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Assunta Spina



1914 Italy Color Tinted 62 Min.
Directed by Francesca Bertini and Gustavo Serena

From the cover:

Italian silent screen goddess Francesca Bertini appears in her most famous role in ASSUNTA SPINA, an operatic tale of love and sacrifice in turn of the century Naples.

After being assaulted by her jealous lover Michele (Gustavo Serena), Assunta (Bertini) becomes the mistress of a corrupt Don (Carlo Benetti) so she can visit Michele while he is in prison. When Michele is unexpectedly released, he discovers Assunta's "betrayal," setting the stage for the film's exquisitely tragic finale.


Special Features:

-- The Last Diva: Francesca Bertini (dir. Gianfranco Mingozzi, 1982, 85 min). A feature length documentary, in which 94-year-old Bertini recalls her life and career while attending a private screening of ASSUNTA SPINA.

Stills from the DVD in the screen captures thread.

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I searched the forum, but basically came up with a blank on this wonderful Kino release from 2003. This is the kind of effort that Kino should receive more credit for. Not only do they provide a fine presentation of a key Italian film of the silent period, but it is presented with a rich and unique score compiled from a wide variety of contemporary 1910s Italian and Italian-inspired composers by Rodney Sauer and Susan Hall. There is even a feature listing the different musical cues with the ability to jump to the specific moment in the film, where that particular piece is used as accompaniment.

The film runs a good hour, and is accompanied by an eighty minute documentary on Bertini, who was the great diva of the Italian screen in the teens, and who stars in -- and co-directed -- Assunta Spina. After an introductory sequence, Bertini "invites" the documentary filmmaker to a screening of Assunta, and we are invited with them to view the film with the ageing star. In essence, this part of the documentary is a commentary of the film by Bertini with the added attraction of seeing her face at different times during the screening. Bertini's comments are fairly short and few, but they add more to the experience of the film than many a learned film historian's commentary track. She observes that the film was shot with only the available light of the sun in November of 1914 (the rainy period of the year), in the streets of Naples, using local people as actors. "We invented neo-realism" she half-jokes at one point. And, it is true, that a lot of the attraction of this film comes from the authenticity of the people and the clothes they wear, the meals they take together, the way they speak with their eyes and hands and postures, as well as the backdrops of the Neapolitan hills and streets for the heated romantic rivalries of Assunta and her lovers.

As to Bertini's own performance, she comments on how she was difficult to work with, because of her penchant for not rehearsing scenes. She recalls how her jump into a boat in one particular scene inspired headlines in the local Neapolitan newspapers -- "people were easier to please, then..." she notes with a little smile. She further comments that she performed without make-up, and that her screen kisses were all faked, as she couldn't stand the men she starred with. Bertini comments on her younger self in the film as "her," noting the costumes "she" wears, "her" flirtatiousness, "her" profile, "her" beauty, etc. For a former super-star, who is repeatedly likened to Norma Desmond in the course of the documentary, Bertini had a charming sense of humor and self-distance at the age of 94.

After the screening, the documentary wraps up with an overview of Bertini's career after Assunta. She starred in more than 100 films during the teens, working 14 hour days, and eventually damaging her eyes by the exposure to the harsh lights that were used in the later films of the era. After 1920 she would only star in films very occassionally -- the last time being in Bertolucci's 1900, more than fifty years later. There are excerpts from several of these films, none of which are of course available on DVD. Most tantalizing is an extended sequence inter-cutting Bertini's signature performances in two different versions of Odette -- Marcel L'Herbier's film from 1935, and a version from 1916 by Giuseppe de Liguoro. The nuances in Bertini's performance as a sensual younger woman, and her more sophisticated approach in the latter film, are fascinating to behold.

What is left for us to see these days, aside from the fragments in Diva Dolorosa, Bertini has a miniscule part in Pastrone's epic Cabiria. And she stars in several of the films in the Silent Shakespeare set -- King Lear and The Merchant of Venice come to mind, although in my opinion there is little comparison between these very early shakespearean films, and her tour-de-force performance in Assunta Spina. For the more adventurous set, there are copies of at least Ugo Falena's Romeo and Juliet (1912) and Gustavo Serena's La signora delle camelie (1915) floating around on the internet.

I have the Kino VHS of this so I never picked up the double feature.. I certainly can verify the comment that the the film.. I really loved it, and the tale of forlorn romance and the all location shooting were considered a precursor the the movement of neorealism.. though I doubt many people think about this film much anymore (sadly).

Indeed, like so many first rate releases from these guys, underappreciated.

Schreck, I was wondering if you, or anyone else here, had ever had a chance to see any of Bertini's other films? Aside from Odette, the doco has clips from several other films, amongst them The Serpent and Tosca (in which she apparently attracted the admiration and attention of Puccini himself in the central role).

The clips witness to prints in good condition, and I remember seeing somewhere that there was a series of these Italian films from the teens playing in the States (New York?) some years ago. Not only Bertini films, but films starring several of the Italian divas of the era.

That said, Bertini does mention at one point, how her films were burned during the war. She muses that other stars are lucky to have their films preserved, whereas hers were destroyed. Whether she is talking about prints or negatives is not clear, but obviously there are not a lot of reports around on screenings of anything more than a handful of her films, so it is probably that many of them were in fact destroyed.

Scharphedin2 wrote: For the more adventurous set, there are copies of at least Ugo Falena's Romeo and Juliet (1912) and Gustavo Serena's La signora delle camelie (1915) floating around on the internet.

But Romeo and Juliet is at least the silent that can boast the highest number of modern scores because it was shown on arte six times scored by six different composers!
Assunta Spina has indeed some charme and Bertini's remark on neo realism is not entirely inappropraite since most film histories seem to forget all the zillions of films turned out before 1942 which used non professional actors, real locations, non-melodramatic plots and social criticism. Never understood the big deal about the whole neorealistic rebirth of cinema.
However the film suffers badly from the star problem in Italy's films. I never understood how stars could be in any way a problem for Italy's industry in the 10s until I saw Assunta Spina with Bertini walking up to the front, sinking on a chair and dragging every scene for minutes. It's partly frightfully boring and very much a dead-end.

lubitsch wrote:However the film suffers badly from the star problem in Italy's films. I never understood how stars could be in any way a problem for Italy's industry in the 10s until I saw Assunta Spina with Bertini walking up to the front, sinking on a chair and dragging every scene for minutes. It's partly frightfully boring and very much a dead-end.

Was there really a "star problem?" Surely, the Italian films of the teens were extremely popular and successful both at home and in export markets (from what little I know). Just as surely, there must have been a good deal of politics and powerplay within the Italian industry, but was it any different in Italy than in Hollywood, or any other country with a big film production?

With Bertini's performance in Assunta in particular, I think there are a handful of scenes, where she either walks to the front of the stage, so to speak, or sits down on a chair. These scenes hardly "drag" on for minutes, and seemed to me almost to serve the same purpose as a "close-up" (something which did not exist in the film vocabulary at the time). In any event, these scenes did not work against the film for me.

I saw these scenes as an intrinsical part of the film's mode of telling its story. This is Naples in the teens, and there are comments elsewhere that the film has affinities with opera. And, there is a lot of "story-telling" going on in these scenes. Take the scene early on, where Assunta does "sink" into a chair in the foreground; meanwhile her beau is throwing a fit of jealousy in the center of the scene, with her father trying to calm him down. It is theatrical, of course -- Bertini remains on stage, but for a moment the attention is on the other characters. Later, there is the scene at the outdoor restaurant, where Assunta is again front and center in a scene, with her former lover looming in the background. Assunta's body language and expressions tell us her momentary discomfort at his presence, at the same time she is also flirting with him, and there is an element of foreboding and foreshadowing in the way he is dominating her from the back of the scene. Even if there is no action to speak of in this scene (which does go on for a while), there are volumes being told about the relationship between these two people, the tension between them, and indeed about the sexual roles at this time and place.

And then, I do think you are correct, that the way these scenes were blocked also paid mind to the star status of Bertini, and I think there is something very Italian about the way it is done (interestingly, Bertini was to a degree also directing the film). So yes, by placing herself directly in front of the camera, we have a chance to admire her -- both her beauty, and her abilities as an actress. And, the way she places herself, does it not express the way that women are looked at in Italy (especially by men); more frankly and unapologetically as a sensual object of desire?

I do not know, if there was a general problem with the role of the stars in Italian film at the time; I really find it hard to believe.

lubitsch wrote:

Scharphedin2 wrote:For the more adventurous set, there are copies of at least Ugo Falena's Romeo and Juliet (1912) and Gustavo Serena's La signora delle camelie (1915) floating around on the internet.

But Romeo and Juliet is at least the silent that can boast the highest number of modern scores because it was shown on arte six times scored by six different composers!
Assunta Spina has indeed some charme and Bertini's remark on neo realism is not entirely inappropraite since most film histories seem to forget all the zillions of films turned out before 1942 which used non professional actors, real locations, non-melodramatic plots and social criticism. Never understood the big deal about the whole neorealistic rebirth of cinema.
However the film suffers badly from the star problem in Italy's films. I never understood how stars could be in any way a problem for Italy's industry in the 10s until I saw Assunta Spina with Bertini walking up to the front, sinking on a chair and dragging every scene for minutes. It's partly frightfully boring and very much a dead-end.

And the lack of CGI and helicopter shots is just maddening.