RIP Aldo Bernardini (1935-2023)
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.
Ivo Blom 