographyand Cinema, and Vice Versa�� ) &�� * � � (�� (��

Giorgio Bertellini

The Italian city, ancient or modern, is

prodigiously photogenic.

André Bazin, 19481

The day we will be able to write the history of

Italian photography, we will have to give the lion’s

share to amateur photographers.

Lamberto Vitali, 19742

For decades the scholarship of silent Italian

cinema has not granted much space to pho-

tography and photographers beyond the

familiar introductory sections on “origins” or “be-

ginnings”. Before the late 1970s, historical

overviews relied on the pressing assumption that

cinema was an autonomous medium, deserving of

its own distinct history. Motion pictures, the argu-

ment went, had come into their own by

emancipating themselves from all other – namely

previous – image-making forms, as if painting,

print-making, and photography had not experi-

enced any development or radical changes in the

20th century.3 The debatable premise revealed the

familiar, modernist postulate of discontinuity: cin-

ema was a new, modern phenomenon that

radically broke with the past. For decades, even

photography studies have shown little interest in

approaching the emergence of motion pictures

and the protracted give-and-take between the two

media, limiting their references to anecdotes

around questions of pictorial influence or docu-

mentary coverage.4

In the 1980s, film scholarship modified its

approach. A number of groundbreaking historical

studies began to include photography not just as

the antecedent to cinema’s technical emergence,

but as inherently linked to the material history of

early motion picture exhibition and production.

Aldo Bernardini and Gian Piero Brunetta, among

others, made their readers appreciate early Italian

cinema’s debts to photographers affiliated with

either professional ateliers or amateur societies

where films were first shown and often manufac-

tured.5 More recently, scholars have extended the

possible methodological approaches by focusing

on the longue dureé of the two media’s relationship

in terms of subject matter, visual style, technologi-

cal inventions, commercial convergences, cultural

dissemination and reception. Three recent an-

thologies deserve to be singled out: the two vol-

umes of Cinema muto italiano: tecnica e tecnologia

(2006) and Moltiplicare l’istante: Beltrami, Comerio

e Pacchioni tra fotografia e cinema (2007).6

What these studies have shown is that from

early on the advent of cinema raised a number of

broader interests and concerns among profes-

sional and amateur photographers, who engaged

in discussions about the nature and status of pho-

tographic reproduction, whether still or in motion.7

Their inquiries focused on issues of national docu-

mentation, cultural institutionalization, artistry,

authorship, and even copyright. As film historian

Franco Prono has noted, the contributors to such

photography periodicals as Il Dilettante di Foto-

grafia (Milan, 1891–1905), Bullettino della Società

Fotografia Italiana (Florence, 1889–1912), La Foto-

grafia Artistica (Turin, 1904–1917), Il Progresso Fo-

tografico (Milan, 1894–1942), and Il Corriere

fotografico (Turin, 1924–1963) wrote about cinema

as a manifestation of photography’s broad techno-

logical reach.8 Also, while their information and

insights, particularly about foreign inventions, were

often inexact, the same contributors expressed

great interest in the educational, scientific, and

military potential of filmmaking and in legal ques-

tions about national and international copyright.9

Although still understudied, these convergences

enlighten our understanding of what Italian photo-

graphic culture thought about cinema beyond the

very first film exhibitions. For instance, in 1912 La

Fotografia Artistica was quite forthcoming in em-

phasizing cinema’s artistic merits for cultured and

popular audiences alike and in acknowledging that

both professional and amateur photographers

were capable of embracing the new medium tech-

nically and financially.10 By the same token, as

recent research has emphasized, Italian film peri-

odicals devoted regular space to questions of pho-

tographic reproduction, coloring, filmmaking

technique, and lighting.11

Still, despite these outstanding contributions,

all too rarely have interventions risen to the level of

overviews of the role of photography in Italy’s silent

film culture, not just before or during, but also well

beyond cinema’s emergence and early develop-

ment. Possibly because of their complex research

and methodological demands, studies of interme-

dial coexistence and exchange have continued to

remain scarce and underdeveloped.12

In this essay I sketch a possible landscape of

these contributions and of further research oppor-

tunities. Within the context of this Reader, my essay

is more concerned with a preliminary assessment

of the historical relationships between the two me-

dia; consequently, I will not discuss the more theo-

retical features of the relationship between

photography and film, which would constitute a

much-needed investigation.13 In particular, I or-

ganize my discussion around three selected areas

of intermedial intersection. The first area of interest

pertains to the domain of early film exhibition, con-

centrated in the 1895–1905 period. In this regard it

is worth remembering that Italy’s fiction production

began only in 1905. Before then, the first exhibitors,

who in addition to being amateur photographers

also dabbled in filmmaking, produced mostly local

actualités. The second area of interest concerns

film production, both non-fiction and fiction, from

1895 to the end of the silent period; and it revolves

around three dialogic motifs linking photography

and cinema. The first motif of this second area of

interest is the shared pictorial aesthetics of monu-

mental and picturesque views, which achieved

great formal and commercial success from before

the inception of motion pictures until at least the

1920s. In still photographs and motion pictures,

this was the nation’s most bankable aesthetic cur-

rency. The second motif is the instantaneous view,

arguably one of photography’s greatest technical

innovations, which informed ethnographic and

news-making efforts, particularly during the war in

Libya and World War I. The third motif was the

portrait, or close view, which enabled the two me-

dia to interact formally and commercially (for in-

stance through film publicity) and institutionally by

serving a pivotal role during Fascism. In Italy, the

Futurists’ opposition to photographic pictorialism,

instantaneous views, and realistic portraiture de-

layed the appreciation and development of pho-

tography as an autonomous aesthetic form of

expression in Italy. Excluded from the realm of

artistic transfiguration and radical avant-garde art-

istry, photography found ways to be associated

with cinema by aiding its circulation, the third area

of interest in this essay, after film exhibition and

production. Photography served a major role in

cinema’s public dissemination beyond the movie

screen, particularly in relationship to its iconic stars

– whether domestic or foreign – through film peri-

odicals, brochures, posters, and postcards. The

stillness of frame enlargements or photographs,

either taken on the film set or in professional stu-

dios, enabled cinematic imagery to become port-

able and thus contributed to the emergence of

Italian film fandom.

Exhibition

One of the first clear links between photography

and motion pictures involved the skilled photogra-

phers and tinkerers who understood the novelty of

the cinematograph. By considering how individu-

als retooled their approach to the photographic

craft as they became professional film exhibitors,

camera operators, and even film directors, Aldo

Bernardini has showcased the initial overlapping

stages in the relationship between cinema and

photography.14 These photographers’ contribu-

tions were visible in technical inventions and count-

less patents: suffice it to mention the name of

Filoteo Alberini (1864–1937), an engineer at the

Istituto Geografico Militare, who both adopted and

improved standard foreign equipment.15 In De-

cember 1895 Alberini obtained a patent for his

Kinetografo Alberini, a camera, projector and

printer quite similar to the Lumières’ Cinématogra-

phe. Although he was apparently unable to com-

mercialize it, he left a major mark in Italian cinema

by directing Italy’s first fiction film, La presa di Roma

– XX Settembre 1870 (The Capture of Rome – 20

September 1870, 1905).16

Familiarity with the tech-

nology, in fact, regularly fostered the inception not

just of early film exhibitions, but also of film produc-

tion – in Italy, as elsewhere – as the two early

activities were inherently linked.

Several independent photographers and sell-

ers of photographic equipment and plates enabled

the very first exhibitions of the Lumières’ invention

in Italy, particularly in Rome and in the North. For

the capital, we should mention Francesco Felicetti,

whose shop was in the very central Piazza di

Spagna; Enrico Navone; and Henri Le Lieure, a

Frenchman who had achieved fame with photo-

graphs of Italian urban sights, particularly of Rome.

Bernardini has noted that it may have been Le

Lieure who bypassed Vittorio Calcina, the Italian

representative of the Société Anonyme des

Plaques et Papiers Photographiques A. Lumière et

ses fils, and presented the Cinématographe for the

first time to an Italian audience. His exhibition pat-

tern, followed by others, gave precedence to local

50 ITALIAN SILENT CINEMA: A READER

authorities, the press, and fellow photographers

ahead of regular paying audiences.17

Elsewhere in Italy were Roberto Omegna,

Giovanni Battista Vitrotti, and the aforementioned

Calcina in Turin; Giuseppe Filippi, Luca Comerio,

Italo Pacchioni, and Adolfo Croce in Milan; Luigi

Sciutto in Genoa, Rodolfo Remondini in Florence;

Alberto Donnini in Pisa, Vittorio Dello Strologo in

Livorno, Roberto Troncone in Naples; and Gi-

useppe Gabrielli and Raffaello Lucarelli in Palermo.

Calcina and Filippi directed the first Italian dal vero

productions in 1896, Omegna was a pioneer in

scientific filmmaking, and Comerio and Vitrotti were

accomplished traveling cameramen and forerun-

ners of documentary cinema.18

One of the most

significant links between the commerce of photog-

raphy and cinema is the career of Arturo Ambrosio

(1870–1960), the co-founder in 1906 of the first

version of the film company that would make his

name famous all over the world. Ambrosio had

started only four years earlier with a shop of pho-

tographic equipment, which he then turned into a

photographic studio after the sale of a camera he

had patented.19 Among his first close collaborators

was Omegna who in 1901 had opened the movie

theater Edison in Turin. After a visit to the Pathé

studios in Paris in 1904, Ambrosio and Omegna

moved into film production, with two short news-

reels about a car race and military maneuvers,

before committing their activities to fiction film pro-

duction.20

Finally, right at the time of the emergence of

national film production, a group of entrepreneurs

active in Turin in the field of photography since

1897 came up with an ambitious, but short-lived

plan. In 1906, their company, Excelgrafia, aspired

to become an international network of movie thea-

ters located in Turin, Milan, Rome, and even in

France – at least according to contemporary re-

ports.21 Not much else is known about the com-

pany, though it appears to have dissolved in 1910,

which probably tells the whole story. Although

more research is necessary on the whole scope of

film exhibition, it is fair to conclude this section by

noting Italian cinema would have to wait years

before any industrialist with commercial savvy

could devise an exhibition plan of comparable

ambition.

Production I: filmingphotographic landscapes

The earliest and most enduring relationships be-

tween photography and cinema center on a shared

repository of intermedial visual and literary refer-

ences, which in Italy followed the influential visual

tradition of the Grand Tour and began decades

before the inception of photography. Ever since the

18th century, richly illustrated collections of views

(Raccolte di vedute) and picturesque journeys

(Viaggi pittorici) about the Italian peninsula and its

inhabitants had popularized graphic reproductions

of cities, monuments, and picturesque sceneries

and customs for a growing cohort of European and

American tourists. Similar views soon appeared in

albums of daguerreotypes, photographic collec-

tions, and postcards.22 The commercialized aes-

thetic of the Grand Tour provided the common,

international currency that largely defined the sub-

ject matter, style, and mass marketability of photo-

graphic representations of Italy.

Italian and foreign photographers together

reproduced the web of collaborations and compe-

tition that in previous centuries had characterized

the production and commerce of paintings and

prints about the peninsula. Such an international

network of commercial and artistic interests was

particularly significant to the success of Italy’s most

prominent and influential private atelier, the Fratelli

Alinari established in Florence in 1852. Its work

codified at the highest professional level what Gi-

ulio Bollati termed “Italians’ visual dictionary”, a

national instrument of cataloguing and document-

ing Italian cities, architectural monuments, and

natural sights.23

The Alinari’s repository of national

views served as a model for the institution, in 1892,

of the Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale (National

Photographic Archive) within the Ministry of Educa-

tion’s Direzione Generale delle Antichità e Belle Arti

(General Management of Antiquities and Fine

Arts).24 By Royal Decree, the purpose was to sup-

port the classification of monuments, antiquities,

and art works of national interest.25

The work of the Alinari, together with other

Italian and foreign photographers, established a

profound relationship with centuries-old painterly

traditions, particularly architectural view painting

and paysage classique, along with related graphic

reproductions.26 While scouting Italian cities with

the aid of foreign tourist handbooks, they adopted

the established European practice of employing

photography to document a nation’s distinct civili-

zation. From early on, Alinari’s photographs be-

came famous for their high-quality reproductions

of Italy’s patrimony of monuments, urban views,

and art works.27 In their painstaking cataloguing

efforts, the Alinari appear to have absorbed the

lessons of the Excursions daguerriennes

(1840–43), a collection of over a hundred images

of Grand Tour destinations. They also studied the

work of daguerreotypists like John Ruskin and the

international members of the “Roman School of

Chapter 4 / Photography and Cinema, and Vice Versa 51

photography”, whose photographic codification of

known painterly views – from the Florentine pano-

rama to Rome’s Colosseum, Arch of Titus, Castle

of St. Angelo, and Forum – offered Italian cinema

a familiar repertoire of subjects and views.28

The case of the Colosseum is a most remark-

able one, as it figured most prominently in such

blockbusters as Spartaco (Spartacus, Pasquali e

C., 1913) and Quo Vadis? (Cines, 1913), as was the

city of Rome more generally, both as ancient impe-

rial capital and as center of the new State.29

Signifi-

cantly, when filmmaker, inventor, and Cines

founder Filoteo Alberini experimented with 70mm

panoramic views in 1918, he included the cele-

brated visual cliché of the Colosseum in his

Cinepanoramica – a perfect, and very Italian,

matching of cinematographic innovation with a

long-standing visual topos.30 Venice too provided

another highly recognizable encyclopedia of pain-

terly traditions, beginning with the 18th

century

works of Gaspar Van Wittel and Canaletto and,

later, countless topographical panoramas. The Ali-

nari codification of this tradition was part of a

photographic imagery that included tourist photo-

graphs, postcards, and Lumière filmed trave-

logues.31

In addition to urban landmarks, the Alinari

devoted several views to natural wonders, for in-

stance the Tivoli waterfalls, which had already been

the subject of earlier daguerreotypes and photo-

graphs. Within a few decades the same views

reappeared in such film travelogues as Le cascate

di Tivoli [Waterfalls of Tivoli, Cines, 1906] and the

two 1909 series titled Cascate d’Italia (Waterfalls of

Italy), produced by the Milanese SAFFI-Comerio

(four episodes) and the Roman Pineschi firm (three

episodes).

The introduction of gelatin dry plates during

the 1880s (replacing the laborious process of pre-

paring negatives by applying liquid emulsion to

glass plates) rapidly accelerated the process of

photographic impression. Instantaneous photog-

raphy became the approach favored by amateurs,

often aristocrats, who spontaneously captured the

world as it appeared “live” rather than creating

polished reproductions, designed according to

professional visual parameters linked to pictur-

esque, artistic, or monumental styles. Instead, they

experimented with catching the world, “live”, in its

tracks.32 Consider the work of three Milanese pho-

tographers whose work nicely dovetailed with the

two media: Giuseppe Beltrami (1853–1935), who

“used the instantaneous photography as if it were

a Lumière view before the emergence of cinema,

while remaining exclusively a photographer”, and

who inaugurated a visual atlas of the city’s different

social classes;33

Italo Pacchioni (1872–1940), who

practiced filmmaking between 1896 and 1902, but

remained primarily a photojournalist until his death;

and Luca Comerio (1878–1940), photographer of

the famous food riots of 1898 in Milan, founder in

1907 of Luca Comerio & C. (in 1908 known as

SAFFI-Comerio). Comerio was able to both photo-

graph and film the effects of the 1908 earthquake

in Messina and the Italian army’s activities during

the war in Libya (1911–1912), and the Great War

(1915–1918).34 Their work calls attention to the

cogent intermedial relationship between the imme-

diacy of turn-of-the-century photographic report-

age and Italian film production of the very early

period. It was a production that included early

travelogues, proto-documentaries, and filmed ac-

tualités that covered sport events, disasters, and

occurrences of historical significance. Their selec-

tion of noteworthy subjects and photogenic views

pointed to a visual patrimony shared with foreign

image-makers.

It was this convergence between Italian and

foreign ways of looking at and recording life in the

peninsula that made it quite easy for international

photographers and cameramen to produce widely

circulating images about Italy that combined older

visual frameworks with the immediacy of instanta-

neous photography. The Lumière case is the most

obvious, especially given the fact that the French

company’s dual activity in both photography and

filmmaking culminated in films that the Lumières

significantly referred to as “views” (vues).35

Lu-

mière’s agents and operators dominated the early

years of film exhibitions and filmmaking in Italy:

between 1896 and the early years of the 20th cen-

tury their actualités amounted to more than one

hundred and sixty films.36 Despite its cataloguing

impulse, Lumière’s Italian illustrative project re-

vealed choices of touristic and political relevance

consonant with the firm’s ambitions for interna-

tional cultural appeal and official recognition. Their

favorite subjects were military parades, royal cere-

monies, sport events, local customs, urban views

and natural landscapes.37

As Lumière’ hegemony in Italy began to fade

by the second half of 1897, other foreign operators

distinguished themselves with Italian photogenic

subjects, including the British photographers Birt

Acres and Henry Short, W.K.L. Dickson, the Eng-

lish-educated amateur photographer and former

chief experimenter at Edison, and the British film

pioneers Charles Urban and George Albert

Smith.38 The co-optation of Italy’s reigning political

and religious personalities, military parades, and

renowned natural and architectural attractions was


part of the strategy to endow cinema with a pres-

tige that had worked quite well for photography.

For Italians, the fashion for patriotic history

and symbols fostered the perception of the film

medium as an instrument of national self-explora-

tion and display, not simply as a foreign purveyor

of famous and exotic attractions. Between 1896

and 1905, photographer-film exhibitors like Fe-

licetti, Alberini, Pacchioni, Calcina and Omegna,

Remondini, Troncone, and Lucarelli produced

about one hundred and sixty film titles – a figure

identical to the number of Italian views manufac-

tured by the Lumière firm alone. Italian production,

however, was dwarfed in comparison with the more

than twenty-five hundred foreign travelogues and

actualités that circulated in Italy during the same

period.39 Such disproportion calls attention to Ital-

ian film culture’s international character and ad-

dress, which obviously did not disappear after

1905, at the beginning of national industrial pro-

duction.

Similarly to the historical film, views of South-

ern Italian backwardness featured intermedial and

international characters. The photographic styles

that pervaded Southern Italian photographic and

film representations combined the lifelike immedi-

acy of instantaneous photographic reproductions

and actualités – often linked to ethnographic vo-

yeurism and natural disasters – with the cultural

mediation of known iconographic models. Photo-

graphic historian Roberta Valtorta has noted, “early

Italian social photography does not develop a

straightforward documentary approach, does not

narrate actual daily life, but rather looks for the

effect of poverty and the picturesque and thus it

appears to stage the ‘type’”.40

Contrasting with the embalming effect com-

mon in monumental views of Rome and Northern

Italy, the privileged poetic approach was the pic-

turesque mode, which relied on the trope of the

inexorable passing of time and on effects of charm-

ing backwardness. Southern views insisted on the

plebeian and melodramatic realism of lively crowds

and posed idle individuals in place of the architec-

tural significance of solitary buildings in deserted

squares. In poetic partnership with Italian painters,

a foreign legion of photographers based in Naples

and Sicily, including the Swiss Giorgio Conrad, the

French Alphonse Bernoud, and the German Gior-

gio Sommer, had also been particularly influential

in the realist articulation of characteristic land-

scape views (the Neapolitan bay, the erupting Ve-

suvius, the ancient ruins of Pompeii, and Sicily’s

archaeological sites) and sketches of local cus-

toms.41 Plein air views of local life shot on location

resonated with realist and socially-engaged poet-

ics, pervading the wider contexts of journalism,

literature, theatre, and popular culture, and insist-

ing on a novel proximity to the lives of the destitute

classes. The film productions that addressed these

themes often showcased the dark alleys of Italian

cities while nevertheless still being carefully cho-

reographed. They were known as dal vero, as they

walked a fine line between disturbing reportages of

widespread wretchedness and ethnographic field

work. For Naples, the titles of Neapolitan actualités

include Gita a Napoli [Excursion to Naples, Filoteo

Alberini, 1906], Napoli e il Vesuvio (Life and Cus-

toms of Naples, Ambrosio, 1907), and Sorrento

(Picturesque Sorrento, Cines, 1912). In the mid-

1910s the two most important fiction films to cap-

ture this poetics were Sperduti nel buio [Lost in

Darkness, Morgana Film, 1914] and Assunta Spina

(Caesar Film, 1915), two intense melodramas un-

folding in the shadow of the iconic Vesuvius and

preceding many vernacular productions released

in the 1920s for the local and immigrant markets.

The situation in Sicily was to some extent very

much comparable. In the 1860s, foreign and Italian

photographers, both professionals and amateurs,

captured images of monuments of Arab architec-

ture, archaeological sites of Greek temples, and

picturesque views of Mt. Etna, the Sicilian coast-

line, and local populations.42 Their work provided

the visual language for such tourist travelogues as

Sicilia illustrata (Sicily Illustrated, Ambrosio, 1907),

as well as for the sensational reportages about

earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that from 1906

onward seemed to confirm the old Grand Tour’s

trope of Sicily as an isolated, underdeveloped, and

somewhat ill-fated region, for which natural disas-

ter and heightened human drama exemplified re-

alism.

Following the devastating December 1908

earthquake that struck Messina and part of South-

ern Calabria and caused about 100,000 casualties,

all the major Italian film companies (Ambrosio,

Itala, Cines, Saffi-Comerio, and the Milanese Croce

& C.) and several American ones (including Vita-

graph, Kleine-Gaumont, and Lubin) sent operators

on location.43 These films circulated widely and

when a year later, in September 1909, Mt. Etna

erupted, the “catastrophic film” had become a

successful genre, concocting a form of “pathetic

realism” (from pathos) that was not limited to films

dal vero, but that included such tear-jerking melo-

dramas of loss and romantic rescue as Dalla pietà

all’amore (Il disastro di Messina) (A Drama at Mess-

ina; a.k.a. Pity and Love; Saffi-Comerio, 1909) and

L’orfanella di Messina (Orphan of Messina; Am-

brosio, 1909).44 In contrast to writers from Naples

and its surrounding region, however, the Sicilians


Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana, the key expo-

nents of the literary genre known as verismo, were

unwilling to play a direct role in the adaptations of

their work.45

The tourist paradigm did not disappear with

the inception of Fascism and its increasing control

of visual communications. The creation in 1924 of

the Istituto L.U.C.E. (L’Unione Cinematografica

Educativa) institutionalized not just the tourist para-

digm, but also, and beyond that, the exchanges

between still and motion pictures. In addition to its

known output of documentary films and newsreels,

the Istituto L.U.C.E. (commonly referred to as “Isti-

tuto Luce”) was entrusted with systematically col-

lecting and classifying Italy’s past and present life

for the Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale. For in-

stance, in 1927, the Ministry of Education donated

to the Istituto Luce the entire photographic reposi-

tory of the General Management of Antiquities and

Fine Arts, about 35,000 negatives. From that mo-

ment, the Istituto Luce became the key repository

of the state’s photographic archive, which owed a

good deal to the Alinari model.

The purpose of these efforts was to control

the nation’s image and, more pressingly, to docu-

ment events of national significance that could be

distributed to the national and international press,

ministries, and various domestic institutions com-

pelled to record their own activities under the Fas-

cist regime.46

The challenge that the Istituto Luce

faced was the reconciliation of the rhetoric of time-

lessness, which pervaded the representations of

the nation’s cities, villages, and countryside, with

the idea that Fascism constituted a force of mod-

ern change. The regime’s plan to control news and

visual records about government actions had be-

come both necessary and challenging after the

events of the Libyan campaign in 1912 and, even

more pressingly, during World War I.

Research on the representation of the colo-

nial campaigns in Northern Africa involving post-

cards, photography, and films has recently made

outstanding progress,47 even though a historiog-

raphical and disciplinary chasm between photo-

graphic and filmic evidence related to the war

events of 1912 and 1915–1918 still largely per-

sists.48 A number of initiatives, combining rare

visual and critical materials, are also bringing some

of these films to light and revealing the historical

interplay between private companies and state

control.49

During the Great War the issue of jour-

nalistic evidence fostered a new relationship be-

tween visual culture and Italy’s institutional power,

from the Government to the Army. The public fame

that Luca Comerio enjoyed for his photographic

and filmic coverage of Italy’s Royals and the con-

troversies some of his war actualités caused, par-

ticularly when showing dead soldiers as in Dentro

la trincea [Inside the Trenches, Pathé Film/Sezione

Cinematografica dell’Esercito Italiano, 1917], con-

stitute two sides of the same phenomenon. They

reveal the politicization, and related urge for insti-

tutional regulation, of photographic evidence,

whether concerning still or motion pictures.50

It was

a politicization that largely involved forms of gov-

ernment control that, for instance, materialized

through the 1916 constitution of the Sezione Cine-

matografica del Regio Esercito, the sole authority

to oversee the war’s film coverage. Still, even when

in presence of private enterprises, the state’s sym-

bols and iconic representatives were ever pre-

sent.51

Production II: cinema and thephotographic portrait

The emergence of the photographic portrait in Italy

is as much indebted to such older forms of image-

making as painting and sculpture (and to their

centuries-old fondness for remarkable historical

figures) as to the format’s new scientific and com-

mercial appeal. Portrait-making, in fact, stood in

between processes of visual individualization and

typologization. Beginning in the second half of the

19th

century, the reification of human differences

into measurable types, first separating the “aver-

age man” from the “degenerate” or the “pathologi-

cal subject”, turned to photography as uniquely

capable of recording abnormality and, particularly,

its human face. The language of this physiognomic

evidence was known as phrenology.52 When the

emerging field of Italian anthropology addressed

the racial diversity of the newly formed Italian state,

its adoption of the ideological dichotomy of nor-

mality vs. degeneration relied on the photographic

readability of phrenological evidence.

The epicenter of the encounter between an-

thropology and photography was Florence, head-

quarters of the Alinari and Brogi photographic firms

and, since 1869, home to Italy’s first academic post

in anthropology, held by physician and ethnologist

Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910). After 1871, the

Tuscan city also housed the National Museum of

Anthropology and the Italian Society of Anthropol-

ogy and Ethnology (both founded by Mantegazza).

Mantegazza was knowledgeable of Darwin’s theo-

ries, but unaware of his photographic experiments;

beginning with an 1869 study of Sardinian physi-

ognomies, he developed an intense appreciation

of photography as a “precious aid” due to its

evidentiary objectivity.53 Later, he launched a na-

tional contest of “photographic physiognomies”,


aimed at capturing shared typologies of “emo-

tional portraits”, which culminated in the 1876 At-

lante delle espressioni del dolore (Atlas of

Expressions of Pain), featuring photographs by the

celebrated Florentine Giacomo Brogi.54 His unsci-

entific and yet influential conclusion was that pho-

tography could uniquely capture individual

expressions that, when viewed as physiognomic

residues, revealed distinct racial patterns and iden-

tities. “Who would ever dare to speak of Italian

expression”, he boasted in his classic Fisonomia e

Mimica (Physiognomy and Expression), “while it is

so different at Naples and at Milan, at Cagliari and

at Turin?”55 In a telling convergence of photogra-

phy and anthropology, Mantegazza was elected

president of the newly formed Italian Photographic

Society in 1889.56

Following his lead, the other key exponent of

Italian anthropology, Cesare Lombroso (who, like

Mantegazza, never took scientific photographs)

focused his attention on the classification of pho-

tographs that were donated to his Museo di Antro-

pologia Criminale (Museum of Criminal

Anthropology).57

Lombroso grouped the images

under various rubrics (juridical, psychiatric, medi-

cal, racial, and social) and used them to visualize

highly racialized deviant patterns shared by Sardin-

ian subjects, chiefs of Camorra bands, and South-

ern Italian brigands, all included in a special Album

dei delinquenti (Album of Criminals). His ambitious

scientific purpose, in fact, was to illustrate the

deviant atavism of anthropological types, not of

individuals. The problem was that photography’s

own taxonomic endeavors were actually impaired

by the medium’s “extremely individualizing proc-

ess”, as Tom Gunning put it.58 Metric photography,

that is the kind of photographic recording that

allowed quantitative measurement of an event or

an object, could only make full sense within

broader narrative accounts, whether sociological

or ecological, that combined mute scientific accu-

racy with eloquent literary descriptions. If anthro-

pology and the social sciences learned from the

literary and visual habitus of narrative charac-

terization to draw coherent “racial types”, “scien-

tific” notions of racial inheritability became features

of literary, theatrical, and cinematic charac-

terizations. By the same token, within ever more

cogent publicity narratives, the photographic por-

traits of film actors and actresses, whether taken

on a film set (film still, or foto di scena) or in a

photographic studio, expanded the dramaturgic

relevance of cinematic close-ups to broader pub-

licity narratives.59 Before moving on to the photo-

graphic portrait’s vast commercial appeal

(significant both in and of itself and in relation to

cinema’s on- and off-screen expressions, such as

newspapers ads, periodical illustrations, and post-

cards), it is productive to look at the anti-mimetic

strand of photographic portraiture embodied by

figures revolving around Futurism. The Italian

avant-garde’s uneasy view of photography – par-

ticularly with regard to the portrait format – played

an influential role in Italy’s experimental filmmaking

during the 1910s and early 1920s.

A discussion of Futurism involves three of the

four Bragaglia brothers, known for their experimen-

tal work in photography, film, and theater. It is worth

recalling that two of the brothers, Arturo and Carlo

Ludovico, worked profitably in photographic por-

traiture. By 1915, film periodicals were often pub-

lishing portraits of film stars, including Soava

Gallone, Pina Menichelli, Lyda Borelli, Leda Gys,

and Italia Almirante Manzini.60 Together with his

older brother Anton Giulio, Arturo and Carlo

Ludovico formed the Casa d’Arte Bragaglia, which

was a workshop, exhibition space, and photo-

graphic atelier. The income of the Casa d’Arte

came primarily from professional portraits. While

most of the Bragaglia portraits followed the stylistic

conventions of the time, the brothers’ avant-garde

experience often added a dimension of spiritual

and surreal suggestiveness to their portraits.

The Italian cultural context informing their ex-

perimental work was one in which photography, by

virtue of its alleged intimacy with the vulgarity of the

real, struggled to gain the respect that was granted

to older visual arts. The only sanctioned possibility

was pictorialism, the privileging of a painterly mode

for photography under the iconographic influence

of established artists (i.e., Giovanni Segantini, Gi-

useppe Pellizza da Volpedo, and Giovanni Boldini).

The pressing assumption of this reasoning was

that only the imitation of older models could enable

any artistic transfiguration of the real.61

Furthering the principles of the Manifesto of

Futurist Painting (1910), Bergsonian philosophy,

and the articulations of dynamism that Filippo Tom-

maso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, and Francesco

Balilla Pratella had applied to poetry, painting, and

music between 1911 and 1912, Anton Giulio and

Arturo Bragaglia developed a series of experi-

ments based on the photographic overexposure of

individual subjects’ faces and gestures, caught in

movement and close view. The Bragaglias de-

scribed their experiments as Fotodinamismo futur-

ista (Futurist Photodynamism), gave public talks,

exhibited their photographs, and published essays

on the topic, including a 1913 booklet bearing that

very title.62 Such writings help explain their goal of

poetically expressing life’s transcendental move-

ment rather than embalming immanent reality with


instantaneous photography’s cadaveric reproduc-

tions. Further, the emphasis on capturing random

human movements and facial expressions distin-

guished the work of the Bragaglias from the experi-

ments of Etienne-Jules Marey who aimed instead

at the systematic analysis and complete reconsti-

tution of human gestures. While the Bragaglias

viewed Marey’s work as primarily scientific, they

touted their own experimental photographs as ar-

tistic inasmuch as they de-materialized the expres-

sive and ever-moving gestures of their human

subjects.63 As Anton Giulio made clear in a number

of writings, their ultimate goal was to force photog-

raphy to lift the veil of objective and naturalistic

reality and instead reproduce what “superficially

cannot been seen”, what is “unspeakable and un-

catchable”, which does not at all coincide with

bodies in motion, but with the very “concept: the

general idea, of movement”.64

The Bragaglias sought the approval and cele-

bration of Futurism, but they never received it.

Instead, led by Boccioni, the Futurists’ reaction

was harsh and polemical, and ultimately hindered

the development of a modern photographic culture

in Italy. In an article appearing in the Florentine

literary periodical Lacerba in 1913, Balla, Boccioni,

Carrà, Russolo, Severini, and Soffici vehemently

divorced the fotodinamica from their own artistic

efforts, claiming that the Bragaglia brothers’ ex-

periments pertained solely to the domain of pho-

tography and not of Futurism’s experiments. “Such

purely photographic research has nothing to do

either with the plastic dynamism that we invented

or with any research on dynamism in the realm of

painting, sculpture, or architecture”.65

Only in 1930

did the Futurists embrace photography through

the Manifesto della fotografia futurista, written by

Marinetti and Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni).66

After founding the avant-garde production

company Novissima-Film in 1916, Anton Giulio

directed two films, Thaïs (1916), named after the

film’s leading actress, the Russian singer Thaïs

Galitzky, and showcasing set decorations by Fu-

turist artist Enrico Prampolini, and Perfido Incanto

[Perfidious Enchantment, 1917], subtitled Mimo-

dramma di moderna magia (Mimodrama of mod-

ern magic), also starring Galitzky. By then,

however, he was operating independently of the

Futurists, and these two films, long presumed lost,

had an unsuccessful circulation and very little im-

pact on Italian film culture.67

The failure of Fotodinamismo futurista to re-

ceive the endorsement and the support of Futurism

is indicative of the pre-eminent Italian avant-garde

movement’s prolonged uneasiness toward the

photographic medium. Just as the Bragaglias were

publicly aspiring to position their photographic ex-

periments at the heart of the Futurist mission, Boc-

cioni was describing cinema as an “anti-artistic

manifestation” in his 1913 manifesto Fondamento

plastico della scultura e pittura futuriste.68 Three

years later, in the Cinematografia futurista-Mani-

festo of 1916, Marinetti and others proposed that

the cinema be emancipated from all other visual

arts and, most cogently, from the medium’s imita-

tive automatisms in order to align itself with the

expressive freedom of music and poetry. Still,

when compared to how French, German, and So-

viet avant-garde movements fueled successful ex-

perimentation and regeneration in their respective

national film industries, Futurism’s initial uneasi-

ness toward the “mechanical arts” constituted a

significant factor in the aesthetic impasse of Italian

silent cinema.69

What Italian culture acknowledged as pho-

tography’s key feature was its instantaneous cap-

turing of the world. Rather than stimulating

productive, but constructive reactions, particularly

among avant-garde artists, the allegedly immanent

immediacy of photographic expression found ma-

jor and even inventive use in photojournalism and,

Fig. 1. AntonGiulio Bragaglia,

Un gesto del capo[Movement of the

Head]; [MotionStudy of Artist’s

Head]. 1911.Gelatin silver print,

178 x 127 mm(7 x 5 in.).

[The MetropolitanMuseum of Art

(New York),Gilman Collection,

Gift of The HowardGilman

Foundation, 2005(2005.100.246).

Image copyright ©The MetropolitanMuseum of Art.

Image source: ArtResource, NY.

Reproduction ©2013 Artists

Rights Society(ARS), New York /

SIAE, Rome.]


especially, in film publicity. It is here that a most

productive, though under-researched, conver-

gence of photography and cinema unfolded.

Circulation

Both grand ateliers and individual photographers,

whether operating on the basis of commercial or

purely amateur interests, contributed to the suc-

cess of the phenomenon of the carte de visite, or

calling cards – small-size photographs exchanged

among friends, visitors, or, even admirers if the

subject was a famed person.70 Photographing a

celebrity was not a novelty in turn-of-the-20th

-cen-

tury Europe. It was a practice that Gaspard-Félix

Tournachon, best known as Nadar, had mastered

in France since the mid-1800s, with photographs

of such iconic figures as Victor Hugo, Charles

Baudelaire, Claude Manet, and Sarah Bernhardt,

which he then exhibited publicly or published in his

magazine Paris Photographe. Similarly, in the

1860s the Alinaris were selling portraits of famous

individuals, including writers like Vittorio Alfieri, mu-

sicians like Giacomo Puccini, or state personalities

associated with the Risorgimento, including Gi-

useppe Mazzini, Nino Bixio, and Giuseppe

Garibaldi.71 Initially, for this form of close view, the

Alinari did not show much aesthetic inventiveness:

an obvious uniformity pervaded their photographs.

The subject appeared in the center, photographed

against a grey background with a traditional fill-

light effect. Such a pervasive adherence to official

convention declined only in the 1890s, with the

emergence of new types of celebrities and forms

of image consumption (illustrated periodicals and

postcards) and the rise of new ideas about pho-

tography’s artistic merits. The photographic por-

traits of stage actresses Eleonora Duse and Emma

Gramatica, composer Giacomo Puccini, and

painter Giovanni Fattori, for instance, revealed a

pictorialist influence that resulted in highly stylized

portraits.72 The illustrated periodicals that flour-

ished at the turn-of-the century, particularly La

Domenica del Corriere and La lettura, began popu-

larizing portraits of a broader range of famous

individuals, particularly those associated with cur-

rent events and reputable entertainments. The ap-

proach adopted in these images was artistic and

evocative, resulting in an “evanescence [that] not

only rendered the subject more mysterious but

also took away skin wrinkles and imperfections, like

a chemical peel”.73 After the turn of the century,

stylized photographs of theatrical stars were exhib-

ited in enlarged format, notably at the 1906 Inter-

national Exposition in Milan and in such specialized

periodicals as Il Dilettante di Fotografia, Il Progresso

Fotografico, and La Fotografia Artistica.74

By the late 19th century, opera and, to an even

greater extent, theater, were the main domains of

Italy’s growing celebrity culture and its increasingly

theatricalized national public life. The Genovese

photographer Giovan Battista Sciutto revolution-

ized the iconography of stage performers by pho-

tographing stage diva Eleonora Duse not only in

traditional studio portraits, but also on stage, as the

memorable interpreter of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s

plays. The theatrical settings of his photographs

complicated her portraits’ mode of address and

spectatorial positioning by providing consumers

with a unique proximity to the physical contours of

both the diva’s actual body and her famous stage

roles – a practice that had begun with opera sing-

ers.75

By the time Duse retired from the stage in

1909, her iconic photographs provided a model for

the even more pervasive phenomenon of film star-

dom. By then, a number of ateliers had begun to

specialize in producing photographs of stage and,

soon, film stars.76 Their impact was extraordinary.

Film stills, postcards, brochures, posters, and illus-

trated periodicals spread film stars’ appeal beyond

the movie theatre and into the individual private

spaces of their fans’ domestic lives. These photo-

graphs might represent both a scene from a film or

just a pose, and could be shot on a film set or in a

photographic studio. Film stills, not to be confused

with frame enlargements, consisted of photo-

graphs taken on the set, most often during shoot-

ing breaks and thus after the completion of a

scene, so as to repeat its most significant mo-

ments. Their photographic quality was different

from frame enlargements: harsh lighting contrasts

were avoided in favor of a recurring medial tonality

that emphasized the performers’ poses and faces

to enhance their individual recognition as actors

and/or characters and highlight the film’s diegetic

space. In the history of optical entertainments,

scholars have often described film stills as a devel-

opment of Victorian life model slides, which were

photographs of performers in diegetically signifi-

cant poses, mostly within moralistic tales, that were

projected through magic lanterns.77 If life model

slides were a genre mainly adopted by religious or

moral societies aimed at the education of the popu-

lar classes for the eradication of their social ills (i.e.,

poverty, family abuse, alcoholism), the successive

iterations of film stills belonged to consumerism’s

publicity goals.

Lyda Borelli, for instance, was a favorite sub-

ject for several professional photographers and

printing firms variously associated with film public-

ity, including Varischi Artico e C. (Milan), Attilio


Badodi, Ugo Bettini, Riccardo Bettini, Alfredo

Pinto, Arnaldo Chierichetti, Studio C. Chierichetti

(Milan), G.B. Falci (Milan), Eugenio Fontana, and

Fototecnico Giuseppe Vettori & Compagni (Bolo-

gna).78 One could single out Badodi and the even

more famous Florentine Mario Nunes Vais, given

how their photographs of stage and film stars,

including Ermete Novelli, Ermete Zacconi,

Leopoldo Fregoli, Pina Menichelli, and Tullio

Carminati (winner of a Hollywood contest to re-

place Valentino), contributed to upgrading photo-

graphic portraits to a status symbol for the subject

and an exchange commodity for the consumer.79

Borelli had become famous as the winner of a

national contest for Italy’s most beautiful woman

and in mid-1908 L’Illustrazione Italiana had cele-

brated her in a one-page article, entitled “Le artiste

drammatiche”, consisting of a few lines and a giant

photograph of the actress by the Milanese studio

of Varischi & Artico.80 Several photographs of

Borelli often made use of foto flou effects and

embodied a pictorialist style that, never fading in

Italy’s interwar photographic culture, anticipated

and continuously sustained her performative

glamour.81

Photography operated in dialogue with past

and contemporary forms of image-making. Ivo

Blom has eloquently shown this intermedial trajec-

tory in an essay on the relationships among painter

Cesare Tallone, leading studio photographer

Emilio Sommariva, and Borelli.82 In the early 1910s,

Borelli consented to be the subject of a painting by

Tallone, resulting in a grand Klimtian portrait that

framed her in full figure with her arms stretched

backwards as if welcoming the praises of her ador-

ing audience. The portrait achieved great popular-

Fig. 2 (left).Giovan Battista

Sciutto, EleonoraDuse nel ruolo di

Monna Vanna[Eleonora Duse in

the Role of MonnaVanna], ca.1904.

Gelatin silver print,240 x 183 mm

(9.44 x 7.20 in.).[Courtesy ofFondazione

Giorgio Cini,Fondo EleonoraDuse (Venice).]

Fig. 3 (right). “Leartiste

drammatiche:Lyda Borelli”,L’Illustrazione

Italiana 305, no.25(21 June 1908):

599. Photographyby Varischi &

Artico (Milan).[Courtesy ofBiblioteca di

Archeologia eStoria dell’Arte

(Rome).]

Fig. 4. TullioCarminati, undated

postcard.Manufacturer:Attilio Badodi

(Milan).[Author’s

Collection.]


ity once Sommariva captured it in a 1911 photo-

graph, entitled Lyda Borelli nello studio di Cesare

Tallone (Female Portrait. Lyda Borelli in the Studio

of Cesare Tallone), that included the artwork, its

painter and Borelli striking the same pose painted

by Tallone.83

Sommariva presented his photo-

graph, together with five other portraits of Borelli,

at the Esposizione and Concorso Internazionale di

Fotografia, held in Turin in 1911. Borelli’s collabo-

ration with Sommariva originated a popular series

of postcards, probably manufactured in Som-

mariva’s own studio, and inspired the photogra-

pher’s work with other actresses of Italian cinema,

including Elena Makowska and Diana Karenne.84

At the release of Ma l’amore mio non muore

(Love Everlasting, Film Artistica “Gloria”, 1913), the

film that launched both Borelli and the diva film

genre, her past photographic representations pro-

vided widely recognizable paratexts. Partly set in a

theater dressing room, the film featured Borelli

wearing the negligée she had worn in Sommariva

photographs (and, originally, in Pierre Berton and

Charles Simon’s stage play Zazà). In the play within

the film, she appeared onstage in the black night-

gown that had made her famous in Wilde’s Salomé,

seen in countless photographs and postcards,

while her gestures addressing the theater audi-

ence within the film recalled Tallone’s painting and

Sommariva’s aforementioned photograph.85

The case of Borelli and other divas reveals the

significance of what Dario Reteuna has described

as “paper cinema” (cinema di carta) – namely the

practice, in the words of Oliver Lugon, of “rein-

trodu[cing] stillness, reflexive pauses, and concen-

tration within the elusive continuity of film”.86

It

consisted of the all-too-often overlooked phe-

nomenon of visual popularization of film narratives

and performers, whether in photographic or litho-

graphic terms, through postcards, brochures,

posters, and illustrated articles and novelizations.

Fig. 5 (left). PinaMenichelli,undated postcard.Manufacturer:Giuseppe Vettori(Bologna).[Author’sCollection.]

Fig. 6 (right).Maria Jacobini,undated postcard,Manufacturer:[Riccardo] Bettini(Rome).[Author’sCollection.]

Fig. 7. EmilioSommariva, LydaBorelli nello studiodi Cesare Tallone(Lyda Borelli in theStudio of CesareTallone), 1911.Gelatine silverbromide paper,225 x 236 mm(8.85 x 9.29 in).[Courtesy ofBibliotecaNazionaleBraidense (Milan),Fondo Sommariva.]


The still limited, but growing literature on these

paratextual materials exposes the network of ma-

terial practices and industrial activities surrounding

the film industry.87 From an archeological stand-

point, these photographic repertoires often provide

unique sources of visual information for lost films

or sequences.

Postcards are not the only exemplars of these

intermedial convergencies. Another publicity vehi-

cle that made use of printed frame enlargements,

studio photographs, and stills of film stars was the

brochure. Distributed during premieres and of-

fered to lure distributors, the brochure was most

often designed and manufactured by producers.

In a few cases, distributors themselves manufac-

tured brochures for their most selected audiences.

Consisting of four to six photographs taken on the

set and/or in photographic studios, the brochure

featured suggestive written texts that tied all the

images together in a comprehensive narrative. Af-

ter 1910, the brochure represented a specific and

autonomous form of publicity material that was

more adaptable than the variously sized posters

and visually richer than the individual postcard,

while still encompassing the communicative

strengths of these other formats.88

Next to the brochure were also the publicity

poster and the advertising insert. While posters of

Italian cinema in general have received a good deal

of critical attention, film posters of the silent period

have not been the subject of extensive research –

even though many are extant. Posters, particularly

those of large size, were mostly hand-made illus-

trations by established artists or professionals

rather than blown-up prints of photographs.89 Ac-

tor and director Amleto Palermi wrote about the

importance of large posters in modern life, particu-

larly the ones resulting from hand-made illustra-

tions that artists realized from photographs of key

film scenes.90 Inextricably linked to the poster was

the advertising insert, which since the mid-1910s

began to take up fully half the number of pages of

such periodicals as La Vita Cinematografica, known

for its richly illustrated two-page inserts, and Il

Corriere Cinematografico-Letterario Artistico Illus-

trato. These inserts promised exhibitors a publicity

package made up of posters and photographs of

different sizes.91

Moving from outright publicity to criticism,

one must register the emergence of the illustrated

article during the same period. The phenomenon

apparently began in Italy around 1912, when the

Fig. 8. EmilioSommariva, Lyda

Borelli, 1911.Gelatine silver

bromide paper,252 x 116 mm

(9.92 x 4.56 in).[Courtesy of

BibliotecaNazionale

Braidense (Milan),Fondo

Sommariva.]

Fig. 9. EmilioSommariva, Lyda

Borelli, 1911.Gelatine silver

bromide paper,185 x 125 mm

(7.28 x 4.92 in).[Courtesy of

BibliotecaNazionale

Braidense (Milan),Fondo

Sommariva.]


founder of La Fotografia Artistica, Annibali

Cominetti, published an article praising the Am-

brosio film company. Noteworthy was the fact that

the article included nine photographs from six Am-

brosio films.92 In subsequent issues, up until the

summer of 1916 (less than a year before it ceased

to exist), La Fotografia Artistica published seventy-

seven articles on both film technology and aesthet-

ics, variously illustrated with frame-enlargements

and stills from film scenes, each accompanied by

a caption detailing and expanding upon the film’s

title.93 What seems glaringly absent by today’s

standards are the names of the photographers –

although Reteuna suggests that these anonymous

photographers were Roberto Omegna, Am-

brosio’s scientific director, who had worked in the

early 1900s as a portrait-photographer, and Otta-

viano Ecclesia.94 Omegna’s dual role, as scientific

director and photographer, was entirely consistent

with the practices of the Italian film industry before

the systematic division of labor, which occurred

only in the early 1930s when producer Stefano

Pittaluga introduced a modern organization of

labor.

The printing of film stills was an in-house affair

but could be outsourced to trusted, specialized

firms, such as the Foto Lux – Studio di Fotografia

e Cinematografia Artistica e Scientifica, active in

Turin since 1919, which worked with several com-

panies and advertised its services in the pages of

La Rivista Cinematografica.95 In addition to Turin,

the other major centers for the production of still

images were Naples and Milan. In the former

Southern Italian capital, the key periodical was

L’arte muta. Rassegna della vita cinematografica,

published since 1916, which relied on the photo-

graphic services of Francesco Paolo Michetti,

Pietro Scoppetta, and Vincenzo La Bella, among

others. In the Northern city, to make one example,

the authors of film stills for Milano Films were

Gioacchino Gengarelli, a professional photogra-

pher who moved to the film business in 1911 and

Luigi Fiorio, who started for Corona Films in 1913.

A significant early case of interaction between

photography and silent cinema was the publication

in 1913 of a luxury edition of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s

best-selling novel Quo Vadis? (Milan: F.lli Treves

Editori), which included seventy-eight illustrations

drawn from Cines’ filmic adaptation of a few

months before.96 Eventually the intersection of film

stills and motion pictures became an illustrated

literary genre, known at the time as Romanzo Film.

These narratives were published in dedicated pe-

riodicals, including Il Romanzo film (from 1920) and

Le Grandi Films (from 1926) – issued twice a month

by the Milanese publisher “Gloriosa” – Vitagliano.

From 1927 on, the same publisher produced

stand-alone illustrated novelizations of popular,

mostly foreign films, featuring about a dozen film

stills.97 These novelizations anticipated the photo-

romance or fotoromanzo, which, beginning in the

1930s, translated the stories of popular films into

sequences of still images narrativized by captions

and lines of dialogue.98

Finally, the convergence of celebrity culture

and photographic portraiture, perfected through-

out the 1910s and early 1920s enabled the theatri-

calization of political life that Mussolini would soon

fully embody. During Fascism, the photographic

archive of the Istituto Luce had a special section,

named “Personalità Ritratti” (Portraits Personali-

ties), which held the official portraits of the Duce

and other important figures that the LUCE regularly

sent to the press.99

The trajectory of our media-re-

lated discussion on still and motion pictures inter-

sects and joins here with the history of Italy’s

political life.

Conclusion

In a culture embedded with aestheticism, idealism,

and artistic transfiguration, photography’s realistic

renderings, in conjunction with its showcasing of

modern technological advancements, found a very

marginal place in Italian artistic culture – at least

until the 1930s. Throughout the silent period, main-

stream theoretical and critical reflections marginal-

ized photography as ancillary to the other arts and,

with a delay of a few decades, replicated Baude-

laire’s famous diatribe against photography, “The

Salon of 1859”. Specialized periodicals sought to

articulate a productive alignment between photog-

raphy and art, particularly the Turin-based La Foto-

grafia Artistica (1904–1916), the relatively short

publication life of which coincided almost exactly

with that of Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work

(1904–1917). Coincidences may end there,

though. Stieglitz’s conclusive emphasis on pho-

tography’s acquisition of full aesthetic inde-

pendence from the other arts, particularly painting,

did not find sustained equivalence in Italian dis-

course beyond a few isolated critical insights. Ital-

ian avant-garde movements were not much more

receptive. The dearth of a Futurist film production

may perhaps be linked to the Futurists’ failure to

place the photographic medium squarely in the

midst of their polemical reflections about traditional

art. In Italy, as a result, photography long remained

an artisanal craft and not necessarily a respected

profession.100

Placed outside of the scope of legiti-

mate artistic merits, it nonetheless found success-

ful applications as key evidence to the period’s


most popular narratives of social difference, an-

thropology and female stardom, contributing to the

pervasive glamorization of Southern criminals and

seductive actresses.

It wasn’t until the late 1920s, in the wake of

the work of Man Ray, Christian Schad, and Lázló

Moholy-Nagy, that the annual review Luci e ombre

(Turin, 1923–1934) began to widely propound the

notion that photography was a medium fully eman-

cipated from the dominion of other arts, particularly

painting. Still, beyond the appeal of these artistic

discussions, photography had already moved to

the center of Italy’s commercial and political life. In

the 1930s, photography entered the domain of

advertisement by becoming part of a whole visual

system that included typography and the graphic

arts in a single unit.101

Milan was the new center,

featuring an exceptional cast of characters and

initiatives: Dino Villani and his publishing house

L’Ufficio moderno e la pubblicità, Antonio Boggeri

and his graphic design firm Studio Boggeri (one of

the first ones in Italy to adopt photography for

advertising graphics), as well as Campo Grafico,

the leading printing, typography and graphic de-

sign journal. As art and photography historian

Carlo Bertelli famously noted, “In reality, the [ac-

tual] Italian avant-garde is the avant-garde of ap-

plied arts”.102 It should not be surprising then that

only in the early 1930s did a discussion of photog-

raphy as modern vision insisting upon a poetics of

abstraction and invention reach a wider cultural

audience. As other visual historians have long

noted, one of the turning points was a very influen-

tial 1932 essay, entitled “Discussion on the Art of

Photography”, that architect and industrial de-

signer Giò Ponti first published in a photographic

magazine Fotografia and quickly reprinted in Do-

mus, one of the leading architectural journals of the

time. “Photography is not always faithful to the way

we see the world because it consists of an inde-

pendent vision, abstract and inhuman”, Ponti

noted, before forcefully remarking: “How many

things today are presented to us, and therefore are,

only through the photographic image!”103

Acknowledgements: I wish to thank Richard Abel,Silvio Alovisio, Pierluigi Ercole, Luca Mazzei, andMatthew Solomon for cogent feedback on theessay. All its shortcomings are mine.

Notes1. André Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism”, in What is Cinema?, vol. 2, ed. and trans. Hugh Grey (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1971), 28n.

2. The quote is from Lamberto Vitali’s untitled essay included in Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale, Mario Nunes Vais fotografo (Florence: Centro Di,1974), n.p.

3. To various degrees this assumption pervades the rhetoric of several works, in Italy and abroad. In Italy, consider Maria Adriana Prolo, Storia del

cinema muto italiano, vol. 1 (Milan: Poligono, 1951); Giovanni Calendoli, Materiali per una storia del cinema italiano (Parma: Maccari Editore,1967), which actually devoted a few lines to the relationships between early Italian inventors and the Lumières’ photographic business; and RobertoPaolella, Storia del cinema muto (Naples: Giannini, 1956). Photography featured often in Eugenio Giovannetti’s Il cinema e le arti meccaniche

(Palermo: Sandron, 1930), a most interesting aesthetic treatise that spoke of cinematography as fotografia filmistica (filmic photography) (42).

4. The literature on the history of Italian photography is quite broad. Fundamental overviews are Piero Becchetti, Fotografi e fotografia in Italia

(1839–1880) (Rome: Quasar, 1978); Carlo Bertelli and Giulio Bollati, eds., Storia d’Italia. Annali 2. L’immagine fotografica, 1845–1945 (Turin:Einaudi, 1979); Marina Miraglia, “Note per una storia della fotografia italiana (1839–1911)”, in Storia dell’arte Italiana Einaudi, vol. 9, part 2 (Turin:Einaudi, 1981), 423–543; Paolo Costantini Italo Zannier, eds. Cultura fotografica in Italia. Antologia di testi sulla fotografia, 1839–1949 (Milan:Franco Angeli, 1985); Italo Zannier, Storia della fotografia italiana (Rome-Bari: Laterza 1986), Id., Segni di luce, 3 vols. (Ravenna: Longo, 1991–1993),and more recently the three volumes of Giovanni De Luna, Gabriele D’Autilia, and Luca Criscenti, eds., L’Italia del Novecento. Le fotografie e la

storia (Turin: Einaudi, 2005–2006). In English, see Maria Antonella Pelizzari, Photography and Italy (London: Reaktion Books, 2011). For an overviewof the Italian case in dialogue with Western photographic culture, see Ando Gilardi’s classic study, Storia sociale della fotografia (Milan: Mondadori,2000 [1976]). I will make reference to other key studies throughout the essay.

5. See SCMI/1, pp.3–25; and CMI/1, particularly chapters 1–2.

6. Michele Canosa, Giulia Carluccio, and Federica Villa, eds., Cinema muto italiano: tecnica e tecnologia. Vol.1, Discorsi, precetti, documenti and vol.

2, Brevetti, macchine, mestieri (Rome: Carocci, 2006), and Elena Dagrada, Elena Mosconi, and Silvia Paoli, eds., Moltiplicare l’istante: Beltrami,

Comerio e Pacchioni tra fotografia e cinema (Milan: Il Castoro, 2007). Without ambitions of argumentative cohesiveness, but visually stunning andextremely useful, is the exhibition catalog, Scritto con la luce. Un secolo di fotografia e di cinema in Italia, ed. Cesare Colombo (Milan: Electa,1987), with texts by Aldo Bernardini, Dario Reteuna, and Italo Zannier, among others. For more recent contributions, see Giovanni Fiorentino, “Dallafotografia al cinema”, SCM/5, 43–79, which looks at the transition as a whole, but does not enter, by design, into the specifics of the Italian context.On the same topic see also Giovanni Fiorentino, L’ Ottocento fatto immagine. Dalla fotografia al cinema, origini della comunicazione di massa

(Palermo: Sellerio, 2007), which unfortunately does not include a single image.

7. On the practical and critical role of amateur photographers in Italy, see De Luna, D’Autilia, Criscenti, eds., L’Italia del Novecento. Le fotografie e la

storia, vol. 3.


8. On this topic, see Italo Zannier’s fundamental Leggere la fotografia: le riviste specializzate in Italia, 1863–1990 (Rome: NIS, 1993).

9. Franco Prono, “Cinema/fotografia: il dibattito sulla tecnologia nelle riviste fotografiche italiane del primo Novecento,” in Cinema muto italiano: tecnica

e tecnologia, 1: 30–46, particularly 31. On these debates, see also two complementary essays, Alessandro Oldani, “Il dibattito sul cinema neicircoli e nelle riviste di fotografia a Milano e in Italia (1863–1917)”, and Mauro Giori, “La fotografia nella riviste di cinema italiane (1907–1918)”,in Moltiplicare l’istante, 113–124 and 125–138. See also the special issue of Comunicazioni Sociali, vol.26, no.1 (January–April 2004) devotedto “La civiltà delle machine. Il cinema italiano e le sue tecnologie” edited by Massimo Locatelli.

10. Brand, “La cinematografia artistica”, La Fotografia Artistica 9, no.2 (February 1912): 28; and Anonymous, “La cinematografia e i fotografi”, La

Fotografia Artistica 9, no.6 (June 1912): 96 – both quoted in Prono, “Cinema/fotografia”, 35.

11. See the essays by Silvio Alovisio and Mauro Giori (on discussions of technology and photography in early film periodicals) and the articles of theperiod examined by Marco Grifo (on film stock and color), Melita Mandalà (on lighting), and Valentino Rossetto (on filming and projection), includedin the first volume of Cinema muto italiano: tecnica e tecnologia. The volume ends with a wealth of bibliographic references (228–263). On artisticphotography in Italy, see Paolo Costantini and Italo Zannier, Luci ed ombre: Gli annuari della fotografia artistica italiana, 1923–1934 (Florence:Alinari, 1987) and Paolo Costantini, “La fotografia artistica”, 1904–1917. Visione italiana e modernità (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1990).

12. There are a few notable exceptions, which I will refer to later in the essay. A good place to start is always film archives’ photography collections.See for instance Roberta Basano’s invaluable “Le fotografie: Storia della collezione”, in Tracce: Documenti del cinema muto torinese nelle collezioni

del Museo Nazionale del Cinema, ed. Carla Cesena and Donata Pesenti Campagnoni (Milan: Il Castoro; Turin: Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 2007),147–153. The methodological challenge of a discussion of photography throughout the silent era is not just an Italian occurrence. Two excellentrecent works, Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c.1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), and Elizabeth W.Easton, ed., Snapshot. Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), mainly focus onturn-of-the-20th-century convergences.

13. For examples of broader theoretical discussions, see, among others, David Campany, Photography and Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2008);Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, eds., Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Eivind Rossaak, ed.,Between Stillness and Motion. Film, Photography, Algorithms (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011); and Laurent Guido and OlivierLugon, eds., Between Still and Moving Images (New Barnet, UK: John Libbey Publishing, 2012).

14. Bernardini has contributed to this initial convergence in a number of publications, from CMI/1, passim, and FDV, passim, to his latest “Fotograficineasti nel cinema italiano delle origini”, in Moltiplicare l’istante, 50–59.

15. In July 1899, Alberini patented a projector of his own invention, the Cinesigrafo, again without much success. For a list of Italian inventors ofcinematographic devices and materials limited to the period between 1898 and 1913, see Riccardo Redi, “Tecnologia rivisitata”, in La meccanica

del visibile. Il cinema delle origini in Europa, ed. Antonio Costa (Florence: La Casa Usher, 1983), 43–46; and Alberto Friedemann and Chiara Caranti,eds., Dizionario dei brevetti di cinema e fotografia rilasciati in Italia, 1894–1945 (Turin: Associazione F.E.R.T., 2006).

16. On his work, see José Pantieri, Filoteo Alberini: Pioniere del cinema italiano (Rome: M.I.C.S., 1994); Giovanna Lombardi, Filoteo Alberini. L’inventore

del cinema (Rome: Edizioni Arduino Sacco, 2008); and Alexandra Lalli, Innovazione tecnica e creatività di un pioniere italiano: Filoteo Alberini nel

cinema delle origini (Orte: Amministrazione Comunale, 2004). Within a perspective that places scientific research as the key impetus for thedevelopment of motion pictures, see the pages devoted to Filoteo Alberini and physiologist Osvaldo Polimanti in Virgilio Tosi, Cinema before

Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography (London: British Universities Film & Video Council, 2007 [1984]), 190–191.

17. Bernardini, “Fotografi cineasti nel cinema italiano delle origini”, 52.

18. For individual profiles, see Marucci Vascon Vitrotti, Un pioniere del cinema: Giovanni Vitrotti (Trieste: Settimana Internazionale del Cinema di Grado,1970); Virgilio Tosi, “Il pioniere Roberto Omegna (1876–1948)”, Bianco & Nero 40, no.3 (March 1979): 1–68; the special section on GiovanniVitrotti, inclusive of filmography, in Griffithiana nos. 26–27 (September 1986): 7–63; Carla Manenti, Nicolas Monti, Giorgio Nicodemi, eds., Luca

Comerio, fotografo e cineasta (Milan: Electa, 1979); Sarah Pesenti Campagnoni, Luca Comerio: notizie dal secolo scorso (BA thesis, University ofMilan, 2007); Paolo Pillitteri and Davide Mengacci, Luca Comerio: milanese. Fotografo, pioniere e padre del cinema italiano (Milan: Spirali, 2012);Livio Luppi, “Ritratto di un pioniere: Giuseppe Filippi”, in Cinema muto italiano (1905–1916), ed. Riccardo Redi (Rome: CNC Edizioni, 1991),11–32; Renato Bovani and Rosalia Del Porro, Il Grand Tour di Giuseppe Filippi in Toscana con il Cinématographe Lumière (Ghezzano, Pistoia: Felici,2007), and the aforementioned anthology, Moltiplicare l’istante. In English, see the short, corresponding entries in EEC.

19. Vittorio Martinelli, “L’uomo con la macchina da presa”, Griffithiana 9, nos. 26–27 (September 1986): 11–37.

20. Claudia Gianetto, Società Anonima Ambrosio: cinema muto nei documenti d’epoca. (Rome: Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia delCinema, 2002), 14–18 and Franco Prono, “Atti di nascita del cinema a Torino”, in Le fabbriche della fantasticheria. Atti di nascita del cinema a

Torino, ed. Ira Fabri (Turin: Aleph, 1993), 66–78.

21. For a discussion of this company and its financial documents, see Bernardini, “Fotografi cineasti nel cinema italiano delle origini”, 57.

22. For a broader discussion of this tourist gaze, in paintings, prints, photographs, and films, see Giorgio Bertellini, Italy in Early American Cinema:

Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), chapters 1 and 2.

23. Giulio Bollati, “Note su fotografia e storia”, in Bertelli and Bollati, L’immagine fotografica, 31.

24. For years the Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale was known as Fototeca Nazionale. In 2011 it reacquired its original denomination.

25. Roberta Valtorta, “L’incerta collocazione della fotografia nella cultura italiana”, in La Cultura Italiana, ed. Luigi Luca Cavalli Sforza, vol. 9, Musica,

spettacolo, fotografia, design, ed. Ugo Volli (Turin: UTET, 2009), 559–560ss.

26. Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, Gli Alinari (Florence: Alinari, 2003), 289, 303, and passim. Alinari greatly appreciated the work of Ferdinando Artaria, theMilanese publisher of engravings obtained from daguerreotypes, collected in Vues d’Italie d’après le Daguerréotype (1842–47) and sold all overEurope. As Marina Miraglia noted, the Vues d’Italie “inherited the various principles of the voyages pittoresques, that is, the iconic identification of


a city with distinct monumental and viewing stereotypes, the truthfulness to topographic reality, and the mobilization of exotic and picturesquestrategies”. Miraglia, Culture fotografiche e società a Torino 1839–1911 (Turin: Umberto Allemandi & C., 1990), 21. For a recent discussion, seeVincent Jolivet, Memorie del Grand Tour nelle fotografie delle collezioni Alinari (Florence: Alinari, 2006) and for examples and information in Italianand English see the firm’s excellent site, http://www.alinari.it/

27. On their visual poetics, see Quintavalle, Gli Alinari and, in English, Monica Maffioli, ed., Fratelli Alinari: Photographers in Florence (Florence: Alinari,2003).

28. With some significant disclaimers, the work of the Alinari could be compared to the nation-building and nation-preserving task of the French Mission

Héliographique of 1851, a most influential (and jingoistic) patrimonial survey sponsored by the French Commission des Monuments Historique.Cf. Anne de Mondenard, La mission héliographique: Cinq photographes parcourent la France en 1851 (Paris: Patrimoine – Monum, 2001). Whatthe Alinari also provided were also reproductions of Italian art works that eventually appeared in scholarly monographs, art periodicals or illustratedtextbooks. See Massimo Ferretti, Alessandro Conti, and Ettore Spalletti, “La documentazione dell’arte”, in Gli Alinari fotografi a Firenze 1852–1920

(Florence: Alinari, 1985), 101–174.

29. On the importance of locations for film narratives set during the Risorgimento, see Mario Musumeci and Sergio Toffetti, eds., Da “La presa di Roma”

a “Il piccolo garibaldino”: Risorgimento, massoneria e istituzioni: l’immagine della nazione nel cinema muto, 1905–1909/From “La Presa di Roma”

to “Il piccolo garibaldino”: the Risorgimento, Freemasonry and Institutions: Italy in Silent Films (1905–1909) (Rome: Gangemi, 2007).

30. Roberto Chiti, José Pantieri, and Paolo Popeschich, Almanacco del cinema muto italiano (Rome: CSCTV, 1988), 21.

31. On Venice’s dominant topographical paradigm, see Alberto Zotti Minici, “Venezia nell’iconografia degli spettacoli ottici”, in L’immagine di Venezia

nel cinema del Novecento, ed. Gian Piero Brunetta and Alessandro Faccioli (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2004), 59–74; andId., “Le traiettorie dello sguardo alle origini del cinema”, in Cinéma & Cie 9 (Fall 2007): 79–90. Particularly famous were the Lumière views ofVenice, with the “tracking shots” of the city’s architecture from moving gondolas, as in Panorama du Grand-Canal pris d’un bateau (1896). SeeMarco Bertozzi’s essay (#5) in this volume.

32. See Pelizzari, Photography and Italy, 64ss.

33. Elena Dagrada, “La seduzione del vero: genesi e risultato nella base fotografica dell’immagine filmica”, in Moltiplicare l’istante, 15. See alsoBeltrami’s biographical profile by Silvia Paoli in the same volume (147–151).

34. On Comerio as photographer and filmmaker, see Manenti, Monti, and Nicodemi, Luca Comerio, fotografo e cineasta and the “Apparati” section inMoltiplicare l’istante, 145–232.

35. For a list, perhaps incomplete, of the company’s “Italian views” listed in the official Catalog, see Michelle Aubert and Jean-Claude Seguin, eds.,La production cinématographique des Frères Lumière (Paris: BIFI, 1996), 321–350. On the vues Lumières as a genre, see Marco Bertozzi,L’immaginario urbano nel cinema delle origini. La veduta Lumière (Bologna: Clueb, 2001), 51ss; and Riccardo Redi, ed., Verso il centenario Lumière

(Rome: Di Giacomo, 1986).

36. CMIA, 153–165. On recent findings of other Lumière films about Italy, see Bernardini “Hors Catalogue: Lumière Films of Italy”, in 19th Pordenone

Silent Film Festival Catalogue (Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2000), 109–112.

37. The Lumière films expanded upon their established and influential practice of photographic reportages, of both touristic and ethnographic type,which later inspired Albert Kahn’s even more ambitious geopolitical encyclopedia, Les Archives de la Planète (1909–1931). On the Archives’ Italianphotographs, see Maria Teresa Grendi Hirsckoff, ed., L’Italia negli Archivi del Pianeta. Le Campagne Fotografiche di Albert Kahn, 1910–1929 (Milan:Electa, 1986).

38. On Dickson, see Paul Spehr, The Man Who Made Movies: W.K.L. Dickson (New Barnet, UK: John Libbey Publishing, 2008), particularly chapter28 (“The Pope and the Mutoscopes”).

39. For a filmographic study of Italian and foreign non-fiction films about Italy, see FDV/1 and FDV/2. The most recent overview is Cristina D’Osualdo,“Per una filmografia delle origini del cinema italiano (1895–1905)”, in Storia del cinema italiano, 1895/1911, ed. Aldo Bernardini (Venice: Marsilio;Rome: Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia/Edizioni di Bianco & Nero, forthcoming). I thank Aldo Bernardini and Luca Giuliani for bringing thisessay to my attention. For a critical analysis of some of these films, see Ivo Blom, “Travelogues italiani: un genere da riscoprire”, in A nuova luce.

Cinema muto italiano I, ed. Michele Canosa (Bologna Clueb, 2000), 63–73; and Bernardini’s essay in this volume (#13). On the origins of newsreelsin Italy, see Luca Mazzei, “First Came the Word and then the Picture: Comment to [sic] Newsreels in Italy at the Time of Silent Films”, in La

construcció del l’actualitat en el cinema del orígens/The Construction of News in Early Cinema, ed. Àngel Quintana and Jordi Pons (Girona: FundacióMuseu del Cinema-Col-lecció Tomàs Mallol/Ajuntment de Girona, 2012), 151–163 and for a broader discussion on non-fiction filmmaking in Italy,see Marco Bertozzi, Storia del documentario italiano. Immagini e culture dell’altro cinema (Venice: Marsilio, 2008), particularly 11–95.

40. Valtorta, “L’incerta collocazione della fotografia nella cultura italiana”, 561. Real-life photography had its own painterly, graphic, and literaryantecedents and constant influences. I sought to make this case in Italy in Early American Cinema.

41. On Naples and photography, see Mariantonietta Picone Petrusa and Daniela Del Pesco, eds., Immagine e città: Napoli nelle collezioni Alinari e nei

fotografi napoletani fra ottocento e novecento (Naples: Macchiaroli, 1981). On Sicily, see Michele Falzone del Barbarò, Monica Maffioli, and PaoloMorello, eds., Fotografi e fotografie a Palermo nell’Ottocento (Florence: Alinari, 1999). Sommer, for instance, crystallized known aspects of theNeapolitan physical environment into visual topoi as he managed “to distill to its maximum extent the two opposite eighteenth-century tendenciesof picturesque and documentary view”. Marina Miraglia, “Giorgio Sommer, un tedesco in Italia”, in Un viaggio fra mito e realtà: Giorgio Sommer

fotografo in Italia, 1857–1891, ed. Marina Miraglia and Ulrich Pohlmann (Rome: Carte Segrete, 1992), 23.

42. Among the most significant figures were Eugène Sevaistre, Gustave Le Gray, the ubiquitous Sommer, Giuseppe Incorpora, and the Tagliarini brothers– who received an award at the 1876 Universal Exposition of Philadelphia. See Vincenzo Mirisola and Michele Di Dio, Sicilia Ottocento: Fotografi

e Grand Tour (Palermo: Gente di Fotografia, 2002).


43. Some of the titles, all made in 1909 and often exported to the U.S., included Dalla pietà all’amore (Pity and Love, Saffi-Comerio), Terremoto di

Messina e Calabria (Messina Earthquake a.k.a. Messina Disaster, Cines), and the three-part series Il terremoto calabro-siculo (Great MessinaEarthquake, Saffi-Comerio). Within a few years, the follow-up productions included Messina che risorge [Resurrection of Messina, Cines, 1910]and Messina al giorno d’oggi (Messina as It Is Today, Cines, 1912). For recent discussions, see Luca Mazzei “Il disastro di Messina”, Quaderni del

CSCI (Barcelona) 5, no.5 (2009): 175–176 and Luigi Virgolin, “How To Tell a Catastrophic Event. The 1908 Messina Earthquake (Italy)” in La

construcció del l’actualitat en el cinema del orígens, 239–250.

44. On this last film, see Nino Genovese ed., L’orfanella di Messina: cinema e terremoto (Messina: Daf associazione culturale, 2008), which includesa DVD copy of the film.

45. This may seem surprising given that, following Émile Zola’s literary and photographic example, both Verga and Capuana became passionatephotographers, particularly of Sicilian landscapes and people. See Andrea Nemiz, Capuana, Verga, De Roberto fotografi (Palermo: Edikronos, 1982).On Verga’s relationship with the film industry, see Gino Raya, Verga e il cinema (Rome: Herder Editore, 1984).

46. Through its international connections the Luce distributed, free of charge, about 3,000 images of Italian landscapes, monuments, and cities toseveral international institutions, including Photo Press (Berlin), International News Corporation (Paris), International News Corporation Photo

Service (New York) and the Visual Educational Service Institute (Los Angeles). See Alessandro Sardi, Cinque anni di vita dell’Istituto Nazionale

“L.U.C.E”. (Rome: Grafia, 1929), 95–101 and Origine, organizzazione e attività dell’Istituto Nazionale “LUCE” (Rome: Istituto poligrafico dello Stato,1934). For a critical perspective, see Mino Argentieri, L’occhio del regime. Informazione e propaganda nel cinema del Fascismo (Florence: Vallecchi,1979), Giampaolo Bernagozzi, Il mito dell’immagine (Bologna, Editore Clueb, 1983), Massimo Cardillo, Il duce in moviola. Politica e divismo nei

cinegiornali e documentari “Luce” (Bari: Dedalo, 1983), Silvio Celli, “Nuove prospettive di ricerca”, Bianco & Nero 63, no. 547 (2003): 27–50,Ernesto G. Laura, Le stagioni dell’Aquila. Storia dell’Istituto Luce (Rome: Ente dello Spettacolo, 2006), and Gabriele D’Autilia, “Il fascismo senzapassione. L’Istituto Luce”, in De Luna, D’Autilia, Criscenti, L’Italia del Novecento, 1: 91–114.

47. On photography in colonial contexts, see Alberto Angrisani, Immagini dalla guerra di Libia: Album africano, ed. Nicola Labanca and Luigi Tomassini(Manduria: Piero Lacaita, 1997) and Silvana Palma, L’Africa nella collezione fotografica dell’IsIAO: il fondo Eritrea-Etiopia (Rome: Istituto italianoper l’Africa e l’Oriente, 2005). On fiction and non-fiction filmmaking during the war in Libya, see the essays published in Immagine. Note di Storia

del Cinema no.3 and no.4 (2011), particularly those by Denis Lotti, Giovanni Lasi, Sila Berruti and Luca Mazzei (in both issues), Berutti and SarahPesenti Campagnoni, and Maria Assunta Pimpinelli and Marcello Seregni. See also Luca Mazzei, “La celluloide e il museo. Un esperimento di“cineteca” militare all’ombra della prima Guerra di Libia (1911–1912)”, Bianco & Nero 63, no. 571 (September–December 2011): 66–85; andSila Berruti and Luca Mazzei, “The Silent War. ‘Newsreels’ and ‘Cinema Postcards’ From a Country at War”, in La construcció del l’actualitat en el

cinema del orígens, 261–276.

48. On the wealth of prints and postcards about World War I circulating in the mid-1910s, see Fabio Fogagnolo et alii, eds., La Grande Guerra: Il fronte

italiano nelle cartoline e nelle stampe degli artisti (Sommacampagna, Verona: Cierre, 2012) and Andrea Kozlovic Storia fotografica della grande

guerra (1914–1918) (Novale di Valdagno, Vicenza: Rossato, 1988). For critical discussions, see Nicola Della Volpe, Fotografie militari (Rome:Stato maggiore dell’Esercito, Ufficio storico, 1980) and Angelo Schwarz, “Le fotografie e la grande guerra rappresentata”, in La Grande Guerra.

Esperienza, memoria, immagini, ed. Diego Leoni e Camillo Zadra (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986), 745–764.

49. Lucio Fabi, ed., Doppio sguardo sulla Grande Guerra. I ‘dal vero’ del 1915–18 tra cinema, guerra e propaganda (Gemona: La Cineteca del Friuli,2006), which includes a documentary, newsreels of the time, and precious filmographic and bibliographic references in the accompanying booklet.

50. On the film, see Sarah Pesenti Campagnoni, “Dans la tranchée [Dentro la trincea]”, in Moltiplicare l’istante, 201–202. On the Italian Army’s regulationsof film correspondences, see “Norme del Comando Supremo Italiano per i corrispondenti di Guerra”, in Il cinematografo al campo. L’arma nuova

nel primo conflitto mondiale, ed. Renzo Renzi (Ancona: Transeuropa, 1993), 142–148. On the convergence of film (and photography) and wartechnologies, see Giaime Alonge, Cinema e guerra (Turin: UTET, 2001), especially 3–29, and Id., “L’occhio e il cervello dell’esercito. Tecnologiabellica e tecnologia cinematografica nelle riviste degli anni Dieci”, in Cinema muto italiano: tecnica e tecnologia, I: 15–29. For a recent cogent andcomprehensive discussion, see Sarah Pesenti Campagnoni, “WWI La guerra sepolta. I film girati al fronte tra documentazione, attualità e spettacolo”(Ph.D. diss., University of Turin, 2012).

51. Consider two documentaries recently restored by the Cineteca del Friuli and Haghefilm, respectively, Gloria: apoteosi del soldato ignoto (FederazioneCinematografica Italiana e Unione Fototecnici, 1921) and Sulle vie della Vittoria: Visita dei Reali d’Italia alla Venezia Giulia (Walter Film, 1922). Thetwo films are now included in the DVD, Le vie della Gloria (Cineteca del Friuli/Giornate del Cinema Muto/Cineteca Nazionale/CSC, 2010).

52. Phrenology exerted an impressive political and multidisciplinary influence on the realm of visual representation: it became the main research methodfor most bio-sciences and their most illustrious representatives, including comparative anatomy and biology, medicine and psychiatry, physicaland criminal anthropology. For a recent discussion of phrenology, see Stephen Tomlinson, Head Masters: Phrenology, Secular Education, and

Nineteenth-Century Social Thought (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2005).

53. On Mantegazza’s importance for Italian visual anthropology, see Paolo Chiozzi, “La ‘Scuola Fiorentina’ di Antropologia Visuale”, in Etnie: La Scuola

antropologica fiorentina e la fotografia tra ‘800 e ‘900, ed. Susanna Weber (Florence: Alinari 1996), 13–19.

54. Paolo Mantegazza, Atlante della espressione del dolore; fotografie prese dal vero e da molte opere d’arte, che illustrano gli studi sperimentali

sull’espressione del dolore (Florence: Brogi, 1876).

55. Mantegazza, Fisonomia e Mimica (Milan: Dumolard, 1881) trans. Physiognomy and Expression (New York: Scribner’s, 1890), 231 (italics in theoriginal).

56. Mantegazza’s scientific and public promotion of photography for anthropological research informed the collaboration between Italian scientists andphotographers in countless ethnographic expeditions in non-Western countries and soon, in Italy’s African colonies. On the subject, see LuigiGoglia, ed., Colonialismo e Fotografia: il caso italiano (Messina: Sicania, 1989), which is the catalog of an exhibition held in Messina in 1989; andGoglia, “Africa, colonialismo, fotografia: il caso italiano (1885–1940)”, in Fonti e problemi della politica coloniale italiana, ed. Carla Ghezzi (Rome:


Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, Ufficio centrale per i beni archivistici, 1996), 2: 805–904. The volume consists of the proceedings of aconference held in Messina and Taormina in 1989. In the same period, Carlo Brogi, the Florentine owner-manager of one of Italy’s most significantateliers, published Il ritratto in fotografia: appunti pratici per chi posa (Florence: Landi, 1895), which featured an introduction by Paolo Mantegazza.

57. On Lombroso and photography, see Renzo Villa, “Un album riservato”, in Locus Solus: Lombroso e la fotografia, ed. Silvana Turzio (Milan: Mondadori2005), 23–41.

58. Tom Gunning, “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film”, Modernism/Modernity 4, no.1 (1997): 6.

59. For a broad discussion of the close-ups in Italian silent cinema, see the dedicated sections in Elena Dagrada, Between the Eye and the World. The

Emergence of the Point-of-View Shot (Bruxelles: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2013).

60. Mario Verdone, I fratelli Bragaglia (Rome: Lucarini, 1991), 56.

61. A more articulated defense of the artistic poetry of photography, achieved in its own terms, came at the turn of the 20th century from art and literarycritic Enrico Thovez, on the occasion of the first National Photographic Congress, held in Turin in 1898. See “Poesia fotografica”, L’arte all’esposizione

del 1898, no.9 (1898): 67–70, now in Cultura fotografica in Italia. Antologia di testi sulla fotografia (1839–1949), ed. Italo Zannier and PaoloCostantini (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1985), 277–281. In English see his “Artistic Photography in Italy”, The Studio, Special Issue on Art in Photography(Summer 1905): 17–20. Thovez also wrote about film. Cf. Luca Mazzei, “Papini, Orvieto, e Thovez (1907–1908): il cinema entra in terza pagina”,Studi Novecenteschi no.1 (June 2001): 19–29.

62. On the context of the Bragaglia brothers’ experimentation, see Giovanni Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista (Milan: Skira, 2001), 148–172. In English,see Lista, “Futurist Photography”, Art Journal 41, no.4 (Winter 1981): 358–364. On more recent discussions about the inclusion of a third brother,Carlo Ludovico, see Zannier, Storia del fotografia italiana, 234–236.

63. On the importance of photographic portraiture in the Futurists’ initial resistance to photography, see Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista, 137–147.

64. Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista (Rome: Nalato, 1913), reprint Turin: Einaudi, 1970), 16–17 (italics in the original). The original1913 edition included sixteen images. A. G. Bragaglia also wrote a number of articles on the topic for La Fotografia Artistica, from February 1912to May 1913. Many of those texts provoked admiring and critical reactions in the same periodical as elsewhere. See Zannier and Costantini, Cultura

fotografica in Italia, 269n14, and Zannier, Storia della fotografia italiana, 232ss. For a recent critical discussion, see Claudio Marra, Fotografia e

pittura nel Novecento. Unastoria “senzacombattimento” (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), chapter 3 (“L’esperienzedel Fotodinamismo e/o il Fotodinamismocome esperienza”)

65. For a discussion of these films, particularly Thaïs, see Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista, 61–67.

66. Parts of F.T. Marinetti and Tato’s Manifesto, dated 11 April 1930, first appeared as “La fotografia dell’avvenire” and “La fotografia futurista”, Gazzetta

del Popolo (9 and 15 November 1930), later published as “La fotografia futurista” in Il futurismo: Rivista sintetica illustrata (11 January 1931):points 1–15. In English, see “Futurist Photography”, in F.T. Marinetti, Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York:Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 392–393.

67. At present the Cinémathèque française appears to hold the only extant copy of Thaïs. Perfido incanto still appears to be lost. Cf. Antonella ViglianiBragaglia, “Fotodinamismo e cinema d’avanguardia”, in Fotodinamismo Futurista, A.G. Bragaglia, 133; and Lista, Il cinema futurista (Recco, Genoa:Le Mani, 2010), 42–43, especially footnote 24.

68. Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista, 16.

69. On Futurist cinema, see Giovanni Lista’s essay (#18) in this anthology and his Il cinema futurista.

70. The immense popularity of the carte de visite led to the publication and collection of photographs of prominent persons. The ubiquity of the carte

de visite was supplanted by larger “cabinet cards”, themselves eclipsed when Kodak introduced the Brownie camera and home snapshot photographybecame a mass phenomenon. On the photographic portrait and the industry of glamour, see Gilardi, Storia sociale della fotografia, chapters 15 and16.

71. Wladimiro Settimelli, Garibaldi, l’album fotografico (Florence: Alinari, 1982).

72. Quintavalle, Gli Alinari, 251–281.

73. Italo Zannier, ed., A Century of Photographic Portraiture in Italy, 1895–1995 (Florence: Alinari, 1995), 20.

74. Each cover of the periodical Torino Artistica, printed since 1886, carried the photographic portrait of a stage personality. Other periodicals adoptedthe same practice, including the Teatro Illustrato in Milan and, from 1905, the Scena Illustrata in Florence.

75. On Duse’s iconography, see Maria Ida Biggi, Eleonora Duse: viaggio intorno al mondo (Milan: Skira, 2010). Edward Steichen had also taken amemorable artistic photographic portrait of Duse in 1903. On the dissemination of photographs of opera singers, collected in “Serie Opere liriche”,see Matilde Tortora, L’Opera lirica in tasca (Soveria Mannelli, Catanzaro: Iride, 2003). On the parallel practice for stage stars (“Serie Teatrali”), seethe section “Antecedenti” in Tortora, Lo Schermo in tasca (Catanzaro: Abramo, 1999).

76. As early as 1908, the Milanese photographer, filmmaker, and film company founder Luca Comerio too was producing postcards. Pathé seemed tohave started the practice of the so-called “cinematographic album”, as Matilde Tortora describes it, in the early 20th century, although not inrelationship to stars. See Matilde Tortora, Au Pays Noir. Film Pathé en pochette: 1903–1905 (Cassano Jonio: La Mongolfiera, 2002) and AugustoSainati, “La novelizzazione nelle fotografie pubblicitarie: l’esempio Pathé”, in Il racconto del film. La novelizzazione: dal catalogo al trailer/Narrating

the Film. Novelization: from the Catalogue to the Trailer, ed. Alice Auteliano and Valentina Re (Udine: Forum, 2006), 273–279.

77. On life models, see Laurent Mannoni and Donata Pesenti Campagnoni, Lanterna magica e film dipinto: 400 anni di cinema (Milan: Il Castoro; Turin:Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 2009), 243–249.

78. Other key manufacturers included the Turinese firms Fotocelere and Eliotipia Molfese, with the latter that operated independently and often for thepublisher Società Editrice Cartoline, Edizioni A. Trealdi and G.B. Falci (Milan), and the Casa Editrice Ballerini & Fratini (Florence). Cf. Dario Reteuna,


Cinema di carta. Storia fotografica del cinema italiano (Alessandria: Edizioni Falsopiano, 2000), 16. Studies about these photographers, but especiallythe aforementioned printing firms, are rare, incomplete, or virtually absent. It is often unclear from which geographical location these professionalswere operating. For an exception, see Silvia Paoli, “Lo studio e laboratorio fotografico Artico”, AFT Rivista di Storia e Fotografia, no.24 (1996):52–65. This Milanese firm was also known as Varischi & Artico.

79. Bertelli, “La fedeltà incostante”, in Bertelli and Bollati, L’immagine fotografica, 157. Nunes Vais (1856–1932) created a pantheon of portraitsaccording to the photographic lessons of Nadar and the early Steichen, along with the pictorial ones of Aristide Sartorio, Giovanni Boldini, andGiacomo Grosso. See Mario Nunes Vais, fotografo and Maria Teresa Contini, ed., Gli italiani nelle fotografie di Mario Nunes Vais (Florence: CentriDi, 1978). In 1971 Nunes Vais’ daughter donated his immense archive to the Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale.

80. L’Illustrazione Italiana had actually published images of Borelli as the star actress of a play by Alfredo Testoni in the fall of 1907. Cf. vol.304, no.42(20 October 1907): 391. On the use of photography in L’Illustrazione Italiana, Italy’s first illustrated periodical, see Flavio Simonetti, ed., L’Illustrazione

Italiana. 90 anni di storia (Milan: Garzanti, 1963).

81. For a comparable analysis of Bertini’s intermedial presence, see Chiara Caranti, “La Diva e le donne. Francesca Bertini nella stampa popolare efemminile”, in Francesca Bertini, ed. Gianfranco Mingozzi (Genoa-Recco: Le Mani, 2003), 122–124. For a comparative view of film stills inHollywood, see Christoph Schifferli, Paper Dreams: The Lost Art of Hollywood Still Photography (Göttingen: Steidl, 2004) and David A. Shields,Still: American Silent Motion Picture Photography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

82. Ivo Blom, “Lyda Borelli e la nascita del glamour. Dal teatro, via pittura e fotografia, al cinema”, in Attraversamenti: L’attore nel Novecento e l’interazione

fra le arti, ed. Silvana Sinisi, Isabella Innamorati and Marco Pistoia (Rome: Bulzoni 2010), 71–96.

83. Tallone also made portraits of other celebrities of the time, including stage actress Lina Cavalieri, “the world’s most beautiful woman”, QueenMargherita of Savoy, and members of the Milanese aristocracy. Cf. Blom, “Lyda Borelli...”, 76n13 and 80. Sommariva found initial fame and fortuneby contributing to the repertoire of the Touring Club Italiano. On this important institution, see Rossella Bigi, Italo Zannier, and Valentino Bompiani,eds., Foto d’archivio: Italia, 1915–1940. Antologia d’immagini tratte dalla fototeca del Touring club italiano (Milan: Touring club italiano, 1982).The Fondo Sommariva at the Biblioteca Braidense (Milan) includes more than 52,000 negatives and 2800 prints.

84. Blom, “Lyda Borelli…”, 86n55 and 79. The list should also include stage actresses, from Vera Vergani and Anna Fougez to Irma Gramatica andVittoria Lepanto. Sommariva mostly worked independently. Still, from the early 1920s, his portraits virtually monopolized the covers of the film andstage periodical Comoedia.

85. The relationships between cinematic close-ups and the tradition of photographic portraiture are often under-examined in favor of the study of therelationship of cinema with figurative arts, mainly painting and prints, or opera. See Angela Dalle Vacche, “The Diva-Image in 1911: Visual Form,Cultural Specificity, Perceptual Model”, in La decima musa. Il cinema e le altre arti, ed. Leonardo Quaresima and Laura Vichi (Udine: Forum, 2001),127–153. In her volume, Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), Dalle Vacche quotes sourcesindicating Eleonora Duse’s personal opposition to the close-up (138). The volume does not discuss star publicity’s commercial and aesthetic debtsto photographic ateliers and firms, although Dalle Vacche’s work has the merit of approaching film stardom in an interdisciplinary way while movingaway from stars’ biographic profiles.

86. Reteuna, Cinema di carta, and Lugon, “Introduction. Between the Photograph and the Film Frame”, in Between Still and Moving Images, 79.

87. On postcards, see Tortora, Lo Schemo in tasca; the special issue “La novelizzazione in Italia: Cartoline, fumetto, romanzo, rotocalco, radio, televisione”Bianco & Nero, no. 548 (January–April 2004) edited by Raffaele De Berti; and the essays included in Roberto Della Torre and Elena Mosconi, eds.,I manifesti tipografici del cinema: La collezione della Fondazione Cineteca Italiana 1919–1939 (Milan: Il Castoro, 2001). For broader overviews, seeMatilde Tortora, “Modi di un transitare: dai fotoalbum cinematografici agli screen captures”, and Angela Maria Fornaro, “Ai confini della narratività:l’emergenza del tempo nelle serie fotografiche degli anni Dieci”, in Il racconto del film, 293–307 and 309–315; and Elena Ezechielli, “Postcardsand Diva’s Canon in the Italian Silent Film”, in Il canone cinematografico/The Film Canon, ed. Pietro Bianchi, Giulio Bursi, and Simone Venturini(Udine: Forum, 2010), 405–410 and “Una, nessuna, centomila. Le fonti nella storiografia cinematografica: cartoline e brochure a confronto”, inQuel che brucia (non) ritorna/What Burns (Never) Returns. Lost and Found Films, ed. Giulio Bursi and Simone Venturini (Pasian di Prato, Udine:Campanotto, 2011), 86–104. A curious case is that of the series of postcards of Italian films commercialized in Spain in boxes of chocolate anddiscussed in Matilde Tortora’s richly illustrated Cinema fondente (Doria di Canno Jonio, Cosenza: La Mongolfiera, 2001).

88. Paolo Bertetto ed., Schermi di carta. La collezione di manifesti del Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino: il muto italiano 1905–1927 (Turin: F.lliPozzo, 1995), 21. The Museo Nazionale del Cinema (Turin) holds illustrated publicity material for over 320 films produced by Ambrosio Film, andmore than two thousand photographs related to the same firm. Cf. Claudia Gianetto, “Percorso tra gli archivi del Museo: La Società AnonimaAmbrosio”, in Nero su Bianco. I fondi archivistici del Museo Nazionale del Cinema, ed. Carla Ceresa and Donata Pesanti Campagnoni (Turin:Lindau/Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 1997), 114–116.

89. On the subject, see Paolo Bertetto, ed., Schermi di carta. On the intermedial fabric of Italian film posters, see Gian Piero Brunetta, ed., Il colore dei

sogni. Iconografia e memoria nel manifesto cinematografico italiano (Riva presso Chieri, Turin: Testo & Immagine, 2002).

90. A.P. (Amleto Palermi), “Cartellone e cartellonistici cinematografici”, La Vita Cinematografica (Turin) nos.3–4 (22–31 January 1916): 73–74. Palermiwished instead that, given the talent of such lithographic artists as Marcello Dudovich, Enrico Sacchetti, and Leopoldo Metlicovitz, the poster wasto showcase a form of transfiguration and was to be considered an “an artistic manifestation, in direct relationship to the film”. A.P. (Amleto Palermi),“Cartellone e cartellonistici cinematografici”, in La Vita Cinematografica (Turin) nos. 5–6 (7–15 February 1916): 74–76. Cf. Reteuna, Cinema di

carta, 27–28. For a brief, but informative overview, see Roberta Basano, “Fotografia di scena e cinema delle origini”, in Moltiplicare l’istante, 60–65.

91. These publicity inserts also appeared in foreign periodicals. Matilde Tortora has shown the example of an illustrated insert for I Promessi Sposi

(The Betrothed, Pasquali e C., 1913) that appeared in the Illustrated Film Monthly (February 1914). Cf. Matilde Tortora, “Modi di un transitare”, Il

racconto del film, 294.


92. Brand (Annibale Cominetti), “La Cinematografia Artistica”, La Fotografia Artistica 9, no.2 (February 1912): 26–30.

93. Ambrosio’s two stars, Elena Makowska and Gigetta Morano, featured prominently in these articles. La Fotografia Artistica would feature the photographof a diva, whether Makowska, Francesca Bertini, or Leda Gys, actually glued to the cover. Entrusted to take their photographs were Ecclesia, a coupleof Turinese photo ateliers, and the Roman photographers Riccardo Bettini and Alfredo Pinto. Their materials also served the growing critical literatureon the diva phenomenon. One of the earliest representative of these overviews, Tito Alacci (Alacevich), Le nostre dive cinematografiche (Florence:Bemporad, 1919). included sixteen photographs of famous actresses, a few of which are signed by Pinto.

94. Reteuna, Cinema di carta, 20. After 1916, another Turinese periodical, La donna, adopted the same practice by gracing its cover with a portrait ofFrancesca Bertini. From 1922, a key venue for the publication of photographic portraits was the periodical, Scene e retroscene, which specializedin stage personalities, with photographs by Giancarlo Dall’Armi and Eugenio Fontana. Ibidem, 24.

95. Another one was La Positiva, also based in Turin, and known for its publicity material for Maciste Imperatore (1924).

96. On this media synergy, see Raffaele De Berti, Dallo schermo alla carta. Romanzi, fotoromanzi, rotocalchi cinematografici: Il film e i suoi paratesti

(Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2000), 59–61.

97. Raffaele De Berti, “‘King Vidor comes to Italy:’ dai film alle trasposizioni in romanzo di Big Parade e The Crowd”, Il racconto del film. 125.

98. Raffaele De Berti and Marina Rossi, “Cinema e cultura popolare: i rotocalchi illustrati”, in “Il cinema a Milano fra le due guerre”, ed. FrancescoCasetti and Raffaele De Berti, special issue of Comunicazioni Sociali, nos.3–4 (July–December 1988): 222–254; Cristina Bragaglia, “Cineromanzie novella film: editorial e cinema”, in Stampa e piccola editoria tra le due guerre, ed. Ada Gigli Marchetti and Luisa Finocchi (Milan: Franco Angeli,1997), 451–457; Raffaele De Berti, Dallo schermo alla carta; Andrea Meneghelli, “La bellezza facile del Romanzo Film”, in Il racconto del film,223–230; Emiliano Morreale, ed., Lo schermo di carta. Storia e storie dei cineromanzi (Milan: Il Castoro; Turin: Museo Nazionale del Cinema,2007), and Silvio Alovisio, ed., Cineromanzi. La collezione del Museo Nazionale del Cinema (Turin: Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 2007).

99. The “Personalità Ritratti” section was part of the large “Chronology” collection. The key photographer was Adolfo Porry Pastorel, who had constantlyfollowed the Duce since 1915. See his profile by Eileen Romano in Sergio Romano, Mussolini. Una biografia per immagini (Milan: Longanesi,2000), 179–180. For a sample of the LUCE’s portraits and approved images, see, in addition to Romano’s volume, Sergio Luzzato, L’immagine del

duce. Mussolini nelle fotografie dell’Istituto Luce (Rome: Editori Riuniti/Istituto Luce, 2001) and Pasquale Chessa, Dux. Benito Mussolini: una

biografia per immagini (Milan: Mondadori, 2008).

100.Early attempts to establish specialized schools of photography date only from 1935, and successful ones materialized even later, in 1954. For abroader discussion, see Valtorta, “L’incerta collocazione della fotografia nella cultura italiana”, 564ss.

101.Alessandra Antola, “Ghitta Carell and Italian Studio Photography in the 1930s”, Modern Italy 16, no.3 (August 2011): 249–273.

102.Bertelli, “La fedeltà incostante”, 164–165.

103.Giò Ponti, “Discorso sull’arte fotografica”, Fotografia 1 (1932): n.p.; reprint Domus 4, no.5 (1932): 285–287, trans. in Maria Antonella Pelizzari,“Gio Ponti, ‘Discorso sull’arte fotografica’ (1932)”, Visual Resources 27, no.2 (1 June 2011): 146–153, 151.


Bertellini Cinema Photography and Viceversa

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