Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema (review)

This book examines the relationship between the role of the diva film and what the author calls Italy’s “eccentric modernity” (254). Divas, or female film stars (chief among them Francesca Bertini [1892–1985], Lyda Borelli [1884–1959], and Pina Menichelli [1890–1984]) dominated the Italian imagination in the years of early and silent film. Within this context, Dalle Vacche asserts, the diva is “a modern phenomenon that ‘mimed’ a pre-modern form” (255). In contrast to film’s concern with diachronicity, she observes, lies the diva film’s interest in synchronicity: “Who am I now?” the diva seems always to be asking herself. Put in different terms, the conflict within the diva (as well as within the poetics of the genre) is that of culture in transition between nineteenth-century decadentism and twentieth-century modernity.

Dalle Vacche’s analysis is centered on both the temporal forms and their visual correlatives at play within the genre: the tension between Henri Bergson’s élan vital and the memento mori and the arabesque and the serpentine as their visual metaphors. French philosopher Henri Bergson’s 1907 Creative Evolution “theorized about the existence of élan vital, a sensualist impulse mobilizing all matter all the time, in defiance of either the cold chronology of history or of time’s linearity” (27).¹ Bergson’s influence, for Dalle Vacche, is to be seen in the opposition to plot-driven American films; diva films, in contrast, are “accidental, erratic, uneven, badly plotted, and unpredictable in their developments,” a function of Bergsonian spontaneity, energy, imagination (10–11). In contradistinction to this life-affirming impulse is its opposite, the memento mori. Dalle Vacche is at her strongest when examining the ambiguously shared visual analogs of these impulses. She names serpentine trails of cigarette smoke, withering roses, and wine as well as “veils, screens, feathers and curtains,” all of which speak as much of dreams and rebirth as of the fleeting passage of time (29).

The idea behind these analyses is that they are instructive for our understanding of the diva as a singular cultural construction: the typical diva is at once a femme fatale, a modern woman, and, most significantly, a mater dolorosa, a quality that serves to distinguish her from other European versions of the femme fatale or, in American films, from the figure of the vamp. Dalle Vacche’s most interesting observations revolve around the diva film’s social consciousness, that is, the ways in which the diva film genre developed in close response to, on the one hand, the perception that Italian men were becoming increasingly corrupt and, on the other hand, the ways Italian women at once absorbed and resisted this corruption. Caught between a pull toward increasingly modern attitudes and the continued lure of traditional roles, the “preoccupation with men and women redefining themselves is absolutely dominant in the social and cinematic imagination of the period” (3). She connects her argument to in versus out discoveries in science (X-rays, radium, radioactive decay, and the theory of relativity) that altered “notions of energy, being, substance, and visibility [and thus] upset the equivalence between surface and depth, [and] . . . reshaped definitions of masculinity and femininity, gender roles and sexual orientation, biological features and physical appearances” (3). Thus, one finds in the diva film “an alarming survey of major social problems, such as prostitution, adultery, and out-of-wedlock births,” hence “the documentary streak buried in the diva film’s overcrowded wardrobes or in its arabesque-like plots” set in beautiful, sumptuous, natural and built environments (253). In other words, though the genre did not necessarily break new ground in the Italian cinematic avant-garde, it did contribute to a new awareness of “the Italian diva [as] a sado-masochistic spectacle at odds with agency and self-esteem” (256).

And here, with the question of agency, lies my only quibble with this extraordinarily rich and fascinating book: I am not entirely convinced by the ascription...