The Last Bohemian Dream: on Nino Oxilia’s “Rapsodia Satanica” (1915):
manco questo me pare tanto esclusivo come Warm Bodies, però è più… antico, questo, ma sempre attuale…
This post is a follow-up to yesterday’s and focuses on the film I will introduce next week at the Barbican during the 3rd Fashion in Film Festival.
I would like to dedicate this post to all my friends developing projects that involve art, fashion and film.
Wartime evoked apocalyptic visions of death, but didn’t manage to dim the lights on that form of entertainment that had fascinated Italians since the early 1900s, cinema.
Directors kept on producing films while the country went through enormous sacrifices and young men left for the front carrying images of their favourite actresses with them, consolidating the legend of “divismo”, the obsessive diva cult of those years.
Hiding in its monuments, fountains and buildings esoteric and occult symbols and preserving in its local Egyptian museum mysterious papyruses emanating negative energies, Turin was already considered at the time a city with an intriguing supernatural side.
In 1915 Turin-born journalist, poet and writer Nino Oxilia set to shoot a new film, Rapsodia Satanica (Satanic Rhapsody), for the Cines production house. Directors favoured then historical, dramatic, comic and adventure films, but Oxilia displayed a cinematic taste of figurative origins.
Influenced by irrational atmospheres, early lightning experiments, paintings, an aestheticism that recalled Gabriele D’Annunzio’s, and ballets and films that blended theatre, music and a passion for costumes, Oxilia shot a Faustian story steeped in the phantasmagorical colours of dreams and grazed by a hint of melancholy.
The plot revolved around an elderly lady called Alba D’Oltrevita (literally “Dawn-Beyond-Life”), the owner of the Castle of Illusions, who makes a deal with the devil: she will regain youth, if she gives up romance. Yet, when Alba, now a reborn seductive Salome, meets two brothers, Tristano and Sergio, she fatally tempts them, breaking the pact with the devil.
Rapsodia Satanica introduced audiences to a new kind of cinema in which sound and images went together with art, architecture, dance, music and fashion, attacking the senses and disrupting traditional patterns.
The main inspirations for this film are to be traced back in experimental ballets such as the hymn to modernism entitled Excelsior, staged in 1881 and in 1908; in the experiments with figurative and rhythmic abstractions carried out in early Futurist films directed by Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra in 1910 and in Baldassarre Negroni’s Histoire d’un Pierrot (1913), shot with a musical accompaniment and screened with a synchronised score played live by an orchestra.
Actress Lyda Borelli, starring in the film as Alba D’Oltrevita, incarnated D’Annunzio’s feminine ideal, a tenebrous and sensual femme fatale. Journalist and critic Matilde Serao praised Borelli for her ability to transform herself in her films, adapting to different roles.
Yet, in Rapsodia Satanica Borelli went through a radical metamorphosis: from an elderly lady she turned into a wild Salome, then became a human butterfly à la Loïe Fuller and was finally transfigured by the camera into a high priestess of Eros and Thanatos.
This transformation was achieved also through Mariano Fortuny’s dresses that draped with naturalness on her body: Borelli’s play of veils and sensual motions called to mind the images of dancers at the opening of the Countess of Béarn’s theatre that Fortuny had restructured or his photographic portraits of a veiled Giorgia Clementi.
Seeking contaminations and amalgamating them with the most varied stimuli, Oxilia borrowed from Fortuny the pochoir, or stencilling, technique: while the versatile artist used it to decorate his precious fabrics, Oxilia’s stencilling in colour injected new life into the film.
Red, pink, yellow, blue and green created rich and complex chromatisms, amplifying motions, highlighting the scenes, giving life to a visual polyphony in which the details responded to one another in a harmonic ideal of beauty.
In his 1920 essay Il mio credo cinematografico novelist Lucio D’Ambra described cinema as “fantasy for the eyes” and predicted for the future frequent collaborations between this powerful medium and different artists. Oxilia anticipated D’Ambra with Rapsodia Satanica, claiming: “Cinema represents for me the sun, the light, it embodies beauty (…). Theatre and music produced melodrama; painting and storytelling gave life to cinema.”
Oxilia’s Rapsodia Satanica was the last dream of a bohemian: shot in 1915, the film was released two years later, after Pietro Mascagni made the final changes to his score.
In November 1917 Oxilia died on the front line, during the battle of Monte Tomba that followed the withdrawal from Caporetto. A year later, at the climax of her career, Lyda Borelli left the stage and the glamorous world of cinema to get married, leaving legions of fans and elegant women who imitated her manners and style, bereft.
A new chapter in the history of cinema opened, but Oxilia’s spell-bounding rhapsody remained to bewitch, enchant and mesmerise generations to come.
Trama del film Rapsodia satanica
La storia è una variazione della vicenda faustiana da un poema di Fausto Maria Martini del 1915. Una anziana dama dell’alta società, Alba d’Oltrevita (Lyda Borelli) stipula un patto con Mefisto (Ugo Bazzini), per riacquistare la giovinezza in cambio della quale però lei ha il divieto di innamorarsi. Alba è corteggiata da due giovani fratelli, Tristano (Andrea Habay) e Sergio (Giovanni Cini). Quest’ultimo minaccia di uccidersi se lei non lo amerà: lei tuttavia non s’interessa a Sergio, il quale dunque si uccide, e si prepara a sposare Tristano. A questo punto però Mefisto torna per riprendersi la giovinezza che aveva concesso e restituendo la vecchiaia ad Alba che non aveva rispettato il patto.