Fifty years of Italian cinema (1955)

32 great disappointment to Duse. The actress soon became aware of the poetic secret of the screen, however, and of the possibilities of the film language. In her own words, « The cinema is above all a means of lyrical musical expression, an art of transposition ». The so-called advance-guard (avant-garde) film is also an Italian invention. The first critic who clearly defined the problem of an independent cinema esthetic was an Italian, Riciotto Canudo. In 1911, the year when the first writings by Canudo appeared, a book by Anton Giulio Bragaglia was published, « Fotodinamica Futurista » (Futuristic Photodynamics). This was the first aesthetic theory of photography in which the many different techniques and devices, later to find their use and justification in the avant-garde cinema technique, were considered. In 1916, the « Manifesto della Cinematografia Futurista » (Manifesto of Futurist Cinematography), after stating that «the cinema as a means of expression should be freed », proposed for the new art « analogies, simultaniety and interpenetration of different times and places, musical researches, scenic states of mind, dramas of objects » and so forth. It was that year that Bragaglia produced the world's first avant-garde film, Perfido incanto (Perfidious Enchantment), which made use of essentially cinematic devices to achieve photographic effects in which there was a play of abstract rhythms. 1916 also witnessed the « first futurist film » by Arnaldo Ginna. It was also the year of the florescence of the innovator, Lucio D'Ambra, who made from his own novel the film in which the Countess di Frasso made an auspicious screen debut, The King, The Castles and the Bishops. The film was one of Italy's earliest international successes. There were two types of d'Ambra films : the light romance, albeit highly moral in tone, and the drama. The King, The Castles etc. was in the first category. Love and politics were elegantly caricatured in it, bringing to mind the couplets of La Belle Helene. Nocturnal Strauss waltzes, the Princes and Ambassadors of Franz Lehar's operetta world, and the ballet, like an army corps, all pervaded this charming work. As the publicity announcements described it, « A sentimental comedy, rather ironic, rather sad, rather comic, rather old, rather new, rather true, rather false — like life. » The critic, Lucio D'Ambra, called it « a modern Iliad played at the whim of a little Homer. » « He anticipated, » writes Corrado Pavolini, of this work, « that frivolous but exquisite world that came into fashion in Germany and America after the advent of the sound film. » Soro recalls that there was spontaneous applause after each of the four parts of this film — « the first time this ever happened in the history of the screen. » D'Ambra flourished till 1921, his last picture being Tragedia su Tre Carte (Tragedy on Three Cards). World War I ended, and the cinema entered the postwar period. But the war, which had truly revealed a people, did not inspire any new spiritual themes. The « super-human » dramas of passion and sin continued unabatedly, as rhetorical and flamboyant as ever, as if nothing had happened. The Italian cinema still led the world, but its evening was at hand. The foreign cinema was using a more ambitious and more direct means of expression (the avant-garde films had not been a very significant experience for the Italian cinema). The language to wich the Italians had given rhythm, vigor and inspiration, became fixed, more visual and freer in foreign films. The Swedish film had begun and the Russian cinema was already a reality. German and French films began to impose an aggressive authority. The Ameri