Bianca Virginia Camagni
Vintage Italian postcard. Ed, Vettori, Bologna, 40[?], late 1910s or early 1920s.
Bianca Virginia Camagni (Milan, 17 July 1885 - Canzo, 8 September 1960) was an Italian film director, actress and producer active during the silent film period. She was one of the first and most important female figures in Italian silent film directing along with Elvira Notari, Elettra Raggio, Diana Karenne and Daisy Silvain. She is also remembered for the variety of acting roles she managed to play throughout her career. Unfortunately, many of her films are lost.
Bianca Virginia Camagni was born in Milan on 17 July 1885 and trained as an actress in the city's stage companies. She was a woman of refined upbringing who loved the company of intellectuals, men of letters and artists. She could speak several languages, played the piano and travelled throughout much of Europe. Her career began with the theatre and she did not concentrate on film until the eve of World War I She made her debut in 1913 at Mediolanum Film and moved to Milano Films at the beginning of 1914. In June of the same year the Milanese company decided to dedicate a series to her (as it did for the better-known Mercedes Brignone and Hesperia), which was, however, interrupted with Italy's entry into the World War. The actress played various leading roles during this period: in the comedy Dietro un cespuglio (1914) by Guglielmo Zorzi, in the dramas I naufraghi del potere (1914) by Enrico Rappini and Nel nido straniero (1914) by Baldassarre Negroni, in the adventurous Oro che uccide (1914) by Enrico Rappini.
The years of the First World War were a crucial period in the development of Camagni's career: she collaborated with leading Italian intellectuals and at the same time worked as director and scriptwriter in various films. During 1915 she was ‘lent’ to Mediolanum Film as a leading actress, alongside Paolo Colaci, for the operatic film I pagliacci by Francesco Bertolini, based on Ruggero Leoncavallo's 1892 opera of the same name. In the same year she was a regular partner with Luigi Serventi in a series of dramatic films directed by Augusto Genina for Milano Films such as La gelosia (which still exists) and La fioraia di Como. Again in 1915 she played the part of a fatal woman in Guglielmo Zorzi's film L'agguato alongside Hesperia and Livio Pavanelli. Again directed by Zorzi, she starred in L'idolo bianco (The White Idol), then advertised as a ‘drama of passion and adventure and also had a role in Baldassarre Negroni's Passa la guerra (Passes the War).
In 1916, she starred in Ugo Falena's Cavalleria rusticana, a film adaptation of Giovanni Verga's famous 1884 novella of the same name, produced by Tespi Film in Rome and shot in competition with Flegrea Film's eponymous version. Again with Ugo Falena, she wrote the subject of the film Il figlio della guerra (The War Child) for Galatea Film (or Film d'Arte Italiana) and played the Contessa d'Algo, opposite Luigi Serventi. Alfredo Marchetti in a magazine of the time described the actress as ‘a marvellous performer. A wife, a patriot and a most effective mother'. An incomplete version of this film was shown at the Cinema Ritrovato festival in 2016. 1916 was the year she also signed her first direction (together with Ugo Falena), for La piccola ombra. Antonio Rosso wrote on this subject in the magazine Apollon: ‘Bianca Virginia Camagni is perhaps the most intelligent and the most cultured among the actresses of our cinema. This is demonstrated by this Piccola ombra that she has written and interpreted, and which is the first example of a drama of any value and originality due to a screen actress".
Camagni also worked as a performer in the film Il Re, le Torri e gli Alfieri (The King, the Towers and the Bishops, 1916) by Ivo Illuminati, based on a short story by Lucio D'Ambra, who also wrote the screenplay. It is a story set in an imaginary tournament of love and politics, which takes place on the black and white squares of a symbolic chessboard and features Countess Giorgia Dentice di Frasso, Luigi Serventi and Enrico Roma. It was one of the most famous films in the entire history of Italian silent cinema and was also a huge success in France, where it was screened at the Gaumont-Palace in Paris and remained on the screen for several months under the title Echéc au Roi. Unfortunately, the film was lost (but do check our our postcard series on the film at our Flickr site www.flickr.com/photos/tags/ilreletorrieglialfieri ). Judging by the surviving material, Camagni had her own sober and restrained interpretative style, far removed from that embraced by her contemporary Italian actresses who reverted to an acting style with very marked lyrical gestures, typical of a diva such as Lyda Borelli.
In 1917 Camagni acted in La crociata degli innocenti (The Innocents' Crusade), written by Gabriele D'Annunzio and directed by Alessandro Blasetti and two assistants, Gino Rossetti and Alessandro Traversa. Camagni, who played the character of Vanna, once again acted alongside leading figures of the cinema of the period, such as Giulietta De Riso, Luigi Serventi and Lea Righelli. She also acted in the film adaptation of Marco Praga's eponymous 1903 novel L'ondina, produced by Comerio films in Milan. Due to an ineffective distribution that released the film discontinuously in various theatres across the country, the film received little critical consideration at the time. As an actress she also had a role alongside the famous Italian director Mario Bonnard in one of his minor films entitled La strage degli innocenti. Between 1917 and 1919 she interrupted her career as an actress and director for almost two years to serve as a nurse for the Italian Red Cross.
Many of the films Camagni starred in after the First World War failed to be produced and distributed due to the financial difficulties faced by Italian cinema in the aftermath of the conflict, such as Luciano Zuccoli's La compagnia della leggera, Irma Gramatica's Usque dum viva et ultra and ...Povero cuore...! by Camagni herself, which had raised great expectations. However, there was no lack of important collaborations and moments of experimentation.
Camagni was sentimentally linked to the Emilian painter and sculptor Severo Pozzati (known as Sepo) and was the protagonist, together with him, of interesting experiments born from the thought of Alfredo Masi, who conceived cinema as a figurative art, based on light, shapes and colours and made more expressive by the combination with music. In 1919 (with the support of the Milanese industrialist Achille Brioschi) Masi had the idea of shooting a film based on these premises with his friend Sepo, also involving the musician Vittorio Gui. Camagni was given the role of a melancholic and cruel Pierrot. The film, entitled Fantasia bianca (White Fantasy), was a failure due to the editing by Gui and Masi, who made the music the fulcrum of the work, making the visual part a simple succession of images that was defined ‘an attempt at art’ and therefore withdrawn from circulation. At this point, Bianca Virginia Camagni, assisted by journalist Tito A. Spagnol, took over the film and re-edited it, also introducing some new scenes and a new character, which she entrusted to Amleto Novelli. The title was changed from Fantasia bianca (White Fantasy) to Fantasia and saw the light of day in 1921 thanks to Camagni Film, a production company, this one, specially set up in the same year as the film's release. Despite mixed reviews and not very satisfied audiences, the second edition of the work had a much better outcome, at least from a financial point of view.
In 1919, as an actress, Camagni had a prominent role again alongside Mario Bonnard (and under Bonnard's direction) in the film La stretta (also called Nella stretta), produced by Cines. With her own production company she wrote, directed and starred in a modest number of films: among the most famous were La sconosciuta (1921), co-directed with Tito A. Spagnol, where she had a leading role alongside actors of the calibre of Alberto Collo and Amleto Novelli. It was a passionate and romantic drama in which a poor young man falls in love with a young princess, but reasons of the heart do not prevail over dynastic ones and so the young lover takes his own life. Other titles produced by the Camagni Film company were La bella nonna and Il cuore e l'ombra (both 1922). In 1921 she also worked in supporting roles with Turin's FERT, such as in Guglielmo Zorzi's film La donna perduta, which was widely circulated and much appreciated by the critics of the time, who described it as a ‘very tasty work, full of verve, played with impeccable intuition by all the actors’.
Bianca Virginia Camagni retired from the profession in 1922 after only nine years of her career. She declared on this subject in an interview a few years earlier (1917): ‘I love the cinema and I feel that this ardour blazes within me with such fury that one day I will end up not being able to stand it any longer. [...] Everything I do, I do by myself: I weave the strands, I write the play, I do the performance." Her career also ended due to a major fire that struck her own film production company, Camagni Film. Once she had completely retired from the stage, she lost all trace of herself. All that remains of her work today is La gelosia, one of the first roles she played for Augusto Genina's direction, Il figlio della guerra (a copy with missing captions) and a very short fragment, barely visible, of Cavalleria rusticana. During the Second World War, as an evacuee, Camagni left Milan to take refuge in Canzo, in the province of Como, where she died on 8 September 1960 at the age of 75.
Sources: Italian Wikipedia, IMDb, wfpp.columbia.edu/pioneer/bianca-virginia-camagni/
Bianca Virginia Camagni
Vintage Italian postcard. Ed, Vettori, Bologna, 40[?], late 1910s or early 1920s.
Bianca Virginia Camagni (Milan, 17 July 1885 - Canzo, 8 September 1960) was an Italian film director, actress and producer active during the silent film period. She was one of the first and most important female figures in Italian silent film directing along with Elvira Notari, Elettra Raggio, Diana Karenne and Daisy Silvain. She is also remembered for the variety of acting roles she managed to play throughout her career. Unfortunately, many of her films are lost.
Bianca Virginia Camagni was born in Milan on 17 July 1885 and trained as an actress in the city's stage companies. She was a woman of refined upbringing who loved the company of intellectuals, men of letters and artists. She could speak several languages, played the piano and travelled throughout much of Europe. Her career began with the theatre and she did not concentrate on film until the eve of World War I She made her debut in 1913 at Mediolanum Film and moved to Milano Films at the beginning of 1914. In June of the same year the Milanese company decided to dedicate a series to her (as it did for the better-known Mercedes Brignone and Hesperia), which was, however, interrupted with Italy's entry into the World War. The actress played various leading roles during this period: in the comedy Dietro un cespuglio (1914) by Guglielmo Zorzi, in the dramas I naufraghi del potere (1914) by Enrico Rappini and Nel nido straniero (1914) by Baldassarre Negroni, in the adventurous Oro che uccide (1914) by Enrico Rappini.
The years of the First World War were a crucial period in the development of Camagni's career: she collaborated with leading Italian intellectuals and at the same time worked as director and scriptwriter in various films. During 1915 she was ‘lent’ to Mediolanum Film as a leading actress, alongside Paolo Colaci, for the operatic film I pagliacci by Francesco Bertolini, based on Ruggero Leoncavallo's 1892 opera of the same name. In the same year she was a regular partner with Luigi Serventi in a series of dramatic films directed by Augusto Genina for Milano Films such as La gelosia (which still exists) and La fioraia di Como. Again in 1915 she played the part of a fatal woman in Guglielmo Zorzi's film L'agguato alongside Hesperia and Livio Pavanelli. Again directed by Zorzi, she starred in L'idolo bianco (The White Idol), then advertised as a ‘drama of passion and adventure and also had a role in Baldassarre Negroni's Passa la guerra (Passes the War).
In 1916, she starred in Ugo Falena's Cavalleria rusticana, a film adaptation of Giovanni Verga's famous 1884 novella of the same name, produced by Tespi Film in Rome and shot in competition with Flegrea Film's eponymous version. Again with Ugo Falena, she wrote the subject of the film Il figlio della guerra (The War Child) for Galatea Film (or Film d'Arte Italiana) and played the Contessa d'Algo, opposite Luigi Serventi. Alfredo Marchetti in a magazine of the time described the actress as ‘a marvellous performer. A wife, a patriot and a most effective mother'. An incomplete version of this film was shown at the Cinema Ritrovato festival in 2016. 1916 was the year she also signed her first direction (together with Ugo Falena), for La piccola ombra. Antonio Rosso wrote on this subject in the magazine Apollon: ‘Bianca Virginia Camagni is perhaps the most intelligent and the most cultured among the actresses of our cinema. This is demonstrated by this Piccola ombra that she has written and interpreted, and which is the first example of a drama of any value and originality due to a screen actress".
Camagni also worked as a performer in the film Il Re, le Torri e gli Alfieri (The King, the Towers and the Bishops, 1916) by Ivo Illuminati, based on a short story by Lucio D'Ambra, who also wrote the screenplay. It is a story set in an imaginary tournament of love and politics, which takes place on the black and white squares of a symbolic chessboard and features Countess Giorgia Dentice di Frasso, Luigi Serventi and Enrico Roma. It was one of the most famous films in the entire history of Italian silent cinema and was also a huge success in France, where it was screened at the Gaumont-Palace in Paris and remained on the screen for several months under the title Echéc au Roi. Unfortunately, the film was lost (but do check our our postcard series on the film at our Flickr site www.flickr.com/photos/tags/ilreletorrieglialfieri ). Judging by the surviving material, Camagni had her own sober and restrained interpretative style, far removed from that embraced by her contemporary Italian actresses who reverted to an acting style with very marked lyrical gestures, typical of a diva such as Lyda Borelli.
In 1917 Camagni acted in La crociata degli innocenti (The Innocents' Crusade), written by Gabriele D'Annunzio and directed by Alessandro Blasetti and two assistants, Gino Rossetti and Alessandro Traversa. Camagni, who played the character of Vanna, once again acted alongside leading figures of the cinema of the period, such as Giulietta De Riso, Luigi Serventi and Lea Righelli. She also acted in the film adaptation of Marco Praga's eponymous 1903 novel L'ondina, produced by Comerio films in Milan. Due to an ineffective distribution that released the film discontinuously in various theatres across the country, the film received little critical consideration at the time. As an actress she also had a role alongside the famous Italian director Mario Bonnard in one of his minor films entitled La strage degli innocenti. Between 1917 and 1919 she interrupted her career as an actress and director for almost two years to serve as a nurse for the Italian Red Cross.
Many of the films Camagni starred in after the First World War failed to be produced and distributed due to the financial difficulties faced by Italian cinema in the aftermath of the conflict, such as Luciano Zuccoli's La compagnia della leggera, Irma Gramatica's Usque dum viva et ultra and ...Povero cuore...! by Camagni herself, which had raised great expectations. However, there was no lack of important collaborations and moments of experimentation.
Camagni was sentimentally linked to the Emilian painter and sculptor Severo Pozzati (known as Sepo) and was the protagonist, together with him, of interesting experiments born from the thought of Alfredo Masi, who conceived cinema as a figurative art, based on light, shapes and colours and made more expressive by the combination with music. In 1919 (with the support of the Milanese industrialist Achille Brioschi) Masi had the idea of shooting a film based on these premises with his friend Sepo, also involving the musician Vittorio Gui. Camagni was given the role of a melancholic and cruel Pierrot. The film, entitled Fantasia bianca (White Fantasy), was a failure due to the editing by Gui and Masi, who made the music the fulcrum of the work, making the visual part a simple succession of images that was defined ‘an attempt at art’ and therefore withdrawn from circulation. At this point, Bianca Virginia Camagni, assisted by journalist Tito A. Spagnol, took over the film and re-edited it, also introducing some new scenes and a new character, which she entrusted to Amleto Novelli. The title was changed from Fantasia bianca (White Fantasy) to Fantasia and saw the light of day in 1921 thanks to Camagni Film, a production company, this one, specially set up in the same year as the film's release. Despite mixed reviews and not very satisfied audiences, the second edition of the work had a much better outcome, at least from a financial point of view.
In 1919, as an actress, Camagni had a prominent role again alongside Mario Bonnard (and under Bonnard's direction) in the film La stretta (also called Nella stretta), produced by Cines. With her own production company she wrote, directed and starred in a modest number of films: among the most famous were La sconosciuta (1921), co-directed with Tito A. Spagnol, where she had a leading role alongside actors of the calibre of Alberto Collo and Amleto Novelli. It was a passionate and romantic drama in which a poor young man falls in love with a young princess, but reasons of the heart do not prevail over dynastic ones and so the young lover takes his own life. Other titles produced by the Camagni Film company were La bella nonna and Il cuore e l'ombra (both 1922). In 1921 she also worked in supporting roles with Turin's FERT, such as in Guglielmo Zorzi's film La donna perduta, which was widely circulated and much appreciated by the critics of the time, who described it as a ‘very tasty work, full of verve, played with impeccable intuition by all the actors’.
Bianca Virginia Camagni retired from the profession in 1922 after only nine years of her career. She declared on this subject in an interview a few years earlier (1917): ‘I love the cinema and I feel that this ardour blazes within me with such fury that one day I will end up not being able to stand it any longer. [...] Everything I do, I do by myself: I weave the strands, I write the play, I do the performance." Her career also ended due to a major fire that struck her own film production company, Camagni Film. Once she had completely retired from the stage, she lost all trace of herself. All that remains of her work today is La gelosia, one of the first roles she played for Augusto Genina's direction, Il figlio della guerra (a copy with missing captions) and a very short fragment, barely visible, of Cavalleria rusticana. During the Second World War, as an evacuee, Camagni left Milan to take refuge in Canzo, in the province of Como, where she died on 8 September 1960 at the age of 75.
Sources: Italian Wikipedia, IMDb, wfpp.columbia.edu/pioneer/bianca-virginia-camagni/