Vera Vergani (1894-1989) was not just one of the leading lights of Italian theatre between the 1910s and 1920s – her performances as the stepdaughter in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and D’Annunzio’s La figlia di Iorio are famous – but also an extraordinary actress in silent films. Between 1916 and 1923, she worked with the most respected directors of the period: Augusto Genina, Roberto Roberti and Mario Caserini, acting alongside Tullio Carminati, Gustavo Serena and Nerio Bernardi. She was a non-conformist, who retired aged 36 when her career was at its very peak. The story for this “film-drama in five acts”, written specifically for Vera Vergani by one of the most important Italian playwrights of the period, Dario Niccodemi, is “a vaguely Pirandellian text, based on the tormented obsession of a man who sees in every woman he meets the face of the woman he was too afraid to love” (Vittorio Martinelli). Roberto Roberti brings out Vergani’s great talents as an actor: “through her gestures, her performance displays a simplicity, a truth, which is unusual for silent theatre” (“In penombra”, n. 6, 1918). A big hit with the public, the film divided the critics. For some, the protagonist should have displayed “greater passion, a fresher and more wide-ranging performance style” (“La Cine-Fono”, n. 420, 1920), others defined the film as “the work of an artist, interpreted by artists” (“Cinemundus”, n. 8-9, 1920). Today, the importance of this film, at last presented in a restored version, is above all historical: it is the only evidence we still have of Vera Vergani’s acting. Thanks to the Cineteca di Bologna’s archive of non-filmic materials, it is for the first time possible to reconstruct the biography and filmography of this great but forgotten diva.

Enrica Fontana