The fortune of Fauno in the modern age is marked by a paradox: preserved in a color print at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino (another print with intertitles in Danish is at the Cineteca Nazionale di Rome), the film by Febo Mari never enjoyed the success of another of his films, Cenere (1916) known in Italy by means of an exemplary black and white version which has been restored in color by the George Eastman House in Rochester. We might suppose that there are two reasons for this lack of success: the aura of the legend that surrounds the figure of Eleonora Duse, protagonist and the inspiration of Cenere, and the past obstinance regarding the esthetics of Italian decadence in cinema. Times have changed and the dramas interpreted by Lyda Borelli and Pina Menichelli are finally the object of attention without those ironic overtones that marked the reviews of the past decades.
The fame of Cenere has eclipsed that of Fauno for a third reason: its programmatic yet contradictory adhesione to the fundamentals of realism. Filmed in outdoor rural settings that were intentionally sparse, Cenere represented the ideals of that which Italian silent cinema could be without the film star system: a cinema of essential gestures, lean, alien to the spasms of that artificial and impotent sensitivity that were typical of the dramatic productions of the 1910’s and 1920’s. Though inferior to Fauno in terms of visual inventiveness, the adaption of the novel by Grazia Deledda treated the eye with its light and shade effects, with its original perspectives (the reapers in a field glimpsed behind the ridge of a hill) with brief but significant movements of the camera in the internal scenes. The moment has therefore arrived to give Fauna the place it deserves.