E-Book Overview
As scientific discoveries and technological advances radically modernized Europe around the turn of the twentieth century, artists of all types began questioning what it means to be human in an increasingly mechanistic world. Animated by a luminous goddess at its center, the diva film provided a forum for denouncing social evils and exploring new models of behavior among the sexes. These melodramas of courtship, seduction, marriage, betrayal, abandonment, child custody, and public reputation, to mention only a few themes, offered women a vision of—if not always a realistic hope for—emancipation and self-discovery. In Diva, Angela Dalle Vacche offers the first authoritative study of this important "film" genre of the cinema that preceded the Great War of 1914-1918. She analyzes some seventy films, as well as the work of actresses such as Francesca Bertini, Lyda Borelli, and Pina Menichelli, to establish what the diva film contributed to the modernist development of the "new woman." Contrasting the Italian diva with the Hollywood vamp Theda Bara and the famous Danish star Asta Nielsen, Dalle Vacche shows how the diva oscillates between articulating Henri Bergson's vibrant life-force (?lan vital) and representing the suffering figure of the Catholic mater dolorosa. Taking readers on a fascinating tour that includes the Ballets Russes, orientalism, art nouveau, Futurism, fashion, prostitution, stunt women in the circus, aviation, anti-Semitism, colonialism, and censorship, Diva sheds important new light on the eccentric implantation of modernity in Italy, as well as on how, before World War I, the filmic image was associated with the powers of the occult and not with the Freudian unconscious, as has been argued until now.
E-Book Content
01 dalle vacche FM pp. 00i-0xx:Layout 1
12/21/07
12:09 PM
Diva
Page i
01 dalle vacche FM pp. 00i-0xx:Layout 1
12/21/07
12:09 PM
Page ii
Diva
Defi fiaance and
University of Texas Press
Austin
P
d
01 dalle vacche FM pp. 00i-0xx:Layout 1
12/21/07
12:09 PM
Page iii
Passion in Early Italian Cinema by Angela Dalle Vacche Foreword by Guy Maddin
01 dalle vacche FM pp. 00i-0xx:Layout 1
12/21/07
12:09 PM
Page iv
Material included in Chapter 4, “Wings of Desire: Aviation, Fashion, Circus Stunts,” is reprinted from Angela Dalle Vacche, “Femininity in Flight: Androgyny and Gynandry in Early Cinema,” in A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, 444–475, edited by Jennifer Bean and Diane Negra. Reprinted by permission. Copyright © 2002 by Duke University Press. Material included in Chapter 5, “Acting: Prostitution, Vertigo, Close-up,” is reprinted from Angela Dalle Vacche,“Asta Nielsen: Motion, Emotion, and the Close-up,” Framework 43:1 (Spring 2002), 76–94, by permission of Wayne State University Press. Copyright © 2002 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201-1309. Material included in Chapter 8, “Nino Oxilia: Blue Blood and Satanic Rhapsody,” is reprinted from Angela Dalle Vacche, “Lyda Borelli’s Satanic Rhapsody: The Cinema and the Occult,” Cinémas 16:1 (Autumn 2005), 91–115; special issue on “Femmes et cinéma muet: Nouvelles problématiques, nouvelles méthodologies,” edited by Rosanna Maule. Copyright © 2006 by Cinémas. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Foreword copyright © 2008 by Guy Maddin Copyright © 2008 by Angela Dalle Vacche All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2008 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html
The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.