Cerebrismo! Russian Divas at Cinema Ritrovato XXXVII, 2023

Lyda Borelli and Diana Karenne were officially “cerebrali” divas, which meant that they were women with brains, but not in the sense of intellectual power… these actresses had such an inner life of their own, such as sense of spirituality, that they were superior not only to the average woman, but to the average man…**

So, there I was, slumped in the cosy seats of the Sala Mastroianni at the Cinema Lumière on Day Three of this festival of film festivals and waiting for the next screening to begin I tried to work out the order of what I’d seen from kick off on Saturday and, reader, I couldn’t. Those of you familiar with my on-going struggle to remember the name of films, the one with thingy in it, you know… may not be surprised but then I suspect I’m not alone. This festival moves fast, it collides with itself, over-runs and, sometimes the film snaps… but the first rule of Il Cinema Ritrovato and Bologna in general is to go with the flow, slow down, don’t look at your emails (I did and regretted it), relax and float down screen… it’s a cinematic multiverse of madness and delight.

I’d definitely seen Spellbound (1945) screened on the opening night in the Piazza Maggiore and so, in addition to now being an expert in pseudo psychoanalysis Hitchcock style, I am also relishing the chemical reaction between Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck even though most of what he does is dazed and confused whereas Our Ingrid lets the thoughts of all possibilities simply flash across her perfect brow as she uses science and intuition to solve her man. This film’s psychological hypothesis has, of course, not been peer-reviewed, but you’d have to be mad not to love it just a little.

Man of the week in silents has been unquestionably Ivan Mozzhukhin who not only featured in the epic serial, La maison du mystère (1923) he also blew the roof off the Cine Lumiere with Le brasier ardent (1923).

The stunning wedding sequence in La maison du mystère

Unlike many earlier serials, La maison du mystère (The House of Mystery), isn’t really episodic and plays like the chapters in the book, by Jules Mary, it was based on. It’s effectively one long narrative often picking up directly after the events of the previous episode. As such it holds your attention and you never feel there’s any padding or artificial rounding off to make the stories fit within the format: the filmmakers respected their audience and only now can we see their full intent by watching each element back-to-back – there was no box-set gorging in 1923; at least here the next episodes

 

For a French production this is, of course very Russian with Alexandre Volkoff directing and Ivan Mozzhukhin (as Ivan Mosjoukine) acting and co-scripting with Volkoff. The two maintain a superb continuity throughout and keep a tight rein on the narrative which could so easily sprawl. The tone is playful and inventive with each episode featuring a flick of the director’s wrist: a wedding shown entirely in silhouette, an overhead shot of a group of police officers suddenly emerging and circling around a wanted man and a breathless chase across a broken wooden bridge with four men holding hands to hold it together – a sequence that lasts for half an episode and could easily have come from a much later era.

Ivan Mozzhukhin

Ivan Mozzhukhin wrote, directed and starred in The Burning Crucible (Le brasier ardent) and proves that, actually, pretty much everyone likes a show off. He is such a commander of the screen with huge expressive eyes conveying a unique feline masculinity and here he has full rein to externalise the quicksilver musings that flash across his face in every performance I’ve seen.

 

The film has elements of contemporary dada and surrealism; it surprises us now and - even though it stretches out a little long (who’s going to tell Mozza to cut one of his own scenes?) – it still engages. The performances of the three leads are all part of the reason for this and it is not just Ivan that excels with his actress wife Nathalie Lissenko, proving his match in more ways than one as Elle and her older cinematic husband, Le mari (Nicolas Koline). The couple’s weekends must have been an exhausting. round of high-energy socialising and “performance” all that Russian wit and bravado: larger in every way than life!

Diana Karenne

Anyway, enough about men, there’s a restored Russan Diva in town and her name is Diana Karenne, who was also a screenwriter, producer and director and who later appeared with Ivan Mozzhukhin in the ultimate swashbuckling romance-with-poems, The Loves of Casanova (1927). Before all that she was a high-level diva to almost rank with Francesca, Pina and Lyda. Diana, or Dina, was originally from Poland when it was part of the Russian empire, moved to Italy pre-war and had multiple names and a story confused by the usual industry PR and the need to work across Europe, from Italy to Germany and then France by the late 20’s.

Her diva status had been based on a single surviving film until the discovery over the last couple of years of three of her early films in the Gosfil’mofond in Russia all of which were screened: The Two Sisters’ Tragedy (1914, Russia), Passione Tsigana (1916, Italy) and Smarrita! (1921, Italy).

Directed by Ernesto Maria Pasquali, Passione Tsigana was the big one, a love triangle involving a gypsy girl torn between the noble Baron Freiman (Giovanni Cimara) and the villainous Aleko, (Nello Carotenuto). It was among the most successful films of the year and still being screened in 1920; it established her as a star in her adopted country and showcases her screen presence and nuanced naturalistic style, more Bertini than Borrelli but with grace too.

Passione Tsigana 

My favourite was the fourth film Miss Dorothy (1920), the only one previously thought to survive until the Russian discoveries. Here our heroine disguises herself in rather smart spectacles which only emphasise her strong features, in order to find out what happened to the baby she had with the son of the cruel matriarch who runs the family. She maintains an aloofness but can’t help but be drawn to his younger brother… I may have, literally, lost the plot here as she encouraged her re-discovered daughter to marry the brother of the man she once loved but who (I think) was not the father. Not the first women to put daughter before herself in the Ritrovato, and not the last.

Taken together these films allowed a full audit of Diana’s Diva credentials:

• Intensity... Diana stares into the mid-distance, ignores useless paramours and doesn’t care a jot what we think.
• Her eyes see right through the narrative and the audience… she bores a hole in your mind, catches your secret thoughts and evaporates the fourth wall, not figuratively but in terms of the audience’s sympathy
• Looks, DK has the extreme beauty and also the geometrically near impossible angularity of Dive Design.
• Diana's character is, of course, willing to kill herself so that the Diva story arc is completed, even when the narrative doesn’t strictly call for it.
• Fashion! Diana wears clothes like an angel wears wings…
• Style, you’ve either got or you haven’t got it; Diana has It! In every respect, you can’t live with her or without her… she just is.
• Cerebrismo!

The programme was part of a programme highlighting the work of Russian Dive in Italian film put together by Mariann Lewinsky and Tamara Shvediuk, who had helped discover previously “lost” films in the Russian film archive. Their research also uncovered the fact that Diana was not killed by an allied air raid in 1940 but lived until she passed away in Lausanne on 18th October 1968 (as proven by her death certificate).

Berta Nelson in Vittoria o morte!

There were also two gorgeous films from Berta Nelson, Vittoria o morte! and Fiamma simbolica (preserved in the Desmet Collection at the EYE Filmmuseum), who was originally from Odessa and who debuted in Italy as an opera singer. She’s certainly a woman of many talents as displayed in these two of her seven surviving films… and holds the screen focus almost as well as Diana but or differing reasons. In Eugenio Perego’s Fiamma simbolica (1917, Italy) she played a wife out to avenge the murder of her husband little realising that he was not quite the man she expected, her ability to pursue the innocent lines and then exhibit the destruction of his reputation and belief is something to see, again, as with Diana K, there’s something beyond the drama in their playing, maybe founded in the theatrical tradition of Chekov and Russian playacting in general, something less operatic and purely expressive than true Italian dive.

As Vittorio Martinelli has pointed out*"Nelson belonged to that very small elite of film actresses whose success on the screen was a mere reflection of their triumph on stage…" and her dual appeal is exhibited again in Vittoria o morte! (1913), as, playing a kind of forerunner of the female antihero in Filibus, she jumps from aeroplane into the sea to recover stolen documents from a spy, thereby saving the day and the reputation of her love and country.

These films are fascinating in general for the elevated parts they provided for women especially up to the change in Italian culture of the twenties, and their complex relationship with female and male audiences is worthy is further reading… see below**

Has he got it yet? Il Grido.

On the fourth day I watched Antonioni’s Il Grido (1957) not just to complete my big screen viewing of his major works, and just below, but also to see how well Italian males were coping with female intelligence forty years after Karenne and Nelson. As usual, Michelangelo gives a mixed report on that score: what do his films tell of the Cerebrismo of Alida Valli and Betsy Blair, then later Monica Vitti, Jeanne Moreau and Vanessa Redgrave?

I’ll be back with more thoughts in this year’s festival including ruminations on the Festival’s three – four? - great films featuring maternal sacrifice and details of the Michael Powell strand as Black Narcissus hits the huge screen in the Piazza Maggiore.

 

*In Cabiria e il suo tempo, Paolo Bertetto and Gianni Rondolino (eds.), Museo Nazionale del Cinema/Il Castoro, Turin-Milan 1998

** I always recommend Angela Dalle Vacche’s book Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema (University of Texas Press) for further reading and, as above, she is a delight to quote!

So much to see... the eyes have it in Le brasier ardent