Giuseppe Amisani painted her, Emilio Sommariva took her photograph, and after the première of the first film she directed, La piccola ombra (1916), a reviewer praised her as the “highest hope of the new Art of Cinema”. We know too little about Bianca Virginia Camagni. Actress, writer, director and producer, she was involved in making over twenty film from 1914 to 1922, initially starring in productions of Milano Films. In 1916 she went freelance. Her last projects, Fantasia bianca (1919- 1921, with sculptor-artist Severio Pozzati and the composer Vittorio Gui) and La sconoscuta (1921, with writer Tito A. Spagnol) sound unique, experimental. Not surprisingly she played the female lead in the elusive Il re, le torri, gli alfieri.
Of Camagni’s work, at the moment we know of the existence of the one-reeler La gelosia (1915), the image part of Il figlio della guerra (1916) and a little fragment, hardly visible, of Cavalleriarusticana (1916). Her own productions from around 1921-1922 (Fantasia bianca, La sconosciuta, La bella nonna, Il cuore e l’ombra) were presumably lost in a fire. We are grateful to Emiliana Losma for this information and for her research on Bianca Virgina Camagni, published in 2011 (“Bianco e Nero” No. 570) with a wealth of source texts and details. Losma reports that during the war Camagni gave up acting for two years in order to work for the Italian Red Cross. Remember this when you see the opening shot of Il figlio della guerra.
The original camera negative, lacking intertitles, of this film was discovered among the fifty-four titles of Pathé-Film d’Arte Italiana in the collections of the Cinémathèque française, and a preservation print was struck from it. To judge from this film alone, Bianca Virginia Camagni had her own individual acting style, sober and restrained. How had she been trained? She is not acting the diva. Which is remarkable; watch any dramatic actress in 1916 Italian cinema, and you will find all of them imitating Borelli, using her key gestures. A film about facts a mother does not tell her son: that she was raped, that he was born as a result of the rape, and that as an adult he killed his father. Both crimes, the rape and the killing, happened during the war. The first part of the film is impressive, making you wish Camagni, who wrote the script, would have also put herself at the center of the second part.

Mariann Lewinsky