You won’t find anything about me / in this film

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Non troverete nulla di me in questo film
[You won’t find anything about me in this film]

Eleonora Duse, considered the greatest stage actress of all time, the woman who revolutionized acting, starred in only one film in 1916. For film, which was silent at the time, the actress chose to adapt Cenere, a novel by Grazia Deledda. During the process she placed herself before the lens as a contemporary performer. But the new medium, which increasingly challenged theaters, overshadowed her natural creativity. The camera became “the beast” in her eyes, and the completed film did not convince critics. The resulting failure put Duse in such crisis that she advised herself not to go see “that asinine.”

Directed by Cosimo Terlizzi, the show Non troverete nulla di me in questo film relates articles published upon the film’s release and Duse’s letters to her daughter, texts that become the voice of the actress’s only film testimony.

A voice that, interpreted by Fiorenza Menni in dialogue with Luca Maria Baldini’s live soundtrack, brings out all the strength of the woman by granting a new and surprising meaning to one of the most controversial films in the history of silent cinema.

Notes from the authors

“The Divine,” of whom we have no visual or sound recordings of her performances, would leave a “living” trace in history with Cenere. She worked on the filming as if she were facing a “beast” to be tamed. Concerned about the camera and her perhaps overly objective eye/eye. But expectations for her entry into filmmaking were disappointed. The film was a flop. In reading the letters that Duse wrote to her daughter during the making of the film, I understood the force of that act and the need to do it justice. I consider this new look at the film of mine an act of love toward the woman and the actress.
Cosimo Terlizzi

I love giving voice to a silent film, words should always come later: after the landscape where one is leaning, after the perception of the body, after thoughts. In Cenere, Duse used her body as a privileged place to “give”: this was the verb with which she summarized her interpretive work, the verb she used to evoke what is generically – with much inaccuracy – called “acting.” I think that Eleonora Duse is so exceptionally interesting, that she is so powerful, precisely because of the way she always keeps her thoughts and emotions in dialogue. Of the highest quality the former and free and aware the latter. I take great pleasure in giving voice to those words, over images that need to tremble and then burn.
Fiorenza Menni

I start from the creation of diegetic sound, and then destroy and transform it. The sonic dimensional planes merge, the parts are reversed: and here music becomes diegetic sound and ambient sound becomes barrier-free music.
Luca Maria Baldini

Credits

Voice: Fiorenza Menni
Original music and live soundtracking: Luca Maria Baldini
Concept and direction: Cosimo Terlizzi
Produced by Ateliersi-Luca Maria Baldini-Cosimo Terlizzi
Supported by Asolo Musica e Asolo Art Film Festival
In collaboration with Agorà

Cenere
(silent film)
Direction: Febo Mari
Performers: Eleonora Duse, Febo Mari
Production: Ambrosio, 1916
Restored by the Cineteca del Friuli in collaboration with the Cineteca Sarda in Cagliari from a nitrate print from the George Eastman House in Rochester. 808 m.
Duration: 44′

Sources

Eleonora Duse’s letters to her daughter are preserved in the Eleonora Duse Archive of the Institute for Theater and Melodrama of the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice.

Bibliography

Grazia Deledda, Cenere, Nuova Antologia, Roma, 1904

Oreste Cimoroni, Vita della Duse, Garzanti, Milano, 1940

Maria Ida Biggi, a cura di, Ma pupa, Henriette Le lettere di Eleonora Duse alla figlia Enrichetta Bullough, Marsilio, Venezia, 2010

Sitography

Azzurra Camoglio, a cura di, Scheda del film Cenere, in Enciclopedia del Cinema in Piemonte, http://www.torinocittadelcinema.it/schedafilm.php?film_id=6

Marta King, Cenere: il rapporto Deledda-Duse, in “Sardegna Mediterranea. Semestrale di cultura”, http://web.tiscali.it/miepgg/cenere.htm

Eleonora Duse e Cenere alla Cineteca Italiana, in “Sempre in penombra. Archivio del cinema muto”, 27 novembre 2008: https://sempreinpenombra.com/2008/11/27/eleonora-duse-e-cenere-alla-cineteca-italiana/