“ANDThe times of D’Annunzio went back and I, on the other hand, put all the papier-mâché aside, and no curtains, no velvets. All from the truth and all against the tide ». Like this Francesca Bertini told Gianluigi Rondiwho wrote about it on the Timehow was the adventure of Assunta Spinathe film that consecrated her “immortal diva”.
“No other artist could revive before the cinema screen a type of woman so varied, so complex, so different in her changing moods as Francesca Bertini managed to create and embody it” wrote an anonymous author in Letters, Arts, Varietiesin 1916, one of the many newspaper clippings of the time assembled by the Cineteca di Bologna on the occasion of the exhibition The clothes of dreamsin 2015.
And again: «Extraordinary photographs have arrived from Grado, of a crowd cheering frantically a vaporous image of a woman. Since the crowd is made up mostly of young people and the fluffy woman is Francesca Bertini, I have a great curiosity to know what is special about her who she managed to keep the myth of herself intact for many years and to pass it on intact to people who, when you stopped working in the cinema, were not yet born ».
The second life of Francesca Bertini
Flaminia Marinaro’s book on Francesca Bertini
There is truly a mystery hidden in the folds of Francesca Bertini’s story, which fascinated those who contemplated her from afar, but also those who knew and frequented her. On the cover of The latest divathe affectionate biography that Flaminia Marinaro, who knew her as a child, published for Fazi, there is one of those photos: the “fluffy” Bertini, jewels, a big hat and a charming look. The chapters of the story of Elena, daughter of Adelina, single mother, perhaps theater actress, later adopted by the Neapolitan property master Arturo Vitiello. Elena will be reborn in a second life, baptized Francesca by the great Eduardo Scarpetta: «From now on you will be called Francesca. Francesca Bertini. And you will be an actress. The actors, I recognize them by eye! ».
Francesca Bertini entered through the back door in lively Neapolitan theatrical environment who was little more than a child. She went from the ironing room to the stage when she was just seventeen, in the acclaimed 1909 production of Assunta Spinaintense southern melodrama by Salvatore Di Giacomo. Assunta Spina it was then transposed onto the screen in 1915. “Without curtains and velvets” as the actress told Rondi, carving out for herself the role of forerunner of truly revolutionary seasons in our cinema that would come much later.
«She had become Bertini, the real movie diva style model for high society ladieswith its innovative wide-brimmed hats »writes Flaminia Marinaro in The latest diva. «She was not pride, hers: her life was transforming her into a fantastic creature, with immense and light wings. Italy was living new days, there was something electric in the air. Overseas companies were being announced, Libya was being looked at. The Belle Époque was at the height of its splendor and Can-can still triumphed in cabarets. But to reflect those times it would have been the much younger and more powerful art of the cinema! And this gave her the right not to look back ”.
Memorable encounters
He never did. By 1915 she had already been cast in more than 50 films and her films were seen from Europe to Latin America, from Russia to the United States. With success, came the awareness of having to administer it and the certainty that one’s image was the most precious treasure. There is a delightful Rai video document ( youtube.com/ watch? v = qLGmX8UaJAI) that in 1982 she was still fully aware of her status as a diva, on the occasion of a visit to the archives of the Experimental Cinematography Center in which she complained that her films were not there, “mistreated” a patient employed and asked to re-enter the scene according to his taste. She was 91 years old. After all she was the first to write about herself, to administer their history, to resell their legend. An autobiography published in installments in 1938 in a film magazine was then revised and expanded, and became a book in 1969, Nothing else matters. In those pages, as in the numerous interviews he gave over time, he always claimed for himself a creative as well as a managerial role.
L ‘histoire d’un Pierrot.
The enormous success achieved by his first feature films, Histoire d’un Pierrot (1914), in which he performed en travesti, Blue blood (1914), Nelly the gigolette or the dancer from the black tavern (1915) and The lady of the camellias (1915), granted her the bargaining power that tycoons would have today and which she wisely used to get higher salaries and screenplay choice. Always leaving room for the legend: in 1917 they come out three films attributed to a certain Frank Bert, of whom it is said he was a male substitute for Bertini herself, but none of these films exist anymore, so it’s impossible to judge whether the negative reviews they received were well founded. Based on the surviving documentation, one can be sure that they guaranteed the diva multiple opportunities to enhance her glamor and sumptuous toilets. The image that Bertini has always wanted to convey is that of one princely life, made up of memorable encounters and still images destined to remain in history. No one before her, not even among the greats of the mute, whose gestures were certainly not minimalist, had studied poses and movements with equal skill: going down the stairs, brandishing the cigarette between her fingers like a weapon, setting the profile as if for a portrait, mirror yourself with pleasure.
At the end of the First World War, Bertini was probably the most powerful woman in Italian cinema, certainly the highest paid, and his authoritarian temperament, privileges and whims were so well known that they became objects of irony. In the short film Mariute (1918), Bertini played a double role, the peasant Mariute and herself: an extravagant star who sleeps until lunchtime and is regularly late on set. In her memoirs, her colleague Emilio Ghione, actor and director who had worked with her on more than one film, accused the scandalous salaries of Bertini and the other divas of having caused the first great crisis of Italian cinema, in the aftermath of the conflict world. Of course the reasons for the disaster are more complex, but that j’accuse something – of the status reached by the actress and the reaction to this by the male world – she tells it.
Marriage and decline
Looking at his filmography, one realizes that Bertini made films at the rate of four or five a year (1920 had 10), often assisted by the faithful director Roberto Roberti (pseudonym of Vincenzo Leone, Sergio’s father). She also noticed Fox who offered her a contract for Hollywood, but she refused. The marriage with Alfred Paul Cartier, Swiss banker, and the birth of their son Jean in 1921, his appearances on the screen slowed down: in a TV interview from the 1960s he argued: «My husband didn’t want me to go back to the cinema. At that time the wives were not made to work ». In reality, the archive of the National Cinema Museum of Turin preserves a letter that the actress wrote in 1935 to Alberto Fassini, director of Cines, asking him to help her get a part and a loan, confessing that she had gone through a difficult period and defining herself “Still beautiful, still young”. The unpleasant voice and an old-fashioned acting style did not facilitate his transition to sonorous. She still starred in only a couple of other films: The woman of a night (1931) and Odette (1935), remake of an old silent success of hers directed by Victorien Sardou, but she had to accept to be voiced by Giovanna Scotto. It will be Bernardo Bertolucci, in 1976, to pay homage to her by calling her to interpret a cameo of her, Sister Desolata, in Twentieth centurylast film of the latest diva.
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