Movies can elicit profound, sometimes dismaying, reflections about the reciprocal influences of religion and society, faith and culture, belief and behavior. Rarely, however, do filmgoers consider the influence of religion on the production of film itself. Of course, some might point to the Presbyterian roots of Will H. Hays (1879-1954), whose infamous “Hays Code” (1930-68) curtailed activities both on and off the screen for decades. Students today are often shocked by the bare breasts and steamy kisses of pre-Hays Code film. Such shock often results from an evolutionary view of morality—or perhaps we should say a devolutionary view, assuming a continuous decline in ethical standards, as though all film before the 1950s reflected the clean-cut values of the Father Knows Best era.
But to explain the Hays Code by pointing to the influence of Christianity would be disingenuous. For one thing, the code required that wrongdoers be punished by the end of the movie, a convention that ignores not only the imprecatory Psalms of David—as in “Why do the unrighteous prosper?”—but also life as most of us experience it. Nor was the Hays Office initiated by people with religious interests. It began during the silent era as a public relations ploy of movie moguls, who worried not about indecency but about protests against it. As David A. Cook puts it in his History of Narrative Film, “The main task of the Hays Office in the twenties was to stave off the threat of government censorship by mollifying pressure groups, managing news, deflecting scandal, and generally discouraging close scrutiny of the industry.” Though pressure groups like the Catholic Legion of Decency were often motivated by religious concerns, the Hays Office sprang from the head of mammon rather than the heart of Christ. We should not be surprised, then, that the “ultraconservative” Hays was, according to Cook, “one of the more crooked members of the corrupt Harding administration.”
America, of course, was not the only country producing movies before and during the era of the Hays Code. In her book Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema, Angela Dalle Vacche discusses silent movies produced in Italy between 1910 and 1919, asserting that religion did indeed affect Italian cinema. Her focus, as the title implies, is on divas in silent film: passionate female characters seeking to break free from cultural restraints, to experience life and love with an intensity only allowed to the males of their day. However, divas who successfully evade or surmount their social constraints are inevitably punished, usually through loss: of social standing; of a child, lover, or spouse; even of life itself.
The Italian diva suffers, then, not only from societal restrictions but also from her rebellion against them. Hence, while punishment of wrongdoers was externally imposed by the Hollywood studios themselves through forceful implementation of the Hays Code (which Dalle Vacche never mentions), suffering, loss, and retribution were spun into the very fabric of the earlier Italian diva films.
Significantly, Dalle Vacche suggests that the Roman Catholic tradition of the mater dolorosa—the suffering mother of Christ—deeply influenced the acting style of the divas in these films, a style driven by the conflict between the content of a diva’s heart and the context of her body. We are reminded (though not by Dalle Vacche) of mournful Pietas in numerous European museums, and of the abundance of Italian gift shop statuettes representing the mater dolorosa with seven swords piercing her heart. All of these images are dramatic but silent—like the divas in early Italian cinema.
Dalle Vacche would have done well to pursue this connection between traditional images of the mater dolorosa and the diva film. In fact, she would have done well to explain more thoroughly numerous connections she makes between early Italian cinema and its contexts. Instead, she gives us cursory and sometimes tantalizing suggestions, skimming the surface of cultural influences without probing in depth. She offers so many different characteristics that they occasionally vie with each other. After asserting that the diva film illustrates the mater dolorosa of classic Roman Catholic piety, Dalle Vacche later presents the genre as “aristocratic, art nouveau and often protofeminist,” discussing how “the diva film shows women practicing sports, smoking, struggling for child custody.” The reader wonders when we’ll see the diva at the kitchen sink.
In other words, Dalle Vacche never makes clear the principal traits by which one might identify the “diva film” as a distinctive genre, despite her insistence on its uniqueness. It would seem that what makes a diva film a diva film is the actress who stars in it. Dalle Vacche discusses in detail the diva work of Lyda Borelli, Francesca Bertini, and Pina Menichelli, suggesting that they share an “oscillation between mystical-visionary and hysterical-melancholic postures.” Along the way she reconstructs the earlier work of celebrities like Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and Asta Nielsen, finding in them antecedents for the diva acting style.
Thus, though Dalle Vacche repeatedly mentions that diva films differ from silent films produced outside Italy, she never adequately shows how. Major American stars such as Dorothy and Lillian Gish, Norma and Constance Talmadge, Clara Bow, Louise Brooks, and Mary Pickford (mentioned on page 226, but not in the book’s index) are never compared with the diva actresses. The great French serial actress Musidora is not mentioned at all, even though her acting in Louis Feuillade’s masterpiece Les Vampires (1915) seems to embody the diva style as Dalle Vacche herself has defined it.
Still, despite the book’s many flaws, some of them glaring (such as the attribution of L’Après-midi d’un Faun to Stravinsky instead of Claude Debussy), Dalle Vacche has done a service for film historians by going into elaborate detail about the diva films themselves. Having spent hours in obscure vaults containing ancient film stock inaccessible to most scholars, she makes available, through lengthy verbal descriptions, the wordless essence of silent Italian cinema. Furthermore, the book comes with a DVD of clips from some of the films Dalle Vacche discusses, illustrating the spectacular artistry of silent Italian cinema. Made by Dutch filmmaker Peter Delpeut, the DVD is a microcosm of the book itself. Called Diva Dolorosa, Delpeut’s silent documentary throws images at the viewer, juxtaposing clips without naming or explaining them. We see a montage of kiss scenes, followed by neck-thrown-back-in-agony scenes, followed by clips of divas clawing the air, and so on. We have no idea where individual clips come from, which diva we are watching, what year each film was made. Hence, as with Dalle Vacche’s book, what we get is the filmmaker’s own sense of connection: surfaces without depth.
But what amazing surfaces! We see subtle (and not-so-subtle) acting that is enhanced by elaborate sets, smart chiaro-scuro effects, and clever camera angles. Hence, just as Dalle Vacche’s (sometimes excruciatingly) detailed description of individual films offers some compensation for her superficial analysis, so Delpeut’s painstaking reproduction of archival material exonerates him from his failure to explain.
And taken together, Dalle Vacche’s verbal descriptions of complex films and Delpeut’s visual images of artistic complexity save us from what C.S. Lewis once called “chronological snobbery,” that careless condescension toward cultural productions of the past, a temptation to which moviegoers are particularly vulnerable. The divas of Italian silent film forcefully remind us that the artistry of film transcends the technological divide between our time and the era before sound.
Reid Perkins-Buzo and Crystal Downing both teach in the film program at Messiah College. Perkins-Buzo, assistant professor of communication, is an award-winning filmmaker and a Dominican Brother; Downing, professor of English and film studies, has won multiple awards for her essays on film, and has published two books on the relationship between faith and culture.
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