2023-12-29 16:11:37
Time.news – The first female director of Italian cinema. Her name is Elvira Notari and is the protagonist of the book “The daughter of Vesuvius. The woman who invented cinema” by Emanuele Coen, journalist of L’Espresso and writer, who six years ago was in Naples on business to do a report on the proliferation of films and TV series set in the city starting from “Gomorrah”.
“I had never heard of him – he says – It immediately seemed like an extraordinary story to me. In the following weeks I did some research, I realized that he was a reference figure for professionals, cinema experts, but absolutely unknown. to the general public. And to the Neapolitans themselves. Suffice it to say that during his career, over sixty films and hundreds of documentaries which were almost all lost, he had never given an interview. Or rather, no one had asked him. We don’t know what he thought , what emotions he felt, his life in some respects remains a mystery. Therefore, the challenge was to fill that void through fiction, the imaginary story of his existence. In a certain sense, the invented part of the novel is the most authentic. Elvira’s character is much richer than the person we knew.”
The result is a novel (Sem editions) which, between reality and fiction, recalls the life of this figure shrouded in mystery who at the end of the nineteenth century was capable of intuiting the novelty and miracle of that “o’mbruoglio int’o lenzuolo” which from the first 1920s in Naples made different humanities dream. A meticulous documentary work based on sources consulted in archives scattered between Italy and America which returns to the public an unrepeatable figure, obscured by the dust of time, capable of founding Dora film, one of the most important production houses of Italian cinema.
The search for materials to convey the story of Elvira Notari. How long did it take her? Can you tell us some curiosities and discoveries made for this writing?
Between archive research and writing, it took me about two years to create The Daughter of Vesuvius. It was a continuous discovery, I carried out most of the research in the Renzo Renzi library of the Cineteca di Bologna, where most of the works dedicated to Elvira Coda Notari are kept. Not being a historian, while working on the book I discovered details and anecdotes that I didn’t know at all. An example: the meeting in Florence between Benito Mussolini and two Hollywood stars, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.
The Duce, a skilled communicator and great fan of American cinema, understood the importance of celebrities and was delighted by that understanding. At the time, in the face of fascist autarchy, Hollywood films were smashing at the box office. Later, Mussolini decided to send dozens of vans equipped with screens and cameras around Italy to educate the masses in propaganda cinema. The traveling cinema of the Istituto Luce. Another discovery concerns the clothing of the characters in the novel. To reconstruct every detail I obtained the original catalogs of the Grandi Magazzini Mele in Naples, where clothes and accessories for women, men and children are scrupulously described.
The book also tells the story of an avant-garde Naples where cinema flourished. How does Elvira’s story intersect with that of the city?
At first, having just moved with her family from Salerno, Elvira hates Naples. She finds it chaotic, intrusive, decadent. She spends entire afternoons looking at the ceiling, disheartened and almost scared of the city and its inhabitants. Then little by little she falls in love with Naples and its people, she discovers cinema and also falls in love with her cinema, she meets the man who will become her husband, Nicola, who will work together with her to build this collective dream. Because in those years Naples, together with Turin, was the Italian capital of cinema. In this sense “The Daughter of Vesuvius” is also a love novel.
How did you reconstruct the character of this figure?
It wasn’t easy building the character of Elvira. Literature is full of female characters told by the pen of a man, just think of “Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy and “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert. Obviously inappropriate comparisons aside, I felt the responsibility of this great challenge. Her fragilities, strengths, inferiority complexes, desire for redemption, sensitivity and entrepreneurial intuition. The idiosyncrasies and passions of a determined woman but with a sometimes hard, inflexible character. I won’t say anything else so as not to spoil the novel.
Were you inspired by any contemporary woman to give shape to the character of Elvira?
To tell the truth, none in particular. Today we live in an era in which, as a result of social media, points of view and opinions are highly polarised. Communication prevails over action. Elvira, on the other hand, is a woman of action, entrepreneur and artist, day after day she builds her reputation, her credibility as a director and unleashes her creativity. She speaks little and acts a lot. I don’t want to say that women like her don’t exist, but I wasn’t inspired by any contemporary figure. Maybe the author of a novel shouldn’t fall in love with her characters but I have to admit that I fell a little in love with Elvira.
How is the story of Elvira the director intertwined with the love story with her husband Nicola?
Nicola is a generous, discreet and far-sighted man. He accepts that his wife takes the stage, in an era in which women are only mothers and have no public role in society. Together they discover cinema as it is born, their love story overlaps with the epic of silent cinema, in a symbiosis that is miraculous.
What remains of Elvira Notari today? Her legacy both professional and personal?
Little remains of Elvira Notari from a material point of view. Only three films, “A Santanotte”, “lei È piccerella” and “Fantasia e surdato”, preserved in the National Film Archive of Rome. The other films and shorts have been lost. From the point of view of the history of cinema, however, Elvira Notari is considered a fundamental figure, a pioneer of Neorealism, a feminist ante-litteram. Film scholars celebrate it but unfortunately the public continues to largely ignore it. I hope that The Daughter of Vesuvius can spark readers’ curiosity.
The plot of the book could be that of a film… have you had any proposals?
Yes, Elvira’s story seems tailor-made for a film or television adaptation. After all, I built the novel through images, through scenes, telling the facts as if they were materializing in front of me. I submitted the subject of a film to Siae a few months ago, I haven’t received any proposals but the work from this point of view begins now. From the novel I created a show, “The sound of Elvira”, which includes the presentation, a two-voice reading and the performance of some musicians on the images of “Napoli sirena della canzone” (1929) by Elvira Notari. We staged it in Naples with the actress Cristiana Dell’Anna, who in recent weeks has been reading some passages from the book on some fragments of the director’s films. Over the next year we have some replicas in the pipeline and then, who knows, maybe one thing leads to another.
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