Upcoming book presentation and previous ones

Here is an update on the presentations of my new book, Quo vadis?, Cabiria and the ‘Archaeologists’: Early Italian Cinema’s Appropriation of Art and Archaeology (Turin: Kaplan, 2023). So far, I have given book presentations in October-November in: Pordenone (Giornate del Cinema Muto, 12/10), Turin (University of Turin, 17/10), Rome (Royal Dutch Institute, 20/10), and Amsterdam (Eye Filmmuseum, 3/11).

Dimitrios Latsis, myself, Paolo Tosini. Photo courtesy Valerio Greco

Dominique Nasta and myself

The presentation in Pordenone was the international premiere and the launch of the extended book trailer (only visible at presentations, in contrast to the teaser on YouTube). Together with two other book presentations, I had a Q&A with the Giornate’s book fair coordinator and host, Paolo Tosini. We had some sixty visitors. Afterward, there was a nice drink at the Teatro Verdi, where I signed various books.

Giulia Carluccio, Domenico De Gaetano, myself, Claudia Gianetto

Palazzo del Rettorato, Turin

Alessia Fassone, Giovanna Ginex, Silvio Alovisio, myself, Claudia Gianetto

The second edition was in Turin at the Sala Blu of the Palazzo del Rettorato, an impressive 17th century building and the heart of university of Turin. Our panel consisted of e.g. the vice-rector and professor Media Studies Giulia Carluccio and Domenico De Gaetano, director of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, who both gave welcome words and paid tribute to the book, while Claudia Gianetto (Museo Nazionale del Cinema) chaired the session. Afterward, we had a nice interdisciplinary series of presentations by myself, by Silvio Alovisio on early Italian cinema, transnationality and transmediality, Alessia Fassone on the Museo Egizio and Egyptomania, and Giovanna Ginex on Italian 19th century painters of Antiquity. After answering questions from the audience (among whom experts in film, theatre, art, etc.), we closed off with drinks in the courtyard.

Monika Wozniak

Maria Assunta Pimpinelli

Dir. Tesse Stek and myself

The third edition took place at the Dutch Institute (KNIR) in Rome, which is idyllically situated just outside of the Villa Borghese park, in a monumental villa from the 1930s. Despite a public transport strike and sirocco, we managed to have representatives from all three Roman universities, either in our panel or among the audience. While Maria Bonaria Orban, staff member History of the Institute, chaired the round table, we had a rich mix of disciplines represented, with Luca Mazzei (Tor Vergata) on the historiography of Italian silent film, Stefano Cracolici (Durham University) on cinema of the 1910s as one of transfiguration & belatedness, Monika Wozniak (Sapienza) on Quo vadis in art & popular culture, and Maria Assunta Pimpinelli (Cineteca Nazionale) on the archivist perspective, canon & availability of prints. After my own speech, I offered the book to managing director, Tesse Stek. Also here, we had a merry round of drinks to toast on the book. The round table & presentation was also an excellent way to meet old and new friends in Rome again.

Elif Rongen and myself

Signing and selling during the reception

Almost a full house

The fourth presentation took place at the Amsterdam Eye Filmmuseum, an institute with which I already have a forty years old relationship, both privately and professionally. After the welcome by Elif Rongen, Head of Silent Film, and me, we had the extended trailer once more (greatly admired and in presence of the editor Machiel Sprujt), followed by an informal Q&A between Elif Rongen and me. Finally, we showed the compilation film film Italia: Fire and Ashes by Céline Gailleurd and Olivier Bohler, which had commentary by Isabella Rossellini, and which contains many clips from the Eye collection (the highest number, compared to other archives). Attendance was massive, over ninety persons, while also the drinks afterward at the atrium were well visited. I signed many books that were sold on the spot and received many positive reactions both during and after the event.

My for the time being last presentation is coming up soon, on 24 November, at the Fondation Seydoux-Pathé in Paris. Here my presentation will be followed by the projection of the film Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914), one of the films central to my book.

Upcoming lecture (29/9) and first book presentation (12/10)

On Friday 29 September, I will give a – Dutch told – lecture at the platform on Interiors entitled Interiors: Real or fake?, at the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed in Amersfoort, The Netherlands. Title of my paper: Het Romeinse interieur in kunst en film: studie, illusie en hergebruik [the Roman interior in art and film: study, illusion, and reuse]. More info.

On Thursday 12 October, I will give my first book presentation at the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy. This refers to my new book Quo vadis?, Cabiria, and the ‘Archaeologists’: Early Cinema’s Appropriation of Art and Archaeology, which will appear with the Turinese publisher Kaplan, as part of the series La favilla, la vampa, la cenere, edited by Silvio Alovisio and Luca Mazzei. See the teaser trailer below. For more, on my research on Italian early cinema & the arts, look here.

RIP Aldo Bernardini (1935-2023)

Aldo Bernardini and Vittorio Martinelli in Sacile during the Giornate del Cinema Muto. © Photo by Ivo Blom

Today, news reached me that Italian film historian Aldo Bernardini, born in Vicenza in 1935, died yesterday at the high age of 88. He was the éminence grise of Italian film history, in particular concerning silent film.

Already from his twenties Bernardini was a film critic, for which he received the Premio Flaiano in 1983, publishing also monographs on Michelangelo Antonioni, Ugo Tognazzi and Nino Manfredi. But he is best known as the specialist in Italian silent film. In 1980-1982 he published the three-part volume Cinema muto italiano, focusing on 1) exhibition & reception, 2) industry & organization, and 3) art, stardom & market. After that, it was time for two major reference work projects, the four-part Archivio del cinema italiano (1991-1995), published by ANICA, and the 21-volume series on Italian silent film, Il cinema muto italiano, published between 1991 and 1996 by La Nuova Eri & Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. The latter publication was co-researched and -written with Vittorio Martinelli. For this milestone of knowledge on Italian cinema, which every scholar or archivist cannot do without when researching Italian silent film, Bernardini focused on the earliest years, shared the early 1910s with Martinelli, while Martinelli alone did the First World War years and beyond. Aldo Bernardini and Vittorio Martinelli became a highly productive tandem between the 1980s and the early 2000s, publishing also on Francesca Bertini, Roberto Roberti, the company Titanus, Leda Gys, and Enrico Guazzoni. In later solo reference works, edited by the Cineteca del Friuli, Kaplan and the Cineteca di Bologna, Bernardini focused on Italian travelling cinema, early non-fiction, early foreign productions shot in Italy, early film enterprises, and protagonists, all in the Italian silent era. The list of publications is endless, in particular if you count all the additional articles and papers in edited volumes. The list of papers Bernardini gave at conferences must be equally long, while he also collaborated on various film programmes and festivals, such as the programme he curated with Jean A. Gili at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1986, Le cinéma italien 1905-1945, de ‘La prise de Rome’ à ‘Rome ville ouverte’.

It was this retrospective and accompanying book that inspired Nelly Voorhuis and me to organize in 1988 in the Netherlands a similar retrospective on Italian cinema between 1905 and 1945, for which many films came from Italian archives that had not been shown in the Netherlands anymore after their regular release at the time. We also showed several rare, hitherto presumed lost Italian silent films from the Desmet Collection at the Eye Filmmuseum, such as Sangue bleu and Fior di male. Preparing this, we visited various Italian experts, including Bernardini, who soon became “Aldo” to me. He wrote an excellent text to our catalogue and was our guest speaker at the opening night, introducing Histoire d’un Pierrot with Francesca Bertini. I well remember we had agreed I would translate his words from Italian to English, but Aldo forgot and started immediately in French, presuming every Dutchman would understand that as well. Also, once Aldo started to talk, it was difficult to stop him – something I witnessed at various other occasions as well. While for a Dutch audience, unacquainted with Italian silent film, the Bertini film would have been better replaced by a straightforward vamp film like Il Fuoco, everybody loved the Italian farces. We had a merry night, though with an official touch by the formal opening by the distinguished Italian ambassador. All of this happened at the Amsterdam art house Cinema Desmet (once a regular cinema, run by a nephew of Jean Desmet).

Over the years, Aldo and I remained in close contact for identifications both during and after my time as archivist at Eye, then still called Netherlands Filmmuseum. Even after I left the archive in 1994, I still helped him with e.g. data or images on the Italian films within the Desmet Collection. Vice versa, he helped me too. Email became gradually more normal, although Aldo sometimes ironically sighed: “Why do you always pose me these difficult questions, and not the easy ones?” Thanks to the reference works by Aldo and Vittorio, I could more and more solve the easy ones myself; that’s why. Aldo himself discovered the digital with great passion and started a digital archive of data on Italian cinema, which by lack of funding could not be completed. Yet, the Bernardini-Martinelli series Il cinema italiano is now completely online on the site of the Associazione italiana per le ricerche di storia del cinema (Italian association of film historians), of which he was chair for some years and founder, director, and collaborator of its journal, Immagine. Note di Storia del Cinema. In 1992 Aldo was one of the – well deserved – two winners of the Jean Mitry Award at the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, a festival of which he was an assiduous visitor too.

We did not always agree. When at the 2000 Domitor conference in Udine I delivered for the first time my paper on Jean-Léon Gérôme and Enrico Guazzoni’s film Quo vadis?, which would become a much cited text and was the basis for one of the four chapters of my upcoming book, I got praise all over from the attending scholars and archivists, but not from him. Aldo being a great fan of Guazzoni as innovative film director, looking forward by e.g. his treatment of space and his analytical editing at scarce moments as in the arena scene, I had dared instead to look backward, pointing at the 19th century pictorial citations Guazzoni had inserted in his film. Yet, for me Guazzoni had done both, looking forward and backward, the one not excluding the other. I wonder what Aldo would have thought of my upcoming book. We won’t know, but we do have his enormous legacy. And even if at times we discover small errors or gaps in the Bernardini-Martinelli reference works, the bulk remains a milestone in film history, for which we owe deep gratitude.

Museum of Dreams

I’d like to share the recent good news with my larger network. Related to my upcoming book and in general my research on early Italian cinema and its ties with visual culture, is my future involvement as Co-I in the British Arts and Humanities Research Council funded research project Museum of Dreams: Silent Antiquity Films in the British National Film Archive (October 2023-26), submitted by Prof Maria Wyke (University College London), with myself (Arts & Culture, VU) and Bryony Dixon (BFI) as Co-I, and in collaboration with various European film archives. The project will establish a better understanding of both the modern reception of classical antiquity and the transnational history and cultural status of silent cinema. By focusing on the BFI holdings and comparing them with those surviving in other archives such as Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam), the project will situate the UK firmly within the global network that produced, distributed, exhibited, consumed, and curated the classical antiquity films of the early 20th century, and establish for those films an important educational legacy in the 21st century. Just a few weeks ago we got the green light for this project.

Three new presentations coming up

Monday 17 April I will give a paper (online, alas) on the iconographic sources of the 1914 Italian silent epic film Cabiria (mainly, the appropriation of the two French painters G.A. Rochegrosse and H.P. Motte), at the conference Cabiria Heritage, at the University of Turin.

Friday 21 April, I will create the ‘slot’‘Her/Hair Affairs. Hair and Gestures in Early Cinema’, at the workshop Dance, Acting, Movement and Gestural Patterns in Silent Cinema (focused on women and organized in the framework of W.I.S.S.PE.R. project), Eye Study Center, Amsterdam.

Thursday 11 May, I will give the paper ‘Une tradition artistique composite. Tracer l’iconographie punique du film Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914) dans l’archéologie et les musées’, at the conference Cinéma et Archéologie, at the Auditorium du Louvre in Paris.

New publications on early Italian cinema and its diaspora

I’d like to share with you that four new publications by me have been released between Autumn 2022 and today. All deal with early Italian cinema or its diaspora in Germany:

‘The Creation of an Italian Star in Diaspora: Luciano Albertini’s Early Career in Germany (1921-1923)’, Immagine, 23, 2021 (released 2023), pp. 57-84. Part of special issue Modelli di mascolinità e divismo nel cinema muto internazionale, curated by Denis Lotti and Jacqueline Reich.

Luciano Albertini in Die Schlucht des Todes (The Ravine of Death, Luciano Albertini, Albert-Francis Bertoni, Max Obal, 1923).

‘Italia Almirante e le arti: Relazioni pittoriche, scultoree e teatrali in Femmina, La statua di carne e L’ombra‘, in: Alessandro Faccioli, Elena Mosconi eds.,  Divine. Nuove prospettive sul cinema muto italiano (Milano: Mimesis, 2022), pp. 89-106.

Italia Almirante Manzini in La statua di carne (Mario Almirante, 1921).

‘The Pictorial Turn: Intervisuality and Recycling in Fabiola (Enrico Guazzoni, 1918)’, in: Melinda Blos-Jáni et.al. eds, Intermedial Encounters: Studies in Honour of Agnes Pethö/ Intermediális találkozások: Tanulmányok Pethő Ágnes tiszteletére (Cluj-Napoca/Kolozsvár: Scientia Kiadó, 2022), pp. 125-136.

Elena Sangro as Fabiola and signora Poletti as Agnese in Fabiola (Enrico Guazzoni, 1918)

‘Immagini spettacolari: Cabiria di Pastrone e le illustrazioni del pittore francese Rochegrosse per Salammbô di Flaubert’, in: Céline Gailleurd ed., L’oro di Atlantide. Il cinema muto italiano e le arti  (Torino: Kaplan, 2022), pp. 137-160. This is a reworked version of a French publication that appeared early 2022: ‘Images spectaculaires: Cabiria de Pastrone et les illustrations de Salammbô de Flaubert par le peintre Rochegrosse’, in: Céline Gailleurd ed., Le cinéma muet italien, à la croisée des arts (Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2022), pp. 162-191.

Italia Almirante Manzini as Sophonisba in Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914)

And that is not all: Autumn this year, my new monograph will appear: Quo vadis, Cabiria and the ‘Archaeologists’: Early Italian Cinema’s Appropriation of Art and Archaeology, published by Kaplan, Turin, within the series ‘La favilla, la vampa, la cenere’, edited by Silvio Alovisio and Luca Mazzei.

‘Visconti’ downloaded over 5000 times

Since the open access upload of 30 August 2019, my book Reframing Luchino Visconti: Film and Art (Sidestone Press, 2018) has been downloaded 5213 times from this site, until 31 December 2022. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, feel free to do so, see https://ivoblom.wordpress.com/research-visconti-visual-arts/.

RIP Vito Annichiarico (1934-2022)

On 6 August 2022, Vito Annichiarico died in Rome, age 88. He became famous as the boy Marcello, the son of Anna Magnani’s Pina, in Roberto Rossellini’s film Roma, città aperta/ Open City (1945).

closing shot from Roma, città aperta (R. Rossellini, 1945)

Born in 1934 in Grottaglie, he was selected for the role in Rossellini’s famous neorealist film. In 2016, he won a special prize for this at the Nastri d’Argento: ‘Shooting Roma Città Aperta,’ he said on that occasion, ‘was for me like going from the stables to the stars, on the set the necessities were never missing, I felt very comfortable, I was always walking around everywhere. Where I lived, on the other hand, there was no well-being’. The famous scene of Magnani’s death, ‘the most moving’, had ‘upset him. I thought Magnani was dying for real and I was determined: I didn’t want to play in the film any more’.

After Rossellini’s masterpiece film, Annichiarico performed, again alongside Magnani, in Abbasso la miseria! (1945) and in Abbasso la ricchezza! (1946). Vittorio De Sica then wanted him for the role of Coretti in the film Cuore (1948), based on the novel by Edmondo De Amicis, while in the same year Annichiarico also acted in Domenico Gambino’s last film Un mese d’onestà. After a revue performance again with Aldo Fabrizi and Magnani, he worked in the theatre with Aroldo Tieri and Carlo Ninchi in L’uomo, la bestia e la virtù (1949). In 1950 he played in Domani è troppo tardi / Tomorrow Is Too Late by Léonide Moguy, starring Pier Angeli. By 1950 his acting career stopped he and he started to work for a multinational until his retirement. In 2005 and 2011 he took part in two documentaries revisiting the places and events of Roma città aperta: I Figli di Roma Città Aperta, by Laura Muscardin, and Voi siete qui by Francesco Mattera.

Source: ANSA <a href=”https://www.ansa.it/…/morto-vito-annichiarico-piccolo…” rel=”noreferrer nofollow”>http://www.ansa.it/…/cultura/2022/08/05/morto-vito-an…</a>. See also <a href=”https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vito_Annicchiarico” rel=”noreferrer nofollow”>it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vito_Annicchiarico</a>. Reproduction of original still from the closing shot of <i>Roma, città aperta/ Open City</i> (Roberto Rossellini, 1945). Collection Ivo Blom.

4000 downloads Visconti book

Giancarlo Giannini and Luchino Visconti during the shooting of L’Innocente. Photo Mario Tursi, collection Ivo Blom.

Since the upload of 30 August 2019, my book Reframing Luchino Visconti: Film and Art (Sidestone Press, 2018) has been downloaded about 4000 times from this site. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, feel free to do so, see https://ivoblom.wordpress.com/research-visconti-visual-arts/.

Grenzüberschreitende Licht-Spiele: Deutsch-Niederländische Filmbeziehungen

Check out the new and very rich German volume Grenzüberschreitende Licht-Spiele. Deutsch-Niederländische Filmbeziehungen (Hamburg/ Munich: Cinegraph/ edition text + kritik, 2021). This is the result of the film historical conference accompanying the Cinefest 2020 manifestation Kino, Krieg und Tulpen. Deutsch-Niederländische Filmbeziehungen. I wrote the article ‘Panorama, Academia, Archiv: Deutsch-niederländische Filmbeziehungen’, on the themes of the Cinefest program and conference, on developments and changes in the historiography, and on three collections of Eye Filmmuseum as cases for change. This publication was my keynote at the conference. Thanks to Google Books you can read the table of contents, preface and my entire article right away. If you want to read more, please order the book at the publisher’s site. I was also co-curator of the Cinefest film program and contributor to the festival catalog. The catalog is still for sale with the same publisher or with the usual internet book sellers.