The essay offers a general survey on the articles collected here, putting them into the national and international context of research on female pioneers cinema. In the last decade, the feminine initiative during the first years of cinema has been at the core of increasing interest of many scholars from all over the world, all aiming at investigating the concrete working practices of the rising film industry. The reflection on the work done by the many women active in national production between the beginning of 20th century and the early Thirties with creative, technical as well as managerial roles contributes to the depiction of the characteristics of a period in which the feminine contribution appears more relevant and substantial than in the following decades. Nonetheless, the rediscovery of the silent gestures of the female pioneers encourages further similar studies for different seasons of Italian cinema as well, revealing the fertile potentialities of a perspective on research able to recognize and enhance gender differences.

The essay offers an introduction to the Women Film Pioneers Project, a collaborative research launched about the end of the last century and now involving contributions by several dozens of scholars across the world. Three key methodological issues are examined: periodization and the choice to focus on silent cinema, the adoption of a transnational approach, and the project’s orientation toward a concept of social history. In this frame, the ongoing investigation concerning the work of Italian women film pioneers is presented as a valuable contribution to a deeper appreciation of the global phenomenon of women’s participation into the film industries and cultures of early XXth century.

The essay offers an introduction to the Women Film Pioneers Project, a collaborative research launched about the end of the last century and now involving contributions by several dozens of scholars across the world. Three key methodological issues are examined: periodization and the choice to focus on silent cinema, the adoption of a transnational approach, and the project’s orientation toward a concept of social history. In this frame, the ongoing investigation concerning the work of Italian women film pioneers is presented as a valuable contribution to a deeper appreciation of the global phenomenon of women’s participation into the film industries and cultures of early 20th century.

This essay presents a still almost unknown aspect of Italian silent cinema: the comedy actress, considered not as a mask, but rather as a body. In this respect, a very interesting case study is represented by the figure of film comedienne Armanda Giunchi. She was the principal of a comedy series produced by Cines and entitled to her own character: the «Lea» series between 1910 and 1916. In the meantime, Giunchi also played in so many different genres, even western and action movies, because of her special physical talents. Giunchi’s acting peculiarity consisted in her ability to combine two different aspects in one single characterization: she made use of her body in a very free way, yet at the same time she also managed to be extremely charming and feminine. In her performances Giunchi made use of both the free and unprejudiced movements of her body and a coquettish femininity: this was quite a revolutionary combination of elements for the time in Italian cinema. Lea’s comedies were made in the same period when the Vamp and the Diva myths were being established, when even a small piece of skin revealed on the screen was enough to intrigue and scandalize both women and men.

As delight and desire of the appropriation of the image form the base of how the cinema sees the world, it’s not surprising that movie directors fall in love with the actresses and vice versa. In the collective imagery the actress, objectified by such view, is the natural cinematographic material that becomes malleable in the hands of her partner and creator. This rigid reduction of gender roles within the creative process is unexpectedly put under question and discussed by an Italian melodrama La ribalta (1912): a noblewoman, who is in love with a theater actor, is impelled by him to step on the stage, just for fun at first, where she reveals an uncanny talent that will alienate her mentor, who is unable to deal with the humiliation of a second place. The main actress is Maria Gasparini, one of the most appreciated Italian intellectual-actress of the first decade of 20th century. The director Mario Caserini, her husband dedicated a sincere homage to her through this little film, where the focus on the ambiguous relationship between a man and the congeniality of his partner seems to affirm the superiority of female creativity.

The paper intends to explore the way Neapolitan silent cinema turned the myth of Parthenope into a symbol of a whole culture, re-shaping a millenary heritage of female images coming from painting, sculpture, plates, illustrations, literature, theater, thus building innumerable narrative architectures round the siren. The siren represented both the bright side and the dark side of the moon and cinema investigated, consciously and unconsciously, the contradictory aspects of her fascinating power. Through the analysis of intertextual relations between cinema and other art forms, we will try to prove that Neapolitan silent cinema gave a different version of the Diva’s image. The protagonists of this genre of cinema were common women, at the same time archaic and modern, linked to local identity and projected onto national traditions. The siren’s archetype was the paradigm through which the woman’s image became a kaleidoscope susceptible to innumerable metamorphoses.

The author of this essay explores in what ways Elvira Notari’s films represent distinct forms of cultural expression of a marginalized regional cinema, and asks the question: «What specific filmic and non-filmic formal, stylistic, and narrative elements may have attracted Italian-American immigrants to Notari’s productions?». Culturally specific to the Neapolitan region, the traditional sceneggiata was conventionalized around 1919, just about the same time Notari’s company (Dora Film) began producing filmed sceneggiate. Created for, and about the southern urban dweller, the multi-media interactive live sceneggiata performance, through a host of familiar inter-medial expressive means, directly engaged the audience, stimulating their emotions, arousing their feelings, and encouraging their active participation. Through a close reading of the film ’A Santanotte is outlined how Notari worked to integrate cinematic stylistic devices with the conventions, motifs and expressive elements of this traditional art form, in order to transpose and adapt it to film.

The paper considers the relationship between Italian Opera and silent film, first from a technological perspective, so with attention to the role of the musicians, and finally through the paradigm of female stardom. In this way, paying attention to the character of the diva, it is possible to understand the differences between opera – where the singer’s body was the vehicle of a complex and unified language, which referred at once to voice, gestures, characters, stardom, economic values, national identity, advertising – and cinema – where the star was completely devoid of voice, to the benefit of the body. Through analysis of several singers who had gone into silent film (Rosina Storchio, Gemma Bellincioni, Lina Cavalieri) we understand how the cinema asked them to give up a part of their Diva personality, that of voice. In this way the relationship between cinema and opera, which also have much in common, reveals unresolved and problematic aspects.

Sarah Bernhardt, the greatest international star of the late Nineteenth century, was also one of the most famous stars of early narrative film. Acclaimed for her «golden voice», she made a remarkable transition to silent film. This paper explores the paradox of her success, paying particular attention to the way in which her first films – La Tosca (1908), La Dame aux camélias (1911), Queen Elizabeth (1912) and Adrienne Lecouvreur (1913) – had their roots in Opera. Discussing the vocal training that Bernhardt brought to the theatre, it argues that Bernhardt’s films were less «filmed theatre» than they were Opera films, artistic hybrids which were capable of joining vision and sound, industry and art. Although we might therefore revise the terms of Bernhardt’s engagement with film, Bernhardt’s reception within Italy indicates that her performance was not universally celebrated. Criticized for her excesses, she was seen as the anachronistic and flip side to the naturalism championed on the stage and screen by Italian actors such as Ermete Zacconi. With Eleanora Duse famously cast as Bernhardt’s antithesis, we might instead argue that the two diva’s do not so much represent difference as they do prefigure the subsequent (and ongoing) development of the cinema.

Almost perfectly unknown, Renée Deliot is in fact a most emblematic example of a woman film pioneer. While her name hardly appeared in both film credits and lobby cards, she wrote scripts for almost all the films played by her husband, Mario Guaita, better known as Ausonia, an actor who specialized in the strong-men genre. All that is left of Renée Deliot’s screenwriting work are two films ( L’atletla fantasma, 1919, preserved in the Museum of the Cinema of Turin and Dans les mansards de Paris, 1924) and the manuscript of one more scenario, also preserved at the Turin Museum Archive.

From 1908 to about 1930 in Italy, some intellectuals sensitive to modernity gradually develop a new spectator canon, based on the figure of the cinephile. This processing hides, however, a gender trategy. In the minds of his «fathers», the «new spectator» is opposed not only to an «ancient» and indistinct attender of movie theatres, but also to the solid figure of the cineappassionata: the traditional female filmgoer. Identified as superficial subjects, useful only to a first phase of the development of the medium, women, however, in their Teens, had already begun to carve out a personal space in the reflection on cinema. In this respect Cinematografo educativo (1916) is exemplary, because it is a long essay written by the young feminist and pacifist pedagogue Angiolina Buracci. In her paper the author not only proves to know and attend the Italian cinemas from the very beginning of the movie business itself, but also revealed to have an unparalleled independence of hought among her contemporaries.

Bianca Virginia Camagni was an actress, director and producer from Milan that worked in the Italian movie industry from 1914 to 1922. She was a a very special kind of Diva, at variance with the mainstream of the times, because of her personality, films, collaborations and extensive network of relationships that she built around her. Camagni launched an appreciated career as a screenwriter and director and then she formed her own production house, Camagni Films. Even knowing the incredible success that she achieved by critics, the name of Bianca Virginia Camagni is mainly remembered in the cliché of a Diva that wanted to be a director. The waste of her movies and written testimonies about her experience helped to suppress her authorship. But this hole in the fonts and the reason of her discontinuity in the Italian movie industry acquires more subjective aspects and a personal decision that becames even a political value.

The essay deals with the problem of working women and hand colouring in Italy between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. It moves from some general issues, such as the relation between the colouring trade and the other professions involved with the diffusion of modernity; the continuity with other colouring praxis (i.e. photography); the possibility of framing the phenomenon in a tradition of hidden working women. After a synthetic reconstruction of the general context, the text investigates working women and division of labour in the Roman laboratories of Cines between 1905 and 1910. The main sources of the investigation are journals, magazines and handbooks of photography and cinematography, together with other sources testifying the state of feminine work in Italy during this period.