Maria Carmi and Dillo Lombardi in Sperduti nel buio (1914)

Spanish postcard by Edis. y Publics. de Arte Planas, Barcelona, Card 4 Photo: Obsequio Palace (Morgana Film). Maria Carmi and Dillo Lombardi in Sperduti nel buio/Lost in the Dark (Nino Martoglio, 1914). According to some, Roberto Danesi was the co-director. The film was based on a homonymous play (1901) by Roberto Bracco. The film was produced by the Roman company Morgana Film, which had as its goal to adapt naturalist plays for the cinema. Sperduti nel buio is the No. 1 lost film of Italian film history.

 

This card made publicity for the Dutch company Rembrandt, which sold artist's equipment such as oil paint in Barcelona.

 

Plot of the film: Naples, in a stormy night, two derelicts meet by chance. She is Paolina (Virginia Balistrieri). illegitimate daughter of a girl seduced and then abandoned by a noble, who survives as a beggar and sometimes by necessity frequenting criminal environments. One day, chased by the police, she takes refuge in a tavern where she meets Nunzio (Giovanni Grasso) , a blind man exploited by his stepfather (Totò Maiorana), who earns his living playing the violin. They approach first for mutual help, then fall in love, and dream of escaping their exploiters, but without being able to redeem themselves from misery. Then the vicissitudes separate them. In the meantime, the Duke of Vallenza, Paolina's father (Dillo Lombardi), in remorse for having abandoned that child and by now old and ill, decides to right the wrong and make her heir to his possessions. But the perfidious Livia (Maria Carmi), the last lover of the noble, deceives him and manages to appropriate the duke's assets, preventing Paolina from receiving what is in her father's will. Meanwhile Nunzio, although blind, manages to thwart an attempt of violence by a criminal who threatens Paolina and the two young people thus found, decide to go far away to escape misery.

 

Sperduti nel buio is taken from the homonymous drama, whose subtitle was People who enjoy, people who suffer. The play was written in 1901 by the Neapolitan author Roberto Bracco and successfully represented first in Naples and then throughout Italy by the company Talli with Irma Gramatica and Oreste Calabresi. After a first unsuccessful attempt of a film adaptation by the Itala Film of Turin in 1912, it was the Sicilian director and playwright Nino Martoglio who initiated the contacts that led to the making of the film, overcoming the distrust of Bracco who even the previous year, faced with a question posted to him by the Florentine newspaper Il Nuovo Giornale, had scornfully replied "I have never worked for the cinema and I have no intention of doing so", adding that "cinema, now as now, it is a tribute to naivety and cretinism». The following year, however, he changed his mind and, interrupting the ongoing contacts with a foreign production house, accepted the proposal of the Morgana Film to bring the drama to the screen.

 

Bracco motivated his changed opinion with the assurances received on the respect of the artistic value of his work: "My drama will not suffer offense (even if) it is understood that the cinematic vision will have a different purpose from that of the scenic vision" . For this reason he assiduously assisted the director Martoglio in the preparation of the screenplay, of which only two copies have survived, partially different from each other, one of which, typewritten, in fact bears the author's autographed notes, thus creating "one of the first occasions in which a perfect collaboration was achieved between the author of the story and the screenwriter - director.». However, despite the declared respect for the theatrical drama, the film's ending was different in that it proposes a happy ending in which Nunzio and Paolina get back together, while in the original text they are definitively separated from the troubles of life. Bracco, in the end, abandoned his reservations and called Martoglio's direction "a marvel": "I did not believe that such an admirable result could have been obtained. If the cinematography is the one with which my drama Sperduti nel buio was reproduced, there is no more to discuss». One of the aspects that were considered the most interesting and innovative of the screenplay was the so-called "contrast montage", in which the scenes of the environments of poverty and those of luxury and vice were brusquely compared, which, in the opinion of some commentators, constituted a discovery in the construction of the characters. On the other hand, D.W. Griffith, years before, did this alternation between the rich and the poor by use of crosscutting already in his short film A Corner in Wheat (1909).

 

Sperduti nel buio was made by Morgana Film (not to be confused with an almost homonymous company from Catania also established by Martoglio the previous year), founded in January 1914 in Rome on the initiative of the Clemente Levi and Co., in which Martoglio, who was already collaborating with Cines, was called to take on the role of Artistic Director. The programs of Morgana, funded mainly by the Marquis Alfredo di Bugnano, proposed in an innovative way to bring to the screen literary works of a realist nature interpreted by important theatrical actors, including dialectal ones, and in fact the first film produced was Capitan Blanco, released at the beginning of 1914 and taken from the drama U Paliu by Martoglio himself.

 

Sperduti nel buio, consisting of a prologue and 3 parts, was shot entirely in Naples with a large and decisive use of exteriors, giving space to "details of such veracity that they alone reveal the great human sympathy of the filmmakers : certain little dresses, certain woolen blankets, rag hats ». During the making of the film, which lasted for several months, the "set" of the film was unexpectedly visited by the Undersecretary of Education Giovanni Rosadi, who received a copy of the film as a gift from the producers, which then about 30 years later would be at the center of a complex story of loss. After Sperduti nel buio, Morgana made a third film, Teresa Raquin, and then went out of business.

 

Although set and made in Naples by a company based in Rome, Sperduti nel buio has been defined "a Sicilian film", given that Martoglio surrounded himself with actors from the dialectal theater of that region, such as Totò Maiorana and above all the main performers, Giovanni Grasso and Virginia Balistrieri (a couple who had already been employed in Capitan Blanco). Grasso, in particular, had been "discovered" by Martoglio in 1902 and started acting as an actor when he worked in the puppet theater. The Sicilian actor Giovanni Grasso was initially deemed unsuitable to fill the role of the meek Nunzio. This choice was initially opposed by Bracco who did not see in Grasso, physically very handsome, the suitable interpreter to impersonate the meek and submissive Nunzio. The only stranger to these origins was Maria Carmi (stage name of the Florentine Norina Gilli), an Italian-German actress at the time returning from great theatrical successes in Berlin and Vienna and who with Sperduti nel buio also qualified in Italy among the major actresses of the moment for her non-star style, but that the following year, at the beginning of the war, she was then forced to leave Italy and return to Germany.

 

The premiere of the film took place on September 20, 1914 after a "private" preview reserved for critics the day at the Maxima cinema in Naples, where according to the chronicles of the time it was enthusiastically received. Subsequently, it is known that the distribution and commercial outcome of the film were made difficult by the war, due to which Sperduti nel buio could not be exported to either France or Great Britain and also in Italy it was presented in many cities with great delay (in Turin only in December 1915). On the basis of the available period sources, sharp contrasts emerge in the criticism. Alongside those who praised "the heartbeat of life, the truth of popular and princely environments, the effectiveness of stage expression such as to make us mistake the screen for a strip of real life", there were those who wrote that "public opinion has shown herself adverse to this film given the various manifest inconclusions and exasperations to which Grasso usually falls ». And if on the one hand there were those who proclaimed that "with this film our cinematography has found its way to art, its goal", on the other hand the film was accused of having upset the original work, preferring the original ending of the play.

 

n the following decades Sperduti nel buio was the focus of discussions by critics and film historians. In the thirties the film became a sacred text for film scholars who gathered around the magazines Bianco e nero and Cinema, who appreciated the environments described with impressive documentary evidence, so as to achieve a highly dramatic atmosphere , only cracked by the acting of the actors, sometimes congested. Still in 1939, the critic Umberto Barbaro dedicated an article to him in which he argued that the film directed at Martoglio could be considered an anticipation of the works of Griffith and the Russian Pudovkin, indicating it as an example of realism for future directors. After the war, after the loss of the only copy of the film, it was not possible to base the judgments on a direct vision of the film. Nevertheless, Sperduti nel buio could not escape the discussion on the origins of Neorealism as many critics, especially in the early 1950s, attributed a strong influence to it in that sense. Cosulich: "It is now unanimously accepted that the Italian neorealist vein derives from Sperduti nel buoi", as well as Aristarco: "The seeds of the post-war realist school are to be found in Assunta Spina by Serena or in Sperduti nel buio.» Other commentators also considered it an important work since, compared to the production of the time (Cabiria is also from 1914) it would have represented a novelty, attributing this development to Martoglio's attention to a realism derived from Giovanni Verga's naturalism in literature.

 

But, in more recent years, these opinions have been contested, deeming "completely arbitrary the claim of wanting to definitely see the harbingers of the complex neorealist movement that took place in Italy over thirty years later, lacking any social point of view or even simple criticism. of custom". Giuseppe Ferrara wrote in 1958 about "critical mythology: we dare to question that from a melodrama of this kind, taken from the mediocre text by Bracco with dukes who first seduce and then die of a broken heart, the much decayed" documentary impetuosity can emerge." Despite this, the myth of Sperduti nel buio continues and there are those who find a way to connect it to neorealism, or, even claim it is pervaded by socialism, when instead, as Ferrarar says "it is the progenitor of a well-established melodrama cinema. still today." Ferrara refers here to the popular melodramas by Raffaele Matarazzo of the 1950s.

 

Despite the opening of film archives all over the globe, and despite a thorough attempt to trace the film's fate all the way to Germany and Russia in Denis Lotti's documentary Sperduti nel buio (2014), no print of the film resurfaced. Only still imagery remains, such as this collector's card.

 

Source: Italian Wikipedia.

 

With her aristocratic air, her severe looks but also her sweet undertones, Italian silent film star and stage actress Maria Carmi (1880-1957) was the cinematic translation of the 19th century Primadonna. Later she became Princess Norina Matchabelli and was co-founder of the perfume company Prince Matchabelli.

 

Trailer of Lotti's film: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgC8uCilKi0

An animated version of the film by Anime Studio (2010): www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nPOjkAXjVk

 

Done