Where does our historical awareness begin? How does someone from the past step into our world? It could be when a friend mentions a name we haven’t heard before: “Ah, Eleuterio Rodolfi…..” Shortly after that, I came to know Rodolfi as the director and lead actor in a brilliant comedy, L’acqua miracolosa / The Magic Water, a visually elegant, humane and thoroughly likeable film in which adultery brings happiness to all concerned, and in a fragment of compelling beauty, L’Oca alla Colbert / Gosse à la Colbert, which was shown in 1994 at the eighth edition of Cinema Ritrovato. The images are unforgettable: brightly-lit shop windows on a winter evening, Gigetta with fur muff on a bridge, under a light dusting of snow… For years there was no more than the memory of these one and a half films, the unusual name (Eleuterio) and a desire to see more and to know more.

After a taster at last year’s Cinema Ritrovato, with Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei / The Last Days of Pompeii, L’acqua miracolosa and above all Forza irresistibile, a fast-paced pas de deux featuring Gigetta and Rodolfi, we are now fulfilling our wish for a retrospective. But it turned out that the survival rate – or more precisely the rate of loss – left us a very restricted field. Of the approximately 170 films that Rodolfi is thought to have acted in or directed, an international search located only 25, of which three were in fragmentary form (Il francobollo raro / The Rare Stamp, Cenerentola / Cinderella and Ah! Le donne! / Oh! Women!). The new Rodolfi and (mostly) Gigetta comedies we discovered are great fun, elegant and witty. Eleuterio Rodolfi is not particularly handsome, but always dapper. And, as every woman knows, in the long run, good conversation and warmth make for better company than dazzling looks. The same goes for Gigetta Morano, who is no diva but something much better: a mature actress with intelligence, self-confidence and charm.

Paradoxically, it became clear during our viewings for the retrospective that the atmospheric fragment of Gigetta on a winter’s night cannot be from L’Oca alla Colbert (even though there are a good few sweet little geese in the film). It has now been identified as the first reel of I raggi “Z” of 1917 – director unknown, though it could still be Rodolfi. Either way, it deserves its place in the programme.

(Mariann Lewinsky)

Eleuterio Rodolfi and Gigetta Morano: we have already met Gigetta, one of the protagonists of the “women’s revolution” that was part of last year’s festival; we know less about Rodolfi, a jack-of-all trades, director, actor and also producer. This section is divided in three parts that follow the different positions he took on during the production process, in many cases connected to the presence of Gigetta: a survey that intends to reconstruct the career of this prolific yet so little known character.
Rodolfi was a leading figure in production in Turin during the 1910s. He was the son of a famous stage actor, and after an explosive debut that brought him work with several travelling theater groups (including Ermete Novelli’s company), he moved on to cinema in 1911, beginning a professional and artistic partnership with Ambrosio that lasted until 1916-17.

Whether comedy or drama, Rodolfi easily moves between directing and acting, which is perhaps why he was made director of one of the most famous Italian silent films, The Last Days of Pompeii; all in all Rodolfi performed in ninety-five films and directed eighty for Ambrosio. In 1916, he also began to work with Jupiter Film, the production company which he definitively moved to the following year. He would go on to make seven films for Jupiter, of which only one has survived (Ah! Le donne!). In 1919 he founded his own production company, exceptional for its continuous (though brief) activity and for its innovative productions, for the most part influenced by cinema on the other side of the Alps, which was developing a more dynamic expressive style in comparison to Italian films.

His work is dynamic in terms of technique and story, which can be seen even in his films for Ambrosio: Rodolfi was certainly one of the first directors to work this way and was the first to imagine, along with Gigetta, a new genre of Italian cinema: comedy. Discarding the chase scenes of previous comedies, Rodolfi is just “Rodolfi” and Gigetta “Gigetta”: a steady adult couple that smiles indulgently upon a world that changes rapidly, knocking down moral codes of faithfulness, family and adultery: on an existential level, cheating becomes as insignificant as trying on a dress…

(Chiara Caranti)

Programme curated by Chiara Caranti e Mariann Lewinsky