Bertellini Cinema Photography and Viceversa

Italian Silent Cinema:
A Reader
Edited by Giorgio Bertellini
Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Traveling Lightness
PART I
Methods and Objects
Chapter 1
Silent Film Historiography and Italian (Film) Historiography

Gian Piero Brunetta
17
A Brief Cultural History of Italian Film Archives (19802005)

Paolo Cherchi Usai
31
Chapter 2
PART II
Italian Silent Cinemas Visual Cultures
Chapter 3
Italy and Pre-Cinematic Visual Culture

Carlo Alberto Zotti Minici
39
Photography and Cinema, and Vice Versa

Giorgio Bertellini
49
Visualizing the Past. The Italian City in Early Cinema

Marco Bertozzi
69
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
PART III
Production Companies and Contexts
Chapter 6
The Giant Ambrosio, or Italys Most Prolific Silent Film Company

Claudia Gianetto
79
Chapter 7
The Pastrone System: Itala Film from the Origins to World War I
Silvio Alovisio
87
Chapter 8
Romes Premiere Film Studio: Societ Italiana Cines

Kim Tomadjoglou
97
Chapter 9
Milano Films: The Exemplary History of a Film Company of the 1910s

Raffaele De Berti
113
Chapter 10
Southern (and Southernist) Italian Cinema

Giorgio Bertellini
123
Chapter 11
Italian Cinema in the 1920s

Jacqueline Reich
135
From Wonder to Propaganda: The Technological Context of

Italian Silent Cinema
Luca Giuliani
143
Chapter 12
PART IV
Genres
Chapter 13
Non-Fiction Production
Aldo Bernardini
153
Chapter 14
In Hoc Signo Vinces: Historical Films

Giuliana Muscio
161
Chapter 15
All the same or Strategies of Difference. Early Italian Comedies in

International Perspective
Ivo Blom
171
vi
Chapter 16
ITALIAN SILENT CINEMA: A READER
The Diva-Film: Context, Actresses, Issues

Angela Dalle Vacche
185
Chapter 17
Early Italian Serials and (Inter)National Popular Culture

Monica DallAsta
195
Chapter 18
Futurist Cinema: Ideas and Novelties

Giovanni Lista
203
Chapter 19
STRACITT: Cinema, Rationalism, Modernism, and Italys Second Futurism

Leonardo Quaresima
213
Chapter 20
Istituto Nazionale Luce: a National Company with an International Reach

Pierluigi Erbaggio
221
PART V
Cinematic Words: On Paper, On Stage, On Screen
Chapter 21
Film on Paper: Early Italian Cinema Literature, 19071920

John P. Welle
235
Chapter 22
On the Language of Silent Films in Italy

Sergio Raffaelli
247
Chapter 23
Famous Actors, Famous Actresses: Notes on Acting Style

in Italian Silent Films
Francesco Pitassio
255
Our Beautiful and Glorious Art Lives: The Rhetoric of Nationalism

in Early Italian Film Periodicals
John David Rhodes
263
Italys Early Film Theories: Borders and Crossings

Francesco Casetti
275
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
PART VI
Circulation, Exhibition, and Reception
Chapter 26
Disordered Traffic: Film Distribution in Italy (19051930)

Chiara Caranti
285
Pictures from Italy: Italian Silent films in Britain, 19071915

Pierluigi Ercole
295
Research on Local Moviegoing: Trends and Future Perspectives

Paolo Caneppele
305
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
PART VII
Research
Chapter 29
Where Can I Find Italian Silent Cinema?

Ivo Blom
317
Cinema on Paper: Researching Non-filmic Materials

Luca Mazzei
325
Chapter 30
Bibliography
Reference Works
337
Primary Sources
339
Secondary Sources
345
Bibliographic Appendix: Film Exhibition and Spectatorship

by Paolo Caneppele
371
Contributors
375
Indexes Film Titles; Names; Film Companies and Institutions
381
Chapter 4/Photography
and Cinema, and Vice Versa
Chapter 4 / Photography and Cinema, and Vice Versa
Giorgio Bertellini
The Italian city, ancient
prodigiously photogenic.
Andr Bazin, 19481
or
modern,
is
The day we will be able to write the history of

Italian photography, we will have to give the lions
share to amateur photographers.
Lamberto Vitali, 19742
or decades the scholarship of silent Italian

cinema has not granted much space to photography and photographers beyond the
familiar introductory sections on origins or beginnings. 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 argument 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 experienced any development or radical changes in the
20th century.3 The debatable premise revealed the
familiar, modernist postulate of discontinuity: cinema 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 documentary 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 cinemas 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
cinemas debts to photographers affiliated with
either professional ateliers or amateur societies
where films were first shown and often manufactured.5 More recently, scholars have extended the
possible methodological approaches by focusing
on the longue dure of the two medias relationship
in terms of subject matter, visual style, technological inventions, commercial convergences, cultural
dissemination and reception. Three recent anthologies deserve to be singled out: the two volumes of Cinema muto italiano: tecnica e tecnologia
(2006) and Moltiplicare listante: 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 professional and amateur photographers, who engaged
in discussions about the nature and status of photographic reproduction, whether still or in motion.7
Their inquiries focused on issues of national documentation, cultural institutionalization, artistry,
authorship, and even copyright. As film historian
Franco Prono has noted, the contributors to such
photography periodicals as Il Dilettante di Fotografia (Milan, 18911905), Bullettino della Societ
Fotografia Italiana (Florence, 18891912), La Fotografia Artistica (Turin, 19041917), Il Progresso Fotografico (Milan, 18941942), and Il Corriere
fotografico (Turin, 19241963) wrote about cinema
as a manifestation of photographys broad technological 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 questions about national and international copyright.9
Although still understudied, these convergences
enlighten our understanding of what Italian photographic culture thought about cinema beyond the
very first film exhibitions. For instance, in 1912 La
Fotografia Artistica was quite forthcoming in emphasizing cinemas artistic merits for cultured and
popular audiences alike and in acknowledging that
both professional and amateur photographers
were capable of embracing the new medium technically and financially.10 By the same token, as
recent research has emphasized, Italian film periodicals devoted regular space to questions of photographic reproduction, coloring, filmmaking
technique, and lighting.11
50

Still, despite these outstanding contributions,
all too rarely have interventions risen to the level of
overviews of the role of photography in Italys silent
film culture, not just before or during, but also well
beyond cinemas emergence and early development. Possibly because of their complex research
and methodological demands, studies of intermedial 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 opportunities. Within the context of this Reader, my essay
is more concerned with a preliminary assessment
of the historical relationships between the two media; consequently, I will not discuss the more theoretical features of the relationship between
photography and film, which would constitute a
much-needed investigation.13 In particular, I organize my discussion around three selected areas
of intermedial intersection. The first area of interest
pertains to the domain of early film exhibition, concentrated in the 18951905 period. In this regard it
is worth remembering that Italys 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
actualits. 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 monumental 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 nations most bankable aesthetic currency. The second motif is the instantaneous view,
arguably one of photographys 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 media to interact formally and commercially (for instance 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 delayed the appreciation and development of photography as an autonomous aesthetic form of
expression in Italy. Excluded from the realm of
artistic transfiguration and radical avant-garde artistry, 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
cinemas public dissemination beyond the movie

screen, particularly in relationship to its iconic stars
whether domestic or foreign through film periodicals, brochures, posters, and postcards. The
stillness of frame enlargements or photographs,
either taken on the film set or in professional studios, enabled cinematic imagery to become portable 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 photographers and tinkerers who understood the novelty of
the cinematograph. By considering how individuals 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 contributions were visible in technical inventions and countless patents: suffice it to mention the name of
Filoteo Alberini (18641937), an engineer at the
Istituto Geografico Militare, who both adopted and
improved standard foreign equipment.15 In December 1895 Alberini obtained a patent for his
Kinetografo Alberini, a camera, projector and
printer quite similar to the Lumires Cinmatographe. Although he was apparently unable to commercialize it, he left a major mark in Italian cinema
by directing Italys first fiction film, La presa di Roma
XX Settembre 1870 (The Capture of Rome 20
September 1870, 1905).16 Familiarity with the technology, in fact, regularly fostered the inception not
just of early film exhibitions, but also of film production in Italy, as elsewhere as the two early
activities were inherently linked.
Several independent photographers and sellers of photographic equipment and plates enabled
the very first exhibitions of the Lumires 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 photographs 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 Socit Anonyme des
Plaques et Papiers Photographiques A. Lumire et
ses fils, and presented the Cinmatographe for the
first time to an Italian audience. His exhibition pattern, followed by others, gave precedence to local

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 Giuseppe 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 forerunners of documentary cinema.18 One of the most
significant links between the commerce of photography and cinema is the career of Arturo Ambrosio
(18701960), 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 photographic 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 Path
studios in Paris in 1904, Ambrosio and Omegna
moved into film production, with two short newsreels about a car race and military maneuvers,
before committing their activities to fiction film production.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 theaters located in Turin, Milan, Rome, and even in
France at least according to contemporary reports.21 Not much else is known about the company, 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: filming
photographic landscapes
The earliest and most enduring relationships between photography and cinema center on a shared
repository of intermedial visual and literary references, 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 collections, and postcards.22 The commercialized aesthetic of the Grand Tour provided the common,
international currency that largely defined the subject matter, style, and mass marketability of photographic representations of Italy.
Italian and foreign photographers together
reproduced the web of collaborations and competition 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 Italys most
prominent and influential private atelier, the Fratelli
Alinari established in Florence in 1852. Its work
codified at the highest professional level what Giulio Bollati termed Italians visual dictionary, a
national instrument of cataloguing and documenting Italian cities, architectural monuments, and
natural sights.23 The Alinaris 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 Educations Direzione Generale delle Antichit e Belle Arti
(General Management of Antiquities and Fine
Arts).24 By Royal Decree, the purpose was to support 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 nations distinct civilization. From early on, Alinaris photographs became famous for their high-quality reproductions
of Italys 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
(184043), 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
51
52

photography, whose photographic codification of
known painterly views from the Florentine panorama to Romes 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 remarkable 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 imperial capital and as center of the new State.29 Significantly, when filmmaker, inventor, and Cines
founder Filoteo Alberini experimented with 70mm
panoramic views in 1918, he included the celebrated visual clich 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 painterly traditions, beginning with the 18th century
works of Gaspar Van Wittel and Canaletto and,
later, countless topographical panoramas. The Alinari codification of this tradition was part of a
photographic imagery that included tourist photographs, postcards, and Lumire filmed travelogues.31
In addition to urban landmarks, the Alinari
devoted several views to natural wonders, for instance the Tivoli waterfalls, which had already been
the subject of earlier daguerreotypes and photographs. 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 dItalia (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 preparing negatives by applying liquid emulsion to
glass plates) rapidly accelerated the process of
photographic impression. Instantaneous photography 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 picturesque, artistic, or monumental styles. Instead, they
experimented with catching the world, live, in its
tracks.32 Consider the work of three Milanese photographers whose work nicely dovetailed with the
two media: Giuseppe Beltrami (18531935), who
used the instantaneous photography as if it were
a Lumire view before the emergence of cinema,
while remaining exclusively a photographer, and
who inaugurated a visual atlas of the citys different
social classes; 33 Italo Pacchioni (18721940), who

practiced filmmaking between 1896 and 1902, but
remained primarily a photojournalist until his death;
and Luca Comerio (18781940), 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 photograph and film the effects of the 1908 earthquake
in Messina and the Italian armys activities during
the war in Libya (19111912), and the Great War
(19151918).34 Their work calls attention to the
cogent intermedial relationship between the immediacy of turn-of-the-century photographic reportage and Italian film production of the very early
period. It was a production that included early
travelogues, proto-documentaries, and filmed actualits that covered sport events, disasters, and
occurrences of historical significance. Their selection 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 instantaneous photography. The Lumire case is the most
obvious, especially given the fact that the French
companys dual activity in both photography and
filmmaking culminated in films that the Lumires
significantly referred to as views (vues).35 Lumires agents and operators dominated the early
years of film exhibitions and filmmaking in Italy:
between 1896 and the early years of the 20th century their actualits amounted to more than one
hundred and sixty films.36 Despite its cataloguing
impulse, Lumires Italian illustrative project revealed choices of touristic and political relevance
consonant with the firms ambitions for international cultural appeal and official recognition. Their
favorite subjects were military parades, royal ceremonies, sport events, local customs, urban views
and natural landscapes.37
As Lumire 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 English-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 Italys reigning political
and religious personalities, military parades, and
renowned natural and architectural attractions was

part of the strategy to endow cinema with a prestige 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-exploration and display, not simply as a foreign purveyor
of famous and exotic attractions. Between 1896
and 1905, photographer-film exhibitors like Felicetti, 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 manufactured by the Lumire firm alone. Italian production,
however, was dwarfed in comparison with the more
than twenty-five hundred foreign travelogues and
actualits that circulated in Italy during the same
period.39 Such disproportion calls attention to Italian film cultures international character and address, which obviously did not disappear after
1905, at the beginning of national industrial production.
Similarly to the historical film, views of Southern Italian backwardness featured intermedial and
international characters. The photographic styles
that pervaded Southern Italian photographic and
film representations combined the lifelike immediacy of instantaneous photographic reproductions
and actualits often linked to ethnographic voyeurism and natural disasters with the cultural
mediation of known iconographic models. Photographic 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 common in monumental views of Rome and Northern
Italy, the privileged poetic approach was the picturesque mode, which relied on the trope of the
inexorable passing of time and on effects of charming backwardness. Southern views insisted on the
plebeian and melodramatic realism of lively crowds
and posed idle individuals in place of the architectural 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 Giorgio Sommer, had also been particularly influential
in the realist articulation of characteristic landscape views (the Neapolitan bay, the erupting Vesuvius, the ancient ruins of Pompeii, and Sicilys
archaeological sites) and sketches of local customs.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 insisting 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 choreographed. 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 actualits
include Gita a Napoli [Excursion to Naples, Filoteo
Alberini, 1906], Napoli e il Vesuvio (Life and Customs of Naples, Ambrosio, 1907), and Sorrento
(Picturesque Sorrento, Cines, 1912). In the mid1910s the two most important fiction films to capture this poetics were Sperduti nel buio [Lost in
Darkness, Morgana Film, 1914] and Assunta Spina
(Caesar Film, 1915), two intense melodramas unfolding 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 architecture, archaeological sites of Greek temples, and
picturesque views of Mt. Etna, the Sicilian coastline, 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 Tours
trope of Sicily as an isolated, underdeveloped, and
somewhat ill-fated region, for which natural disaster and heightened human drama exemplified realism.
Following the devastating December 1908
earthquake that struck Messina and part of Southern 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 Vitagraph, 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 melodramas of loss and romantic rescue as Dalla piet
allamore (Il disastro di Messina) (A Drama at Messina; a.k.a. Pity and Love; Saffi-Comerio, 1909) and
Lorfanella di Messina (Orphan of Messina; Ambrosio, 1909).44 In contrast to writers from Naples
and its surrounding region, however, the Sicilians
53
54

Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana, the key exponents 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. (LUnione Cinematografica
Educativa) institutionalized not just the tourist paradigm, 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 Istituto Luce) was entrusted with systematically collecting and classifying Italys past and present life
for the Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale. For instance, in 1927, the Ministry of Education donated
to the Istituto Luce the entire photographic repository of the General Management of Antiquities and
Fine Arts, about 35,000 negatives. From that moment, the Istituto Luce became the key repository
of the states photographic archive, which owed a
good deal to the Alinari model.
The purpose of these efforts was to control
the nations image and, more pressingly, to document events of national significance that could be
distributed to the national and international press,
ministries, and various domestic institutions compelled to record their own activities under the Fascist regime.46 The challenge that the Istituto Luce
faced was the reconciliation of the rhetoric of timelessness, which pervaded the representations of
the nations cities, villages, and countryside, with
the idea that Fascism constituted a force of modern change. The regimes plan to control news and
visual records about government actions had become 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 colonial campaigns in Northern Africa involving postcards, photography, and films has recently made
outstanding progress,47 even though a historiographical and disciplinary chasm between photographic and filmic evidence related to the war
events of 1912 and 19151918 still largely persists.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 journalistic evidence fostered a new relationship between visual culture and Italys institutional power,
from the Government to the Army. The public fame
that Luca Comerio enjoyed for his photographic
and filmic coverage of Italys Royals and the con-
troversies some of his war actualits caused, particularly when showing dead soldiers as in Dentro
la trincea [Inside the Trenches, Path Film/Sezione
Cinematografica dellEsercito Italiano, 1917], constitute two sides of the same phenomenon. They
reveal the politicization, and related urge for institutional regulation, of photographic evidence,
whether concerning still or motion pictures.50 It was
a politicization that largely involved forms of government control that, for instance, materialized
through the 1916 constitution of the Sezione Cinematografica del Regio Esercito, the sole authority
to oversee the wars film coverage. Still, even when
in presence of private enterprises, the states symbols and iconic representatives were ever present.51
Production II: cinema and the

photographic portrait
The emergence of the photographic portrait in Italy
is as much indebted to such older forms of imagemaking as painting and sculpture (and to their
centuries-old fondness for remarkable historical
figures) as to the formats new scientific and commercial 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 average man from the degenerate or the pathological 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 normality vs. degeneration relied on the photographic
readability of phrenological evidence.
The epicenter of the encounter between anthropology and photography was Florence, headquarters of the Alinari and Brogi photographic firms
and, since 1869, home to Italys first academic post
in anthropology, held by physician and ethnologist
Paolo Mantegazza (18311910). After 1871, the
Tuscan city also housed the National Museum of
Anthropology and the Italian Society of Anthropology and Ethnology (both founded by Mantegazza).
Mantegazza was knowledgeable of Darwins theories, but unaware of his photographic experiments;
beginning with an 1869 study of Sardinian physiognomies, he developed an intense appreciation
of photography as a precious aid due to its
evidentiary objectivity.53 Later, he launched a national contest of photographic physiognomies,

aimed at capturing shared typologies of emotional portraits, which culminated in the 1876 Atlante delle espressioni del dolore (Atlas of
Expressions of Pain), featuring photographs by the
celebrated Florentine Giacomo Brogi.54 His unscientific and yet influential conclusion was that photography could uniquely capture individual
expressions that, when viewed as physiognomic
residues, revealed distinct racial patterns and identities. 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 photography 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 photographs that were donated to his Museo di Antropologia Criminale (Museum of Criminal
Anthropology).57 Lombroso grouped the images
under various rubrics (juridical, psychiatric, medical, racial, and social) and used them to visualize
highly racialized deviant patterns shared by Sardinian subjects, chiefs of Camorra bands, and Southern 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 photographys
own taxonomic endeavors were actually impaired
by the mediums extremely individualizing process, 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 accuracy with eloquent literary descriptions. If anthropology and the social sciences learned from the
literary and visual habitus of narrative characterization to draw coherent racial types, scientific notions of racial inheritability became features
of literary, theatrical, and cinematic characterizations. By the same token, within ever more
cogent publicity narratives, the photographic portraits 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 publicity narratives.59 Before moving on to the photographic portraits vast commercial appeal
(significant both in and of itself and in relation to
cinemas on- and off-screen expressions, such as

newspapers ads, periodical illustrations, and postcards), it is productive to look at the anti-mimetic
strand of photographic portraiture embodied by
figures revolving around Futurism. The Italian
avant-gardes uneasy view of photography particularly with regard to the portrait format played
an influential role in Italys experimental filmmaking
during the 1910s and early 1920s.
A discussion of Futurism involves three of the
four Bragaglia brothers, known for their experimental work in photography, film, and theater. It is worth
recalling that two of the brothers, Arturo and Carlo
Ludovico, worked profitably in photographic portraiture. By 1915, film periodicals were often publishing 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 dArte Bragaglia, which
was a workshop, exhibition space, and photographic atelier. The income of the Casa dArte
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 experimental 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, Giuseppe 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 Tommaso 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 experiments based on the photographic overexposure of
individual subjects faces and gestures, caught in
movement and close view. The Bragaglias described their experiments as Fotodinamismo futurista (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 lifes transcendental movement rather than embalming immanent reality with
55
56
Fig. 1. Anton
Giulio Bragaglia,
Un gesto del capo
[Movement of the
Head]; [Motion
Study of Artists
Head]. 1911.
Gelatin silver print,
178 x 127 mm
(7 x 5 in.).
[The Metropolitan
Museum of Art
(New York),
Gilman Collection,
Gift of The Howard
Gilman
Foundation, 2005
(2005.100.246).
Image copyright
The Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
Image source: Art
Resource, NY.
Reproduction
2013 Artists
Rights Society
(ARS), New York /
SIAE, Rome.]

instantaneous photographys cadaveric reproductions. Further, the emphasis on capturing random
human movements and facial expressions distinguished the work of the Bragaglias from the experiments of Etienne-Jules Marey who aimed instead
at the systematic analysis and complete reconstitution of human gestures. While the Bragaglias
viewed Mareys work as primarily scientific, they
touted their own experimental photographs as artistic inasmuch as they de-materialized the expressive 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 photography to lift the veil of objective and naturalistic
reality and instead reproduce what superficially
cannot been seen, what is unspeakable and uncatchable, 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 celebration 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,

Carr, Russolo, Severini, and Soffici vehemently
divorced the fotodinamica from their own artistic
efforts, claiming that the Bragaglia brothers experiments pertained solely to the domain of photography and not of Futurisms 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, Thas (1916), named after the
films leading actress, the Russian singer Thas
Galitzky, and showcasing set decorations by Futurist artist Enrico Prampolini, and Perfido Incanto
[Perfidious Enchantment, 1917], subtitled Mimodramma di moderna magia (Mimodrama of modern 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 impact on Italian film culture.67
The failure of Fotodinamismo futurista to receive the endorsement and the support of Futurism
is indicative of the pre-eminent Italian avant-garde
movements prolonged uneasiness toward the
photographic medium. Just as the Bragaglias were
publicly aspiring to position their photographic experiments at the heart of the Futurist mission, Boccioni 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-Manifesto of 1916, Marinetti and others proposed that
the cinema be emancipated from all other visual
arts and, most cogently, from the mediums imitative automatisms in order to align itself with the
expressive freedom of music and poetry. Still,
when compared to how French, German, and Soviet avant-garde movements fueled successful experimentation and regeneration in their respective
national film industries, Futurisms initial uneasiness toward the mechanical arts constituted a
significant factor in the aesthetic impasse of Italian
silent cinema.69
What Italian culture acknowledged as photographys key feature was its instantaneous capturing of the world. Rather than stimulating
productive, but constructive reactions, particularly
among avant-garde artists, the allegedly immanent
immediacy of photographic expression found major and even inventive use in photojournalism and,

especially, in film publicity. It is here that a most
productive, though under-researched, convergence 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 success 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-century Europe. It was a practice that Gaspard-Flix
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, musicians like Giacomo Puccini, or state personalities
associated with the Risorgimento, including Giuseppe 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 filllight 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 photographys artistic merits. The photographic portraits 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 flourished at the turn-of-the century, particularly La
Domenica del Corriere and La lettura, began popularizing portraits of a broader range of famous
individuals, particularly those associated with current events and reputable entertainments. The approach 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 exhibited in enlarged format, notably at the 1906 International 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
Italys growing celebrity culture and its increasingly
theatricalized national public life. The Genovese
photographer Giovan Battista Sciutto revolutionized the iconography of stage performers by photographing stage diva Eleonora Duse not only in
traditional studio portraits, but also on stage, as the
memorable interpreter of Gabriele DAnnunzios
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 divas actual body and her famous stage
roles a practice that had begun with opera singers.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 stardom. 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 illustrated periodicals spread film stars appeal beyond
the movie theatre and into the individual private
spaces of their fans domestic lives. These photographs 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 photographs taken on the set, most often during shooting breaks and thus after the completion of a
scene, so as to repeat its most significant moments. 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 films diegetic
space. In the history of optical entertainments,
scholars have often described film stills as a development of Victorian life model slides, which were
photographs of performers in diegetically significant 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 popular classes for the eradication of their social ills (i.e.,
poverty, family abuse, alcoholism), the successive
iterations of film stills belonged to consumerisms
publicity goals.
Lyda Borelli, for instance, was a favorite subject for several professional photographers and
printing firms variously associated with film publicity, including Varischi Artico e C. (Milan), Attilio
57
58
Fig. 2 (left).
Giovan Battista
Sciutto, Eleonora
Duse nel ruolo di
Monna Vanna
[Eleonora Duse in
the Role of Monna
Vanna], ca.1904.
Gelatin silver print,
240 x 183 mm
(9.44 x 7.20 in.).
[Courtesy of
Fondazione
Giorgio Cini,
Fondo Eleonora
Duse (Venice).]
Fig. 3 (right). Le
artiste
drammatiche:
Lyda Borelli,
LIllustrazione
Italiana 305, no.25
(21 June 1908):
599. Photography
by Varischi &
Artico (Milan).
[Courtesy of
Biblioteca di
Archeologia e
Storia dellArte
(Rome).]
Fig. 4. Tullio
Carminati, undated
postcard.
Manufacturer:
Attilio Badodi
(Milan).
[Authors
Collection.]
Badodi, Ugo Bettini, Riccardo Bettini, Alfredo

Pinto, Arnaldo Chierichetti, Studio C. Chierichetti
(Milan), G.B. Falci (Milan), Eugenio Fontana, and
Fototecnico Giuseppe Vettori & Compagni (Bologna).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 replace Valentino), contributed to upgrading photographic 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 Italys most beautiful woman
and in mid-1908 LIllustrazione Italiana had celebrated 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
Italys 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 trajectory 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 adoring audience. The portrait achieved great popular-
59
Fig. 5 (left). Pina
Menichelli,
undated postcard.
Manufacturer:
Giuseppe Vettori
(Bologna).
[Authors
Collection.]
Fig. 6 (right).
Maria Jacobini,
undated postcard,
Manufacturer:
[Riccardo] Bettini
(Rome).
[Authors
Collection.]
ity once Sommariva captured it in a 1911 photograph, 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 photograph, together with five other portraits of Borelli,
at the Esposizione and Concorso Internazionale di
Fotografia, held in Turin in 1911. Borellis collaboration with Sommariva originated a popular series
of postcards, probably manufactured in Sommarivas own studio, and inspired the photographers work with other actresses of Italian cinema,
including Elena Makowska and Diana Karenne.84
At the release of Ma lamore mio non muore
(Love Everlasting, Film Artistica Gloria, 1913), the
film that launched both Borelli and the diva film
genre, her past photographic representations provided widely recognizable paratexts. Partly set in a
theater dressing room, the film featured Borelli
wearing the neglige she had worn in Sommariva
photographs (and, originally, in Pierre Berton and
Charles Simons stage play Zaz). In the play within
the film, she appeared onstage in the black nightgown that had made her famous in Wildes Salom,
seen in countless photographs and postcards,
while her gestures addressing the theater audience within the film recalled Tallones painting and
Sommarivas 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 reintrodu[cing] stillness, reflexive pauses, and concentration within the elusive continuity of film.86 It
consisted of the all-too-often overlooked phenomenon of visual popularization of film narratives
and performers, whether in photographic or lithographic terms, through postcards, brochures,
posters, and illustrated articles and novelizations.
Fig. 7. Emilio
Sommariva, Lyda
Borelli nello studio
di Cesare Tallone
(Lyda Borelli in the
Studio of Cesare
Tallone), 1911.
Gelatine silver
bromide paper,
225 x 236 mm
(8.85 x 9.29 in).
[Courtesy of
Biblioteca
Nazionale
Braidense (Milan),
Fondo Sommariva.]
60
Fig. 8. Emilio
Sommariva, Lyda
Borelli, 1911.
Gelatine silver
bromide paper,
252 x 116 mm
(9.92 x 4.56 in).
[Courtesy of
Biblioteca
Nazionale
Braidense (Milan),
Fondo
Sommariva.]

The still limited, but growing literature on these
paratextual materials exposes the network of material practices and industrial activities surrounding
the film industry.87 From an archeological standpoint, 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 vehicle that made use of printed frame enlargements,
studio photographs, and stills of film stars was the
brochure. Distributed during premieres and offered to lure distributors, the brochure was most
often designed and manufactured by producers.
In a few cases, distributors themselves manufactured 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. After 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
Fig. 9. Emilio
Sommariva, Lyda
Borelli, 1911.
Gelatine silver
bromide paper,
185 x 125 mm
(7.28 x 4.92 in).
[Courtesy of
Biblioteca
Nazionale
Braidense (Milan),
Fondo
Sommariva.]
even though many are extant. Posters, particularly

those of large size, were mostly hand-made illustrations by established artists or professionals
rather than blown-up prints of photographs.89 Actor and director Amleto Palermi wrote about the
importance of large posters in modern life, particularly the ones resulting from hand-made illustrations 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 Illustrato. 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

founder of La Fotografia Artistica, Annibali
Cominetti, published an article praising the Ambrosio film company. Noteworthy was the fact that
the article included nine photographs from six Ambrosio films.92 In subsequent issues, up until the
summer of 1916 (less than a year before it ceased
to exist), La Fotografia Artistica published seventyseven articles on both film technology and aesthetics, variously illustrated with frame-enlargements
and stills from film scenes, each accompanied by
a caption detailing and expanding upon the films
title.93 What seems glaringly absent by todays
standards are the names of the photographers
although Reteuna suggests that these anonymous
photographers were Roberto Omegna, Ambrosios scientific director, who had worked in the
early 1900s as a portrait-photographer, and Ottaviano Ecclesia.94 Omegnas 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 companies 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
Larte muta. Rassegna della vita cinematografica,
published since 1916, which relied on the photographic 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 photographer 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 Sienkiewiczs
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 periodicals, 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 photoromance 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 throughout the 1910s and early 1920s enabled the theatricalization of political life that Mussolini would soon
fully embody. During Fascism, the photographic
archive of the Istituto Luce had a special section,
named Personalit Ritratti (Portraits Personalities), 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-related discussion on still and motion pictures intersects and joins here with the history of Italys
political life.
Conclusion
In a culture embedded with aestheticism, idealism,
and artistic transfiguration, photographys 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, mainstream theoretical and critical reflections marginalized photography as ancillary to the other arts and,
with a delay of a few decades, replicated Baudelaires famous diatribe against photography, The
Salon of 1859. Specialized periodicals sought to
articulate a productive alignment between photography and art, particularly the Turin-based La Fotografia Artistica (19041916), the relatively short
publication life of which coincided almost exactly
with that of Alfred Stieglitzs Camera Work
(19041917). Coincidences may end there,
though. Stieglitzs conclusive emphasis on photographys acquisition of full aesthetic independence from the other arts, particularly painting,
did not find sustained equivalence in Italian discourse beyond a few isolated critical insights. Italian 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 legitimate artistic merits, it nonetheless found successful applications as key evidence to the periods
61
62

most popular narratives of social difference, anthropology and female stardom, contributing to the
pervasive glamorization of Southern criminals and
seductive actresses.
It wasnt until the late 1920s, in the wake of
the work of Man Ray, Christian Schad, and Lzl
Moholy-Nagy, that the annual review Luci e ombre
(Turin, 19231934) began to widely propound the
notion that photography was a medium fully emancipated from the dominion of other arts, particularly
painting. Still, beyond the appeal of these artistic
discussions, photography had already moved to
the center of Italys 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
LUfficio moderno e la pubblicit, 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 design journal. As art and photography historian
Carlo Bertelli famously noted, In reality, the [actual] Italian avant-garde is the avant-garde of applied arts.102 It should not be surprising then that
only in the early 1930s did a discussion of photography 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 influential 1932 essay, entitled Discussion on the Art of
Photography, that architect and industrial designer Gi Ponti first published in a photographic
magazine Fotografia and quickly reprinted in Domus, 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 independent 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, and
Matthew Solomon for cogent feedback on the
essay. All its shortcomings are mine.
Notes
1. Andr 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 Vitalis 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 Lumires photographic business; and Roberto
Paolella, Storia del cinema muto (Naples: Giannini, 1956). Photography featured often in Eugenio Giovannettis 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
(18391880) (Rome: Quasar, 1978); Carlo Bertelli and Giulio Bollati, eds., Storia dItalia. Annali 2. Limmagine fotografica, 18451945 (Turin:
Einaudi, 1979); Marina Miraglia, Note per una storia della fotografia italiana (18391911), in Storia dellarte Italiana Einaudi, vol. 9, part 2 (Turin:
Einaudi, 1981), 423543; Paolo Costantini Italo Zannier, eds. Cultura fotografica in Italia. Antologia di testi sulla fotografia, 18391949 (Milan:
Franco Angeli, 1985); Italo Zannier, Storia della fotografia italiana (Rome-Bari: Laterza 1986), Id., Segni di luce, 3 vols. (Ravenna: Longo, 19911993),
and more recently the three volumes of Giovanni De Luna, Gabriele DAutilia, and Luca Criscenti, eds., LItalia del Novecento. Le fotografie e la
storia (Turin: Einaudi, 20052006). In English, see Maria Antonella Pelizzari, Photography and Italy (London: Reaktion Books, 2011). For an overview
of the Italian case in dialogue with Western photographic culture, see Ando Gilardis 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.325; and CMI/1, particularly chapters 12.
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 listante: Beltrami,
Comerio e Pacchioni tra fotografia e cinema (Milan: Il Castoro, 2007). Without ambitions of argumentative cohesiveness, but visually stunning and
extremely 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, Dalla
fotografia al cinema, SCM/5, 4379, 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, DAutilia, Criscenti, eds., LItalia del Novecento. Le fotografie e la
storia, vol. 3.
63
8. On this topic, see Italo Zanniers fundamental Leggere la fotografia: le riviste specializzate in Italia, 18631990 (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: 3046, particularly 31. On these debates, see also two complementary essays, Alessandro Oldani, Il dibattito sul cinema nei
circoli e nelle riviste di fotografia a Milano e in Italia (18631917), and Mauro Giori, La fotografia nella riviste di cinema italiane (19071918),
in Moltiplicare listante, 113124 and 125138. See also the special issue of Comunicazioni Sociali, vol.26, no.1 (JanuaryApril 2004) devoted
to La civilt 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 the
period examined by Marco Grifo (on film stock and color), Melita Mandal (on lighting), and Valentino Rossetto (on filming and projection), included
in the first volume of Cinema muto italiano: tecnica e tecnologia. The volume ends with a wealth of bibliographic references (228263). On artistic
photography in Italy, see Paolo Costantini and Italo Zannier, Luci ed ombre: Gli annuari della fotografia artistica italiana, 19231934 (Florence:
Alinari, 1987) and Paolo Costantini, La fotografia artistica, 19041917. Visione italiana e modernit (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 Basanos 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),
147153. The methodological challenge of a discussion of photography throughout the silent era is not just an Italian occurrence. Two excellent
recent 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 on
turn-of-the-20 th-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 Olivier
Lugon, 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 Fotografi
cineasti nel cinema italiano delle origini, in Moltiplicare listante, 5059.
15. In July 1899, Alberini patented a projector of his own invention, the Cinesigrafo, again without much success. For a list of Italian inventors of
cinematographic 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), 4346; and Alberto Friedemann and Chiara Caranti,
eds., Dizionario dei brevetti di cinema e fotografia rilasciati in Italia, 18941945 (Turin: Associazione F.E.R.T., 2006).
16. On his work, see Jos Pantieri, Filoteo Alberini: Pioniere del cinema italiano (Rome: M.I.C.S., 1994); Giovanna Lombardi, Filoteo Alberini. Linventore
del cinema (Rome: Edizioni Arduino Sacco, 2008); and Alexandra Lalli, Innovazione tecnica e creativit 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 the
development 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]), 190191.
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 (18761948), Bianco & Nero 40, no.3 (March 1979): 168; the special section on Giovanni
Vitrotti, inclusive of filmography, in Griffithiana nos. 2627 (September 1986): 763; 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 of
Milan, 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 (19051916), ed. Riccardo Redi (Rome: CNC Edizioni, 1991),
1132; Renato Bovani and Rosalia Del Porro, Il Grand Tour di Giuseppe Filippi in Toscana con il Cinmatographe Lumire (Ghezzano, Pistoia: Felici,
2007), and the aforementioned anthology, Moltiplicare listante. In English, see the short, corresponding entries in EEC.
19. Vittorio Martinelli, Luomo con la macchina da presa, Griffithiana 9, nos. 2627 (September 1986): 1137.
20. Claudia Gianetto, Societ Anonima Ambrosio: cinema muto nei documenti depoca. (Rome: Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del
Cinema, 2002), 1418 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), 6678.
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, Limmagine fotografica, 31.
24. For years the Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale was known as Fototeca Nazionale. In 2011 it reacquired its original denomination.
25. Roberta Valtorta, Lincerta 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), 559560ss.
26. Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, Gli Alinari (Florence: Alinari, 2003), 289, 303, and passim. Alinari greatly appreciated the work of Ferdinando Artaria, the
Milanese publisher of engravings obtained from daguerreotypes, collected in Vues dItalie daprs le Daguerrotype (184247) and sold all over
Europe. As Marina Miraglia noted, the Vues dItalie inherited the various principles of the voyages pittoresques, that is, the iconic identification of
64

a city with distinct monumental and viewing stereotypes, the truthfulness to topographic reality, and the mobilization of exotic and picturesque
strategies. Miraglia, Culture fotografiche e societ a Torino 18391911 (Turin: Umberto Allemandi & C., 1990), 21. For a recent discussion, see
Vincent Jolivet, Memorie del Grand Tour nelle fotografie delle collezioni Alinari (Florence: Alinari, 2006) and for examples and information in Italian
and English see the firms 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
Hliographique of 1851, a most influential (and jingoistic) patrimonial survey sponsored by the French Commission des Monuments Historique.
Cf. Anne de Mondenard, La mission hliographique: Cinq photographes parcourent la France en 1851 (Paris: Patrimoine Monum, 2001). What
the Alinari also provided were also reproductions of Italian art works that eventually appeared in scholarly monographs, art periodicals or illustrated
textbooks. See Massimo Ferretti, Alessandro Conti, and Ettore Spalletti, La documentazione dellarte, in Gli Alinari fotografi a Firenze 18521920
(Florence: Alinari, 1985), 101174.
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: limmagine della nazione nel cinema muto, 19051909/From La Presa di Roma
to Il piccolo garibaldino: the Risorgimento, Freemasonry and Institutions: Italy in Silent Films (19051909) (Rome: Gangemi, 2007).
30. Roberto Chiti, Jos Pantieri, and Paolo Popeschich, Almanacco del cinema muto italiano (Rome: CSCTV, 1988), 21.
31. On Venices dominant topographical paradigm, see Alberto Zotti Minici, Venezia nelliconografia degli spettacoli ottici, in Limmagine di Venezia
nel cinema del Novecento, ed. Gian Piero Brunetta and Alessandro Faccioli (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2004), 5974; and
Id., Le traiettorie dello sguardo alle origini del cinema, in Cinma & Cie 9 (Fall 2007): 7990. Particularly famous were the Lumire views of
Venice, with the tracking shots of the citys architecture from moving gondolas, as in Panorama du Grand-Canal pris dun bateau (1896). See
Marco Bertozzis 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 dellimmagine filmica, in Moltiplicare listante, 15. See also
Beltramis biographical profile by Silvia Paoli in the same volume (147151).
34. On Comerio as photographer and filmmaker, see Manenti, Monti, and Nicodemi, Luca Comerio, fotografo e cineasta and the Apparati section in
Moltiplicare listante, 145232.
35. For a list, perhaps incomplete, of the companys Italian views listed in the official Catalog, see Michelle Aubert and Jean-Claude Seguin, eds.,
La production cinmatographique des Frres Lumire (Paris: BIFI, 1996), 321350. On the vues Lumires as a genre, see Marco Bertozzi,
Limmaginario urbano nel cinema delle origini. La veduta Lumire (Bologna: Clueb, 2001), 51ss; and Riccardo Redi, ed., Verso il centenario Lumire
(Rome: Di Giacomo, 1986).
36. CMIA, 153165. On recent findings of other Lumire films about Italy, see Bernardini Hors Catalogue: Lumire Films of Italy, in 19th Pordenone
Silent Film Festival Catalogue (Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2000), 109112.
37. The Lumire films expanded upon their established and influential practice of photographic reportages, of both touristic and ethnographic type,
which later inspired Albert Kahns even more ambitious geopolitical encyclopedia, Les Archives de la Plante (19091931). On the Archives Italian
photographs, see Maria Teresa Grendi Hirsckoff, ed., LItalia negli Archivi del Pianeta. Le Campagne Fotografiche di Albert Kahn, 19101929 (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 chapter
28 (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 DOsualdo,
Per una filmografia delle origini del cinema italiano (18951905), 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 this
essay 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), 6373; and Bernardinis essay in this volume (#13). On the origins of newsreels
in 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
construcci del lactualitat en el cinema del orgens/The Construction of News in Early Cinema, ed. ngel Quintana and Jordi Pons (Girona: Fundaci
Museu del Cinema-Col-lecci Toms Mallol/Ajuntment de Girona, 2012), 151163 and for a broader discussion on non-fiction filmmaking in Italy,
see Marco Bertozzi, Storia del documentario italiano. Immagini e culture dellaltro cinema (Venice: Marsilio, 2008), particularly 1195.
40. Valtorta, Lincerta collocazione della fotografia nella cultura italiana, 561. Real-life photography had its own painterly, graphic, and literary
antecedents 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 citt: Napoli nelle collezioni Alinari e nei
fotografi napoletani fra ottocento e novecento (Naples: Macchiaroli, 1981). On Sicily, see Michele Falzone del Barbar, Monica Maffioli, and Paolo
Morello, eds., Fotografi e fotografie a Palermo nellOttocento (Florence: Alinari, 1999). Sommer, for instance, crystallized known aspects of the
Neapolitan physical environment into visual topoi as he managed to distill to its maximum extent the two opposite eighteenth-century tendencies
of picturesque and documentary view. Marina Miraglia, Giorgio Sommer, un tedesco in Italia, in Un viaggio fra mito e realt: Giorgio Sommer
fotografo in Italia, 18571891, ed. Marina Miraglia and Ulrich Pohlmann (Rome: Carte Segrete, 1992), 23.
42. Among the most significant figures were Eugne 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).
65
43. Some of the titles, all made in 1909 and often exported to the U.S., included Dalla piet allamore (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 Messina
Earthquake, Saffi-Comerio). Within a few years, the follow-up productions included Messina che risorge [Resurrection of Messina, Cines, 1910]
and Messina al giorno doggi (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): 175176 and Luigi Virgolin, How To Tell a Catastrophic Event. The 1908 Messina Earthquake (Italy) in La
construcci del lactualitat en el cinema del orgens, 239250.
44. On this last film, see Nino Genovese ed., Lorfanella di Messina: cinema e terremoto (Messina: Daf associazione culturale, 2008), which includes
a DVD copy of the film.
45. This may seem surprising given that, following mile Zolas literary and photographic example, both Verga and Capuana became passionate
photographers, particularly of Sicilian landscapes and people. See Andrea Nemiz, Capuana, Verga, De Roberto fotografi (Palermo: Edikronos, 1982).
On Vergas 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 to
several 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 dellIstituto Nazionale
L.U.C.E. (Rome: Grafia, 1929), 95101 and Origine, organizzazione e attivit dellIstituto Nazionale LUCE (Rome: Istituto poligrafico dello Stato,
1934). For a critical perspective, see Mino Argentieri, Locchio del regime. Informazione e propaganda nel cinema del Fascismo (Florence: Vallecchi,
1979), Giampaolo Bernagozzi, Il mito dellimmagine (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): 2750,
Ernesto G. Laura, Le stagioni dellAquila. Storia dellIstituto Luce (Rome: Ente dello Spettacolo, 2006), and Gabriele DAutilia, Il fascismo senza
passione. LIstituto Luce, in De Luna, DAutilia, Criscenti, LItalia del Novecento, 1: 91114.
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, LAfrica nella collezione fotografica dellIsIAO: il fondo Eritrea-Etiopia (Rome: Istituto italiano
per lAfrica e lOriente, 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 Sarah
Pesenti Campagnoni, and Maria Assunta Pimpinelli and Marcello Seregni. See also Luca Mazzei, La celluloide e il museo. Un esperimento di
cineteca militare allombra della prima Guerra di Libia (19111912), Bianco & Nero 63, no. 571 (SeptemberDecember 2011): 6685; and
Sila Berruti and Luca Mazzei, The Silent War. Newsreels and Cinema Postcards From a Country at War, in La construcci del lactualitat en el
cinema del orgens, 261276.
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 (19141918) (Novale di Valdagno, Vicenza: Rossato, 1988). For critical discussions, see Nicola Della Volpe, Fotografie militari (Rome:
Stato maggiore dellEsercito, 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), 745764.
49. Lucio Fabi, ed., Doppio sguardo sulla Grande Guerra. I dal vero del 191518 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 tranche [Dentro la trincea], in Moltiplicare listante, 201202. On the Italian Armys regulations
of film correspondences, see Norme del Comando Supremo Italiano per i corrispondenti di Guerra, in Il cinematografo al campo. Larma nuova
nel primo conflitto mondiale, ed. Renzo Renzi (Ancona: Transeuropa, 1993), 142148. On the convergence of film (and photography) and war
technologies, see Giaime Alonge, Cinema e guerra (Turin: UTET, 2001), especially 329, and Id., Locchio e il cervello dellesercito. Tecnologia
bellica e tecnologia cinematografica nelle riviste degli anni Dieci, in Cinema muto italiano: tecnica e tecnologia, I: 1529. For a recent cogent and
comprehensive discussion, see Sarah Pesenti Campagnoni, WWI La guerra sepolta. I film girati al fronte tra documentazione, attualit 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 (Federazione
Cinematografica Italiana e Unione Fototecnici, 1921) and Sulle vie della Vittoria: Visita dei Reali dItalia alla Venezia Giulia (Walter Film, 1922). The
two 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 method
for most bio-sciences and their most illustrious representatives, including comparative anatomy and biology, medicine and psychiatry, physical
and 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 Mantegazzas 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), 1319.
54. Paolo Mantegazza, Atlante della espressione del dolore; fotografie prese dal vero e da molte opere darte, che illustrano gli studi sperimentali
sullespressione del dolore (Florence: Brogi, 1876).
55. Mantegazza, Fisonomia e Mimica (Milan: Dumolard, 1881) trans. Physiognomy and Expression (New York: Scribners, 1890), 231 (italics in the
original).
56. Mantegazzas scientific and public promotion of photography for anthropological research informed the collaboration between Italian scientists and
photographers in countless ethnographic expeditions in non-Western countries and soon, in Italys African colonies. On the subject, see Luigi
Goglia, ed., Colonialismo e Fotografia: il caso italiano (Messina: Sicania, 1989), which is the catalog of an exhibition held in Messina in 1989; and
Goglia, Africa, colonialismo, fotografia: il caso italiano (18851940), in Fonti e problemi della politica coloniale italiana, ed. Carla Ghezzi (Rome:
66

Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, Ufficio centrale per i beni archivistici, 1996), 2: 805904. The volume consists of the proceedings of a
conference held in Messina and Taormina in 1989. In the same period, Carlo Brogi, the Florentine owner-manager of one of Italys most significant
ateliers, 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: Mondadori
2005), 2341.
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 literary
critic Enrico Thovez, on the occasion of the first National Photographic Congress, held in Turin in 1898. See Poesia fotografica, Larte allesposizione
del 1898, no.9 (1898): 6770, now in Cultura fotografica in Italia. Antologia di testi sulla fotografia (18391949), ed. Italo Zannier and Paolo
Costantini (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1985), 277281. In English see his Artistic Photography in Italy, The Studio, Special Issue on Art in Photography
(Summer 1905): 1720. Thovez also wrote about film. Cf. Luca Mazzei, Papini, Orvieto, e Thovez (19071908): il cinema entra in terza pagina,
Studi Novecenteschi no.1 (June 2001): 1929.
62. On the context of the Bragaglia brothers experimentation, see Giovanni Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista (Milan: Skira, 2001), 148172. In English,
see Lista, Futurist Photography, Art Journal 41, no.4 (Winter 1981): 358364. On more recent discussions about the inclusion of a third brother,
Carlo Ludovico, see Zannier, Storia del fotografia italiana, 234236.
63. On the importance of photographic portraiture in the Futurists initial resistance to photography, see Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista, 137147.
64. Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista (Rome: Nalato, 1913), reprint Turin: Einaudi, 1970), 1617 (italics in the original). The original
1913 edition included sixteen images. A. G. Bragaglia also wrote a number of articles on the topic for La Fotografia Artistica, from February 1912
to 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. Una storia senza combattimento (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), chapter 3 (Lesperienze del Fotodinamismo e/o il Fotodinamismo
come esperienza)
65. For a discussion of these films, particularly Thas, see Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista, 6167.
66. Parts of F.T. Marinetti and Tatos Manifesto, dated 11 April 1930, first appeared as La fotografia dellavvenire 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 115. In English, see Futurist Photography, in F.T. Marinetti, Critical Writings, ed. Gnter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 392393.
67. At present the Cinmathque franaise appears to hold the only extant copy of Thas. Perfido incanto still appears to be lost. Cf. Antonella Vigliani
Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo e cinema davanguardia, in Fotodinamismo Futurista, A.G. Bragaglia, 133; and Lista, Il cinema futurista (Recco, Genoa:
Le Mani, 2010), 4243, especially footnote 24.
68. Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista, 16.
69. On Futurist cinema, see Giovanni Listas 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 photography
became a mass phenomenon. On the photographic portrait and the industry of glamour, see Gilardi, Storia sociale della fotografia, chapters 15 and
16.
71. Wladimiro Settimelli, Garibaldi, lalbum fotografico (Florence: Alinari, 1982).
72. Quintavalle, Gli Alinari, 251281.
73. Italo Zannier, ed., A Century of Photographic Portraiture in Italy, 18951995 (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 adopted
the same practice, including the Teatro Illustrato in Milan and, from 1905, the Scena Illustrata in Florence.
75. On Duses iconography, see Maria Ida Biggi, Eleonora Duse: viaggio intorno al mondo (Milan: Skira, 2010). Edward Steichen had also taken a
memorable artistic photographic portrait of Duse in 1903. On the dissemination of photographs of opera singers, collected in Serie Opere liriche,
see Matilde Tortora, LOpera lirica in tasca (Soveria Mannelli, Catanzaro: Iride, 2003). On the parallel practice for stage stars (Serie Teatrali), see
the 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. Path seemed to
have started the practice of the so-called cinematographic album, as Matilde Tortora describes it, in the early 20th century, although not in
relationship to stars. See Matilde Tortora, Au Pays Noir. Film Path en pochette: 19031905 (Cassano Jonio: La Mongolfiera, 2002) and Augusto
Sainati, La novelizzazione nelle fotografie pubblicitarie: lesempio Path, 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), 273279.
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), 243249.
78. Other key manufacturers included the Turinese firms Fotocelere and Eliotipia Molfese, with the latter that operated independently and often for the
publisher Societ Editrice Cartoline, Edizioni A. Trealdi and G.B. Falci (Milan), and the Casa Editrice Ballerini & Fratini (Florence). Cf. Dario Reteuna,
67
Cinema di carta. Storia fotografica del cinema italiano (Alessandria: Edizioni Falsopiano, 2000), 16. Studies about these photographers, but especially
the aforementioned printing firms, are rare, incomplete, or virtually absent. It is often unclear from which geographical location these professionals
were operating. For an exception, see Silvia Paoli, Lo studio e laboratorio fotografico Artico, AFT Rivista di Storia e Fotografia, no.24 (1996):
5265. This Milanese firm was also known as Varischi & Artico.
79. Bertelli, La fedelt incostante, in Bertelli and Bollati, Limmagine fotografica, 157. Nunes Vais (18561932) created a pantheon of portraits
according to the photographic lessons of Nadar and the early Steichen, along with the pictorial ones of Aristide Sartorio, Giovanni Boldini, and
Giacomo Grosso. See Mario Nunes Vais, fotografo and Maria Teresa Contini, ed., Gli italiani nelle fotografie di Mario Nunes Vais (Florence: Centri
Di, 1978). In 1971 Nunes Vais daughter donated his immense archive to the Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale.
80. LIllustrazione 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 LIllustrazione Italiana, Italys first illustrated periodical, see Flavio Simonetti, ed., LIllustrazione
Italiana. 90 anni di storia (Milan: Garzanti, 1963).
81. For a comparable analysis of Bertinis intermedial presence, see Chiara Caranti, La Diva e le donne. Francesca Bertini nella stampa popolare e
femminile, in Francesca Bertini, ed. Gianfranco Mingozzi (Genoa-Recco: Le Mani, 2003), 122124. For a comparative view of film stills in
Hollywood, see Christoph Schifferli, Paper Dreams: The Lost Art of Hollywood Still Photography (Gttingen: 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: Lattore nel Novecento e linterazione
fra le arti, ed. Silvana Sinisi, Isabella Innamorati and Marco Pistoia (Rome: Bulzoni 2010), 7196.
83. Tallone also made portraits of other celebrities of the time, including stage actress Lina Cavalieri, the worlds most beautiful woman, Queen
Margherita of Savoy, and members of the Milanese aristocracy. Cf. Blom, Lyda Borelli..., 76n13 and 80. Sommariva found initial fame and fortune
by contributing to the repertoire of the Touring Club Italiano. On this important institution, see Rossella Bigi, Italo Zannier, and Valentino Bompiani,
eds., Foto darchivio: Italia, 19151940. Antologia dimmagini 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 and
Vittoria Lepanto. Sommariva mostly worked independently. Still, from the early 1920s, his portraits virtually monopolized the covers of the film and
stage 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 the
relationship 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),
127153. In her volume, Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), Dalle Vacche quotes sources
indicating Eleonora Duses personal opposition to the close-up (138). The volume does not discuss star publicitys commercial and aesthetic debts
to photographic ateliers and firms, although Dalle Vacches work has the merit of approaching film stardom in an interdisciplinary way while moving
away 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 (JanuaryApril 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 19191939 (Milan: Il Castoro, 2001). For broader overviews, see
Matilde Tortora, Modi di un transitare: dai fotoalbum cinematografici agli screen captures, and Angela Maria Fornaro, Ai confini della narrativit:
lemergenza del tempo nelle serie fotografiche degli anni Dieci, in Il racconto del film, 293307 and 309315; and Elena Ezechielli, Postcards
and Divas Canon in the Italian Silent Film, in Il canone cinematografico/The Film Canon, ed. Pietro Bianchi, Giulio Bursi, and Simone Venturini
(Udine: Forum, 2010), 405410 and Una, nessuna, centomila. Le fonti nella storiografia cinematografica: cartoline e brochure a confronto, in
Quel che brucia (non) ritorna/What Burns (Never) Returns. Lost and Found Films, ed. Giulio Bursi and Simone Venturini (Pasian di Prato, Udine:
Campanotto, 2011), 86104. A curious case is that of the series of postcards of Italian films commercialized in Spain in boxes of chocolate and
discussed in Matilde Tortoras 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 19051927 (Turin: F.lli
Pozzo, 1995), 21. The Museo Nazionale del Cinema (Turin) holds illustrated publicity material for over 320 films produced by Ambrosio Film, and
more than two thousand photographs related to the same firm. Cf. Claudia Gianetto, Percorso tra gli archivi del Museo: La Societ Anonima
Ambrosio, 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), 114116.
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.34 (2231 January 1916): 7374. Palermi
wished instead that, given the talent of such lithographic artists as Marcello Dudovich, Enrico Sacchetti, and Leopoldo Metlicovitz, the poster was
to 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. 56 (715 February 1916): 7476. Cf. Reteuna, Cinema di
carta, 2728. For a brief, but informative overview, see Roberta Basano, Fotografia di scena e cinema delle origini, in Moltiplicare listante, 6065.
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.
68
92. Brand (Annibale Cominetti), La Cinematografia Artistica, La Fotografia Artistica 9, no.2 (February 1912): 2630.
93. Ambrosios two stars, Elena Makowska and Gigetta Morano, featured prominently in these articles. La Fotografia Artistica would feature the photograph
of a diva, whether Makowska, Francesca Bertini, or Leda Gys, actually glued to the cover. Entrusted to take their photographs were Ecclesia, a couple
of Turinese photo ateliers, and the Roman photographers Riccardo Bettini and Alfredo Pinto. Their materials also served the growing critical literature
on 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 of
Francesca Bertini. From 1922, a key venue for the publication of photographic portraits was the periodical, Scene e retroscene, which specialized
in stage personalities, with photographs by Giancarlo DallArmi 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), 5961.
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. Francesco
Casetti and Raffaele De Berti, special issue of Comunicazioni Sociali, nos.34 (JulyDecember 1988): 222254; Cristina Bragaglia, Cineromanzi
e 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), 451457; Raffaele De Berti, Dallo schermo alla carta; Andrea Meneghelli, La bellezza facile del Romanzo Film, in Il racconto del film,
223230; 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 Personalit Ritratti section was part of the large Chronology collection. The key photographer was Adolfo Porry Pastorel, who had constantly
followed the Duce since 1915. See his profile by Eileen Romano in Sergio Romano, Mussolini. Una biografia per immagini (Milan: Longanesi,
2000), 179180. For a sample of the LUCEs portraits and approved images, see, in addition to Romanos volume, Sergio Luzzato, Limmagine del
duce. Mussolini nelle fotografie dellIstituto 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 a
broader discussion, see Valtorta, Lincerta 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): 249273.
102.Bertelli, La fedelt incostante, 164165.
103.Gi Ponti, Discorso sullarte fotografica, Fotografia 1 (1932): n.p.; reprint Domus 4, no.5 (1932): 285287, trans. in Maria Antonella Pelizzari,
Gio Ponti, Discorso sullarte fotografica (1932), Visual Resources 27, no.2 (1 June 2011): 146153, 151.

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Italian Silent Cinema:

Introduction: Traveling Lightness

Methods and Objects

Silent Film Historiography and Italian (Film) Historiography

A Brief Cultural History of Italian Film Archives (19802005)

Italian Silent Cinemas Visual Cultures

Italy and Pre-Cinematic Visual Culture

Photography and Cinema, and Vice Versa

Visualizing the Past. The Italian City in Early Cinema

Production Companies and Contexts

The Giant Ambrosio, or Italys Most Prolific Silent Film Company

Romes Premiere Film Studio: Societ Italiana Cines

Milano Films: The Exemplary History of a Film Company of the 1910s

Southern (and Southernist) Italian Cinema

Italian Cinema in the 1920s

From Wonder to Propaganda: The Technological Context of

In Hoc Signo Vinces: Historical Films

All the same or Strategies of Difference. Early Italian Comedies in

ITALIAN SILENT CINEMA: A READER

The Diva-Film: Context, Actresses, Issues

Early Italian Serials and (Inter)National Popular Culture

Futurist Cinema: Ideas and Novelties

STRACITT: Cinema, Rationalism, Modernism, and Italys Second Futurism

Istituto Nazionale Luce: a National Company with an International Reach

Cinematic Words: On Paper, On Stage, On Screen

Film on Paper: Early Italian Cinema Literature, 19071920

On the Language of Silent Films in Italy

Famous Actors, Famous Actresses: Notes on Acting Style

Our Beautiful and Glorious Art Lives: The Rhetoric of Nationalism

Italys Early Film Theories: Borders and Crossings

Circulation, Exhibition, and Reception

Disordered Traffic: Film Distribution in Italy (19051930)

Pictures from Italy: Italian Silent films in Britain, 19071915

Research on Local Moviegoing: Trends and Future Perspectives

Where Can I Find Italian Silent Cinema?

Cinema on Paper: Researching Non-filmic Materials

Bibliographic Appendix: Film Exhibition and Spectatorship

Indexes Film Titles; Names; Film Companies and Institutions

The day we will be able to write the history of

or decades the scholarship of silent Italian

ITALIAN SILENT CINEMA: A READER

cinemas public dissemination beyond the movie

Chapter 4 / Photography and Cinema, and Vice Versa

tradition of the Grand Tour and began decades

ITALIAN SILENT CINEMA: A READER

social classes; 33 Italo Pacchioni (18721940), who

Chapter 4 / Photography and Cinema, and Vice Versa

ics, pervading the wider contexts of journalism,

ITALIAN SILENT CINEMA: A READER

Production II: cinema and the

Chapter 4 / Photography and Cinema, and Vice Versa

cinemas on- and off-screen expressions, such as

ITALIAN SILENT CINEMA: A READER

literary periodical Lacerba in 1913, Balla, Boccioni,

Chapter 4 / Photography and Cinema, and Vice Versa

periodicals as Il Dilettante di Fotografia, Il Progresso

ITALIAN SILENT CINEMA: A READER

Badodi, Ugo Bettini, Riccardo Bettini, Alfredo

Cesare Tallone, leading studio photographer

Chapter 4 / Photography and Cinema, and Vice Versa

significance of what Dario Reteuna has described

ITALIAN SILENT CINEMA: A READER

even though many are extant. Posters, particularly

Chapter 4 / Photography and Cinema, and Vice Versa