7. Fragment and Failure

7. Fragment and Failure Hedda Gabler (Giovanni Pastrone, Itala Film, 1920)

Angela Dalle Vacche

In times of economic crisis and historical transformation, cinematic versions of prestigious literary texts may produce disappointing results. This feeling of disappointment or lost opportunity may loom even larger when radically different cultural sensibilities meet on-screen. In the case of Italian film director and producer Giovanni Pastrone’s (1883–1959)1 encounter with Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), the result is all the more awkward and difficult to evaluate since only a fragmentary version of his film adaptation of Hedda Gabler (1920) has survived. Hedda Gabler was developed for the production company Itala Film in Turin. This meant a regional set-up without any adequate vertical integration of production, distribution, or exhibition on a national level. Despite the failure of this project, something historically valuable can be learnt from Pastrone’s production. In 1920, Italian film cameras could move within a closed frame, but Friedrich W. Murnau’s mobile framing with permeable borders had not yet appeared as a component of film style. Overall, Pastrone’s use of the point-of-view shot, intertitles, and the close-up, as well as his approach to costumes and reliance on objects, struggles to compensate

1 Giovanni Pastrone directed Hedda Gabler under the pseudonym Piero Fosco, which he used during the years 1915–1919 (Encyclopedia Britannica).

for the absence of camera movement in the surviving fragment. This chapter situates the weaknesses of Pastrone’s Hedda Gabler within a period of stagnation that clashes with its director’s pioneering reputation due to his monumental, operatic, and orientalist epic Cabiria (1915). The stakes involved in the passage of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890) from Norway to Italy, from Protestantism to Catholicism, and from spoken language to written intertitles become easier to appreciate if the problems faced by Pastrone are situated in an appropriate context, which will allow them to resonate. The role of Hedda Gabler was played by film diva Italia Almirante Manzini. A superstar in the Italian film industry, Almirante Manzini had developed an operatic, hieratic, and statuesque acting style that escalated her into the ranks of “divas”. In contrast to a “star”, the term “diva” articulated a tripartite persona fed by three cultural types at the turn of the century: the modern woman who resists patriarchal conventions; the vamp, or femme fatale, from Northern Europe; and the mater dolorosa, or suffering single mother, who becomes a social outcast (see Dalle Vacche 2008 for further discussion of the Italian diva film). Even if Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler was written by 1890, the character is deeply attached to her powerful father, a military man. She is also indifferent to the idea of working. Thus, she does not qualify as a modern woman eager to make a living for herself. Furthermore, Almirante Manzini’s Hedda Gabler as a destroyer of men and self-destructive femme fatale was not compatible with the frequent implantation of the Catholic mater dolorosa within the operatic diva from Southern Europe. Possibly due to its origin in Catholicism, the facet of mater dolorosa remains outside of Pastrone’s Hedda Gabler adaptation and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. After all, Pastrone was working in Turin, an Italian city influenced by French Positivism and secularism. On stage, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler continues to be a masterpiece and a living text because it changes according to which actress impersonates this role.

Language and the Self

Unfortunately, even though Pastrone’s images become lifelike, thanks to their movement on screen, Ibsen’s text struggles with outdated conventions instead of acquiring a new life of its own through silent cinema. In the history of European theatre, Henrik Ibsen is a towering figure: one of the most famous playwrights in the world after Shakespeare. Inspired by figures such as Macbeth and Hamlet, Ibsen anticipated modern psychology’s discovery that human beings make decisions based more on intuition and emotion than on cognitive reasoning. Ibsen’s creative energy went into developing extremely complex characters whom no interpretation can fully master. Their profound personae cannot be explained by nationality, class, or gender alone. Since Freudian psychoanalysis emerged right after Ibsen’s generation, the Scandinavian dramatist was unaware of the role played by the unconscious. Instead of relying on Freud, Ibsen was in touch with the irrational side of the human experience through the Danish philosopher and dissident Protestant Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855).2 Filled with anxiety to succeed and paranoia about failure, Ibsen’s works powerfully dramatise the pressures of a Protestant ethos based on public scrutiny. In the wake of this social imperative, darkness and depression inhabit his male and female creatures. Haunted by the necessity of public transparency, Ibsen was the first modern playwright to explore suicide in ordinary life. Due to how Ibsen’s characters exist fundamentally alone in the world and before God, and deprived as they are of any chance of spiritual mediation or social forgiveness, a sense of tragic failure often prevails over their melodramatic reversals of fortune. This is not to say that Ibsen ignores or dismisses the poetics of melodrama. Rather, his sense of existential angst is imbued with enough irreversible finality to override melodramatic coincidences. As interested in irrational states of mind as Kierkegaard was, Ibsen’s prose stands out not only for its

2 See De Figuereido 2019; see also Jensen 2019. Additional sources on Ibsen include Moi 2006 and Alonge 1995. On Søren Kierkegaard and Scandinavia, see Ferguson 2017.

democratic simplicity, but above all for its mathematical precision, depth, and subtlety in describing slippages of consciousness. Famous for charging the bourgeois living room with realist conflict, he was modern enough to introduce the problem of self-destruction in the literature of his own time through the ordinary language of daily life. Every single word and punctuation sign, every single adjective and use of tense is carefully chosen. With Ibsen, every banal word counts; it is irreplaceable, and it remains unforgettable. No wonder James Joyce (1882–1941) admired him so much. A master of the well-made play without loose ends and with a careful chain of causes and effects, Ibsen’s plots are so psychologically complex that they do not lend themselves easily to silent cinema. There, spoken words are inevitably constricted to intertitles. One must admit that Pastrone faced an extremely difficult adaptation by working in a medium with no live language.

Ibsen and Italy

Every filmic adaptation is an encounter between cultural sensibilities and industrial circumstances. The journey from Ibsen’s text to Pastrone’s film cannot start without some preliminary information on Ibsen’s long sojourns in Italy. The tragic darkness of Ibsen’s modernist realism in Hedda Gabler strikes a note of contrast against the light and colours of the Mediterranean. This is not to say that his prose becomes lighter and more colourful in the wake of his trips to the South. Restrained and analytical at all times, his language never becomes rebellious or impulsive. This is the case because he holds on to bourgeois respectability without ever questioning the social imperative of a stable self. His sense of tragedy derives from his very bourgeois attachment to this impeccable façade. Consequently, for him, the blind spots of personal choice are always responsible for self-defeat. Social acceptance can be achieved only after the individual experiences enough public shame and social scandal that the status quo of bourgeois values prevails. Public opinion requires, and rewards, individuals’ accountability to social institutions. The Italian dramatist Scipio Slataper (1888–1915) reports that Ibsen was based in Rome from 1864 to 1868, and from 1878 to 1885

(1916, 99). However, he had no knowledge of nineteenth-century Italian literature. Despite his extended stays in Rome, he never read or met Carducci, D’Annunzio, Pascoli, Verga, Scarfoglio, Serao (Slataper 199). All these Italian writers, however, came to know Ibsen through Eleonora Duse (1858–1924), the most important actress in Italy; she performed the Norwegian playwright’s works from stage to stage whilst travelling all over the world. Ibsen’s geographical familiarity with Northern Italy and Rome stands in a paradoxical relationship with his cultural disconnection from Italian intellectual life. The point of mediation between the Scandinavian author and the Italian literary sphere came through, once and for all, thanks to the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). In his Prison Notebooks (1929, 35), Gramsci’s discussion of Ibsen’s Nora, from A Doll’s House (1879), became very famous. Here, Gramsci subordinated an analysis of changing gender roles to class identity. More specifically, Gramsci’s writings on the theatre and the cinema offer a conflicting array of statements on the new woman. In his 1917 review of Henrik Ibsen’s Doll’s House, written for the socialist paper L’Avanti, Gramsci celebrates Nora Helmer’s sense of self and her desire to seek an independent life. Unfortunately, Gramsci argues, this model of emancipation had not fully implanted itself in Italian life because the bourgeois Italian woman tends to prefer the freedom of coquetry or the hypocrisy of charitable sacrifice to Nora’s dignity and sincerity. Instead of analysing the differences between Norwegian and Italian modernity, Gramsci concludes that Italian middle-class women live between the stereotypes of the frivolous socialite and the mater dolorosa. Gramsci contrasts this with the case of two proletarian women who, with the consent of their husbands, left their families to achieve a fuller inner life. By contextualising Ibsen’s heroine in pre-WWI Italy, Gramsci indicates that the sources of a new moral code leading to legal reform can be found only in the ethos of the working class. The diva film was not enough to capture Gramsci’s sympathy. Gramsci’s faith in the potential of the working class to change the perception of gender relations stemmed from his positive view of modernity and industrialisation. Even though proletarian ethics were more in touch with historical change, Gramsci himself

exhibited fairly traditional tastes when it came to matters of art (Dalle Vacche 2008, 52–53; Forgacs and Nowell-Smith 1985). Despite his comments on the women’s movement in Italy and Norway, Gramsci was more conservative than it may seem. He remained attached to the stage and could not bring himself to side openly with the dubious medium of the cinema for children, seamstresses, and governesses on their day off. Intensely critical of the Italian film diva Lyda Borelli (1884–1959), Gramsci had to be aware of Pastrone’s Cabiria (1915) starring Almirante Manzini. Yet, since he was sceptical of the cinema, Gramsci probably never saw Pastrone’s 1920 filmic version of Hedda Gabler, with Manzini again in the leading role. So steeped was Ibsen in his middle-class milieu and so concerned was Gramsci with the Italian working class that neither of them ever fully supported the struggle for female emancipation (see also Yalgın in this volume). Wary of extremist positions and equally interested in both women and men, Ibsen devoted his life to a scathing depiction of the Scandinavian bourgeoisie. Much more than gender, the hang-ups of the middle class, ranging from its highest to its lowest levels, became Ibsen’s lifelong subject of investigation. For Ibsen, to criticise the middle class was a way to interrogate his own ego as an exploratory artist at odds with a respectable life, by confronting his own fears of public rejection and moral disapproval. The reception of Ibsen in Italy goes well beyond both Gramsci’s comments and Pastrone’s adaptation of Hedda Gabler. By the time silent Italian cinema had reached its golden period prior to World War I, Ibsen’s fame was solid. In 1916, a year before she starred in her one and only film, Cenere (Ashes, 1917), Eleonora Duse (1858–1924) committed to a film on Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea. Due to a car accident while Duse was travelling, the film was cancelled. In 1918, Ermete Zacconi, the male equivalent of Duse on the Italian stage, worked with set decorator and director A. G. Caldiera on a cinematic adaptation of Ghosts for Milano Films. Zacconi’s performance is lost. In 1919, Febo Mari, an under-researched yet very talented protagonist of early Italian cinema, directed and acted in A Doll’s House, financed by his own production company, Mari Films, out of Turin. This film is also lost.

In 1922, director Nino Valentini relied too much on a Mediterranean setting for The Lady from the Sea with actress Renée Pelar in the role of Ellida Wangel, which Eleonora Duse was simultaneously touring the country with (IbsenStage). Due to Valentini’s unhappy choice of landscape, the film reviews were negative, so that Valentini’s filmic adaptation of The Lady from the Sea stands out as an example of geographical displacement (see the filmography in this volume).

Discrepancies: Literary Text and Filmic Fragment

What remains today of Pastrone’s appropriation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is very little, since out of an original nitrate print of circa 140 minutes, only a 24-minute fragment has survived (Cherchi Usai 1986). This means that different episodes have been strung together to feign some degree of narrative continuity. Briefly, the plot: Unhappily married to the scholar Giorgio Tesman (Oreste Bilancia), Hedda (Italia Almirante Manzini) meets again the brilliant writer Loevborg (Ettore Piergiovanni), whose youthful love she had rejected earlier on. Thanks to Thea Elvsted’s (Diana D’Amore) emotional support, the young artist has already published a successful book and has now produced a second manuscript of great value. A rising star on the Norwegian intellectual scene, Loevborg finds himself competing for a university post. His rival is the goodnatured but not so bright Tesman. With a wedding ring on her finger, Hedda walks into Loevborg’s modest apartment. Soon after a long kiss rekindles the lovers’ passion, serious complications loom on their horizon. To begin with, Hedda is jealous of her former schoolmate, Thea, to whom Loevborg has dedicated his first book. Hedda has also been bored to death since her expensive honeymoon with Tesman in the Italian Alps. She is restless, but prudish enough to reject the idea of a ménage-à-trois proposed by her Macchiavellian family friend, Judge Brack (Vittorio Rossi-Pianelli). He is the only character who can do whatever he wants and seems unconcerned about what other people might think of him. He is consistently better informed than all the other characters. He operates above anyone’s approval. He embodies the rule of law, but he is lawless.

Judge Brack has known Hedda, Giorgio, and Loevborg for a long time, but he is a false friend, a corrupt individual, and a regular visitor to Diana Ragnhild’s (Letizia Quaranta) brothel, where Loevborg gets into fights. Diana Ragnhild’s boudoir is located inside an apartment building. This kind of domestic architecture is suggestive of modernity and it fits the middle-class milieu. Instead of being surrounded by a beautiful garden, as Hedda’s villa is, Diana’s place is accessible from the street. These details alone spell out a transition from the grand to the petty bourgeoisie. In order to assuage Italian censorship (Dalle Vacche 2008, 92), Pastrone makes Diana’s brothel look like a fun-loving salon of male and female friends. This environment, however, is quite explosive because of the heavy drinking there along with the reckless firing of pistols. Without any scruples, Diana does not hesitate to throw the older Judge Brack out her door as soon as she becomes tired of him. The only male character not involved with Diana’s brothel seems to be Hedda’s husband. He cherishes a very domestic lifestyle, all alone in his study filled with books, drowned in dust. The character of Brack is at odds with comparable figures in Italian silent cinema. In fact, Brack is a strong male and a womaniser who never loses control in difficult situations. In silent Italian cinema, male roles were usually reserved for refined, weak men who would waste their lives gambling, seducing women, or paying for their sins in some forsaken colonial post. An evil creature, Judge Brack is perfectly capable of moving among different levels of the bourgeoisie; he is a guilt-free, rational creature who uses all his powers to amuse himself and become more powerful. Despite his legal profession, he cherishes immoral behaviour. Ibsen’s plot further complicates itself once the manipulative Hedda manages to temporarily separate Thea from Loevborg. Thus, she can encourage Loevborg, a former alcoholic, to attend an academic banquet in honour of her husband. Besides challenging the young writer to socialise without drinking, Hedda intercepts his second manuscript, which discusses the future of humankind. So jealous is she that modest Thea has been involved in Loevborg’s career that Hedda

gives him one of her father’s dangerous pistols. Well aware of Loevborg’s frailty, Hedda assumes he will commit suicide with a shot to the head. She wants to be the instigator of a heroic and quick death that celebrates the lofty ideals of Greek antiquity. Her favourite, youthful memory of Loevborg repeatedly comes up when she thinks of him with vine leaves around his curly hair.3 Little does she know that the young man, drunk and confused, will shoot himself in the lower stomach, thus staging an accidental act of self-castration. This theme is reinforced by the fact that Hedda’s father walks around limping. Such an additional reminder of castration amplifies Hedda’s dangerous familiarity with pistols. It also underlines that the local grand bourgeoisie is in a state of crisis and that its power has been replaced by lower-level administrators such as Judge Brack. Even though they seem to apply the rules, they do not personally follow them. As he spies on Hedda from behind a curtain at Loevborg’s deathbed, Brack’s facial expression spells out contempt for the writer’s stupidity. Now he is ready to blackmail the arrogant Hedda with the threat of scandal. Nothing could be more unbearable than public humiliation in a Protestant society where personal relations must be publicly transparent for the sake of the community’s well-being. His pleasure in her surrender to his erotic ambitions is self-evident. Yet the general’s daughter will not humiliate herself by accepting Brack’s advances in exchange for his silence. Faithful to the use of off-screen space and in line with Ibsen’s original text, Pastrone’s film ends with a rejection of visual spectacle in favour of darkness and iconophobia. After leaving her living room and becoming invisible, Hedda commits suicide with the second pistol she inherited from her father. This elimination of the image suggests that self-annihilation and secrecy are preferable to public exposure. A destroyer of men and competitive with other women, Hedda destroys herself without ever becoming Loevborg’s muse. A failed

3 This idealised image was probably lifted from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872).

aristocrat, her perfectionism, grandeur, and thirst for intellectual recognition make her incompatible with the mediocrities of modern life and the economic uncertainties of a society in transformation. Unlike Hedda, Thea has had the courage to ignore scandal. She left her own husband and children to follow Loevborg for the sake of his writing career. She helped him in his struggle with alcohol, and she believed in his talent. Thea is the ultimate anti-conformist petty bourgeois who adjusts and moves forward. After Loevborg’s death, she becomes Tesman’s loyal assistant, thus turning his pedantic inclinations into a new source of affection and intellectual productivity. Through the character of Hedda Gabler, one can begin to set up an imaginary dialogue between Ibsen and Pastrone. A man of culture, Pastrone dabbled more in art history and opera than in literature. Yet, aware of Ibsen’s stature, the Italian director was eager for a prestigious topic to overcome the stagnation of the silent Italian cinema of 1920.

Fig. 1. Segundo de Chomón’s overprinted titles for Hedda Gabler (1920). Courtesy of La Cineteca del Friuli.

During the making of Hedda Gabler, Pastrone and his co-author, Gero Zambuto (1887–1944), worked with the amazing Segundo de Chomón (1871–1929). Chomón was a Spanish cinematographer and an inventor of special effects who was famous all over Europe for his dream sequences, intertitles, and use of colour. Perhaps spurred on by Ibsen’s exacting language, Segundo de Chomón came up with at least 30 overprinted titles or somewhat transparent verbal superimpositions (Fig. 1). Considering that the original film was 140 minutes long, with a total of 185 captions, 155 were traditional intertitles, but significantly, 75 percent of these intertitles were locutional – that is, words spoken by the characters to each other. What is most interesting is that Pastrone and Zambuto experimented with free, indirect discourse. In the hospital sequence, when Hedda rushes to the bed of her dead lover, the Mephistophelian Brack discloses how Loevborg’s accidental death took place. In this case, a flashback would mean that the judge was present, and is remembering. The free, indirect discourse is also justifiable, assuming that the judge heard by word of mouth that Loevborg, the writer, was desperately looking for his lost manuscript. For the record, Pastrone uses the point-of-view shot whenever someone is reading a letter or when printed matter is involved. Despite the Italian director’s interest in subjectivity, however, during an intense dialogue between Hedda and Loevborg, the shot/reverse shot is replaced by the use of cutaway shots with the two characters facing the audience (Fig. 2). This frontal stance was anachronistic in 1920. This example alone proves that Pastrone’s eagerness for innovation was undermined by an inadequate editing approach, with the consequent loss of eye-line matches stitching one shot to the next. In short, the filmic adaptation of Hedda Gabler delivers old-fashioned results, were it not for Segundo de Chomón’s contribution. Famous for his film melodramas with film divas modelled on the singing prima donnas of Italian opera, Pastrone’s spectacular sensibility was very far from Ibsen’s linguistic restraint. Whereas the latter was an author keen on a microscopic verbal scale, the Italian director specialised in monumental sets. Stifled by too many decorative details in Hedda’s living room, Pastrone’s taste for excess is a major problem in his

Fig. 2. Ernesto Loevborg (Ettore Piergiovanni) and Hedda Gabler (Italia Almirante Manzini) in Hedda Gabler (1920). Courtesy of La Cineteca del Friuli.

literary adaptation. By contrast, in the original play Ibsen intentionally focuses on the plainness of 36 hours of boredom, oblivion, mediocrity, emptiness, and two deaths. Pastrone’s reliance on too many props waters down the verbal power of Ibsen’s tragedy. Yet his kitsch, orientalist mise-en-scène fully conveys Tesman’s petty bourgeois status. He simply cannot keep up with the prosperous middle class from which Hedda comes. As a married woman, Hedda Gabler is no longer the general’s daughter with many privileges but is instead Hedda Tesman on a budget. Forever restless, she longs for something heroic that no longer exists in the new modern world she lives in. Accordingly, Pastrone preserves Ibsen’s title, Hedda Gabler. This verbal choice spells out the young wife’s rejection of her new, married situation. The problem is that the Italian director forgets to include the portrait of the defunct general in Hedda’s living room. How can Hedda Gabler, the character, become Hedda Gabler, the text, without the gen-

eral’s portrait to mark that she will always remain the daughter of a military man, no matter whom she marries? In the literary version, Hedda burns Loevborg’s book, but, in Pastrone’s living room, there is no stove. Pastrone’s set never includes any windows. Notwithstanding this lacuna in the interior set design, the film includes exterior scenes in Hedda’s garden. Pastrone’s adaptation features only doors and curtains, as if daily life was out of touch with transparency and could welcome only secret agreements. In Ibsen’s text, by contrast, an adjacent veranda allows light to stream into the living room. In contrast to how Patrone’s Hedda seems to live on a set without visible windows, only Diana’s well-known brothel is marked by tall windows. Clearly this space is used by many guests unconcerned with public reputation. These are inexplicable omissions which even the loss of footage cannot justify. Could these be mistakes due to the chaotic circumstances of Pastrone’s film production, which involved conflict with both Itala Film, the Board of Censors, and, as a result, a heavily delayed release of the film (Alovisio 2007, 193–95)?

Italia Almirante Manzini as Hedda In terms of costuming, claustrophobia rules as soon as Hedda wears a beautiful long, silky gown with a butterfly on the front. She is the precious butterfly who cannot fly anywhere. By becoming a married woman, she has put herself in a trap. She is a rebel who seeks approval. In contrast to this stunning outfit, her black clothing looks like funeral attire meant to purge her body of any sexual longing. The repressed sexuality of Italian divas found expression in the scattering of flowers in bloom and doomed to wither across the mise-en-scène. Yet Pastrone’s costumes for Hedda are fit exclusively for stiff public appearances. These clothes strike a note of contrast with domestic chores. They are also at odds with activities outdoors. Constantly anxious about how she looks in public, Hedda is far more elegant than Thea, who always wears the same modest black coat. The general’s daughter is eager to compete with her neighbour, Lady Falk, whose expensive villa Tesman has bought for his new bride. At one point, the film fragment even includes an elegant tea served by the Tesmans to Thea, Loev-

borg, and Brack in the garden of their villa. Despite the beautiful lawn and the late summer weather, the female dynamics remain haunting and haunted by secrecy and rivalry. In the original text, Ibsen shows us Hedda sitting down quite a bit. By contrast, Pastrone’s Hedda often stands up when she is alone with Loevborg. This vertical approach might be due to the director’s wish to underline how tall his actress was. Height can grant an unusual degree of poise and authority, even to a contradictory figure such as Hedda Gabler. Manzini’s interpretation of Hedda does not quite fit an Italian diva or prima donna of the operatic stage. In Italian opera, the diva struggles against men. In the diva film, women are often raped, exploited as prostitutes, or abandoned by selfish male figures. Until recently associated wrongly with escapist values, the Italian diva film is much closer to a protofeminist docudrama. With Ibsen, men and women alike struggle because of Hedda. She destroys Loevborg, dismisses Tesman, is ungrateful towards her aunt Giulietta, who helps with money, and despises Thea. In the fragment, however, melodramatic acting takes over tragedy only once, during a self-contained flashback. As a young woman, Hedda tries to shoot Loevborg. After aiming her pistol at him, she throws herself onto the grass and mimes an attack of hysterics with all the customary convulsions (Figs. 3–4). In contrast, for her characterisation of Hedda as a married woman, Manzini comes up with something more modern. As Silvio Alovisio points out, her acting style embraces Ibsen’s dictum of limited expressiveness for the sake of psychological complexity (2016, 97). From young rebel practising her pistols outdoors to poised married woman trapped in her own living room, Manzini deepens her character through stiff or static postures. She repeatedly uses her hands to signify Hedda’s silent unhappiness. Meanwhile, her long gazes seem to speak for themselves. Pastrone’s Hedda Gabler also features sparse use of close-ups underlining not only faces and hands, but, most importantly, crucial objects such as pistols and books. For example, Hedda hides Loevborg’s book inside her drawer, next to her father’s case containing two pistols (Fig. 5). When Judge Brack opens the case of pistols to check if anything is missing, he handles this it as if looking inside a book.

Figs. 3 and 4. Italia Almirante Manzini in the title role in Hedda Gabler (1920). Courtesy of La Cineteca del Friuli.

Fig. 5. Hedda Gabler (1920). Courtesy of La Cineteca del Friuli.

The reasons why the prestigious role of Hedda Gabler went to Italia Almirante Manzini are worth speculating on. An aristocratic marriage had obliged the blonde Lyda Borelli to retire from acting in 1917. Furthermore, between 1915 and 1920, Francesca Bertini (1892–1985) starred in so many films that Manzini may have emerged as the best alternative. Inside Pastrone’s production house, Itala Film of Turin, Manzini was competitive with Pina Menichelli. Specialising in femme fatale roles, Menichelli was the blonde Sicilian that Pastrone had launched with Il Fuoco (The Fire) and used again successfully in Tigre Reale (Royal Tiger) in 1916. Menichelli and Manzini were exactly the same age, whereas their rivals, Francesca Bertini and Lyda Borelli, were slightly older. Manzini’s ranking in the Italian film industry, however, is open to speculation. Many of her films have been lost, and the reviews of her work are more impressionistic than specialised. It is thus extremely difficult to reconstruct the stages of her career. We know that she died in 1941 of a venomous insect bite in São Paolo, Brazil, where she had emigrated.

Even though Manzini was considered a diva of silent Italian cinema, her interpretation of Ibsen’s character intentionally leaves out that special aura of suffering spirituality that a Catholic diva must always have as a mater dolorosa. There is nothing maternal about Hedda, who loathes her pregnancy and wishes to hide her enlarged belly. From Ibsen’s text, the reader learns that Hedda is unhappily pregnant. In Pastrone’s manuscript, there is no reference whatsoever to childbearing. Ibsen’s Hedda is totally secular and materialistic. In Pastrone’s Hedda Gabler, Manzini clearly stays away from the gestures and postures of the mater dolorosa, or suffering mother. This latter cultural type, together with the New Woman of Modernity, was crucial in the construction of the Italian film diva. In the role of Hedda Gabler, Manzini does not embody the New Woman of Modernity with a profession of her own. In contrast, Thea may not be a regular employee, but she constantly puts herself to work. Exhausted by her efforts with Loevborg, and as the mother of numerous children, she even takes a nap at Hedda’s house. Eager to shine in the good society of Kristiania (Oslo), Hedda spends all her time at home, except for a brief visit to Loevborg’s modest room.

(Im)moral values

Whereas the Italian diva film relies on a centrifugal relationship with the ills of the Italian patriarchy, Ibsen’s literary approach is self-consciously centripetal. Line after line, his text deepens our understanding of how a small group of characters lends itself to myriad internal permutations. For example, Brack’s proposal of a ménage-à-trois does happen in a Platonic sense as soon as Thea switches her attention from Loevborg to Tesman. Likewise, the naïve Giorgio is so financially dependent on his aunt Giulietta that his marriage to Hedda slips inadvertently into an economic ménage-à-trois. The real problem, however, is that Ibsen’s shifting configurations function well, thanks to a highly sophisticated verbal text, which Pastrone’s intertitles never approximate. Ibsen’s and Pastrone’s Hedda Gabler fits the type of the soulless femme fatale. In keeping with this model, Manzini’s Hedda invokes the American silent film star Theda Bara (1855–1955). In her

famous film, A Fool There Was (Frank Powell 1915), Bara is a generic social evil comparable to alcohol and bankruptcy, indeed her character is listed as “The Vampire” in the film’s credits. Because Bara’s character is an enigmatic symptom of social unrest, she has no family and no circle of friends. Likewise, Hedda’s friends are out of town because she has returned from her honeymoon before the end of summer. Theda Bara is a sort of negative force that operates outside any level of causality. She is evil for evil’s sake. In the case of Ibsen’s and Pastrone’s Hedda Gabler, female jealousy combined with economic limitation leads to suicide – not because of guilt, but because of public humiliation. Pastrone’s quasi-surrealist composition – with one shot containing numerous accusatory eyes – spells out the triumph of Protestant shame over Catholic guilt (Fig. 6). Alcoholism is another reason why Ibsen’s tragedy is similar to American silent cinema rather than to the maternal melodramas of Italian silent cinema. In Powell’s film, Bara strikes and succeeds in transforming each man into a social outcast. Then she exits the narrative, completely unscathed and unpunished. This evil woman can seduce a husband away from his wife because her appeal is comparable to drinking. A frequent theme in Scandinavian literature and Danish silent cinema, alcoholism never appears in early and silent Italian cinema. Compared to the American, orientalist Theda Bara, Ibsen’s Hedda is a much more complex character. One can detect in her Ibsen’s own insecurities over a clash between radical creativity and his own bourgeois way of living. To some extent, Hedda, Loevborg, and Giorgio Tesman engage in a conceptual ménage-à-trois because they are all possible alter egos of Ibsen himself. What does it entail to be a productive artist in a modern world that is based on bourgeois profit if the artist is calling into question the moral values of the very same social class to which he belongs? In order to get to the heart of Hedda Gabler, one must revisit the role of Judge Brack. Always unpunished, even when he indulges in pleasures, Brack is the keeper of the status quo, a Satanic presence, and an ageing administrator who is too selfish to understand suicide. Untouched by alcoholism, rejected by Diana, and tolerated by Hedda, he is the trium-

Fig. 6. L’Assessore Brack (Vittorio Rossi Pianelli) and Hedda Gabler (Italia Almirante Manzini) in Hedda Gabler (1920). Courtesy of La Cineteca del Friuli.

phant and provincial side of the middle class described by Ibsen. He enjoys breaking the rules, but he never allows himself to lose control, either for a woman or for the bottle. Moreover, Brack is the ultimate, anti-intellectual pragmatist who does not care for books. Neither does Hedda, who as a young woman proves to be a very bad reader. For her, a book is interesting only if she can use it in the same competitive way as she handles a pistol. Unflappable and self-absorbed, Brack is incapable of understanding tragedy and too uncaring to analyse the social malaise that surrounds him. Without any moral values or intellectual ideals, he is the enemy of art, love, friendship, and thought. Filled with too many impossible dreams, Hedda is the opposite of Brack – even if these two figures share an equal thirst for power. Set next to Loevborg’s struggle with alcoholism and Hedda’s fear of failure, Brack is as cold as a mechanism that cannot look beyond or inside itself. He exempli-

fies total indifference towards existential issues and displays a hypocritical observance of social rules. Brack stands for a utilitarian bureaucracy in touch with present modernity, but without any vision of the future or understanding of the past. He consumes only in the present tense. With the exceptions of the cooperative Thea and obtuse Giorgio, all of the characters in Hedda Gabler struggle between pistols and books, because it is easier to shoot a pistol than to write or read a book. Set against Hedda’s rejection of childbearing and in competition with Loevborg’s alcoholism, Ibsen’s artistic creativity is the only and the best antidote to the philistine boredom of middle-class life. Thanks to his connections with books and art, suicide and social conventions, Ibsen anticipates the existentialist themes of authenticity, choice, self-expression, and nihilism which Jean-Paul Sartre explores decades later through his own philosophical engagement with the compensatory function of art. Unfortunately, Pastrone’s adaptation is structurally incapable of achieving the existential depth of Ibsen’s text due to the absence of spoken language. Possibly aware of a linguistic impasse, the Italian director turned to Segundo de Chomón to compensate for the innate limitations of his project. The mixture of tragic and melodramatic moments along with discrepancies between Ibsen’s descriptions of his sets and Pastrone’s set design confirm the climate of confusion plaguing the silent Italian film industry in 1920. Granted all these shortcomings, the surviving fragment of Hedda Gabler is extremely valuable for the ways in which it meditates on the bonds between aristocratic fathers and rebellious daughters. Instead of an oedipal narrative where a young woman replaces an old mother, in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, the challenge is less generational and more social. After the general’s death, with the disappearance of his portrait from the written page to the silent screen, Hedda’s suicide creates a vacuum in the social fabric which cannot be filled. Meanwhile, the intellectuals in this narrative become increasingly weak and marginal as academic research and creative writing retreat into the ivory tower of narrow domesticity.

In both Ibsen and Pastrone, there is a search for a new kind of leadership that is enlightened enough to rebalance the economic shifts of modernity in the arts and in society. Interestingly, three decades after Ibsen, Pastrone’s adaptation offers a diabolical solution to this problem in the corrupt figure of Brack. With the First World War just around the corner, one might say that Pastrone’s adaptation in 1920 – only two years before Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922 – proposes a first inkling of an inflexible will to power leading to dictatorial figures in the European thirties.

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