Gerolamo Lo Savio’s Otello was one of the earliest of the important productions made by Film d’Arte Italiana (F.A.I.), founded in Rome in March 1909 as a sister company to France’s Le Film d’Art. Lo Savio was the company’s managing director, while Ugo Falena often took the role of artistic director, with sources frequently crediting one or the other almost interchangeably, including on Otello. For example, Falena is mentioned in an article about filmmaking by the young journalist and future director Lucio D’Ambra, writing in Il Tirso (September 1909) under the name “Spectator”: “Here we are in Venice. Iago and Rodrigo travel in a gondola, in front of the Doge’s Palace, to plot against Othello… The gondola stops before the Gran Canal Hotel: a steam launch is waiting. Othello (Ferruccio Garavaglia) is here, magnificent in his arms and presence. He’s accompanied by Falena.” The desire to make a film seen to be artistically worthy is attested to, most of all, by the choice of shooting in Venice, where Shakespeare located his play. Here, “dans son décor naturel” (as the French advertisements proclaimed), the action could take shape and develop “along the very waters and in the very gardens and palaces” (Moving Picture World, 19.03.1910). Il Tirso (August 1909) also mentioned that some scenes were shot in Bologna: “The Italian affiliate of the great film studio Pathé started work in Bologna; and from next October will be continuing in Rome, where a special studio will be built. …The first tests made in Bologna have provided excellent results. Included among these shots are some of Ferruccio Garavaglia as Othello.”
Garavaglia was a consummate theatre actor, but the warm baritone voice he used on stage is absent here in his film debut, and for the critics, his screen performance as Othello was less than convincing; Vittoria Lepanto as a young Desdemona copes better with Shakespeare’s dramatic range. And Mario Bonnard? Information from this period is fragmentary, almost non-existent. Some obituaries mention that he appeared in Otello in 1909, with a few connecting it to Mario Caserini (who made an Otello for Cines in 1906). The passage of time, together with scant evidence, doesn’t simplify things.
Two copies of the Film d’Arte Italiana version of Otello are known to exist: the one screened in this year’s festival from the Komiya Collection housed in Tokyo’s National Film Archive of Japan, and a print at the Cinémathèque française. Both copies are incomplete, yet each has unique elements. The Komiya version is a pochoir stencil-color print which provides us with important information about the studio’s production methods. The French copy in black & white includes a prologue containing an evocative extended close-up in which Iago (Cesare Dondini) and one of his friends are transported in a gondola to meet with Othello and Desdemona. Towards the end of this scene, which exists solely in the French copy, one can possibly make out a young Bonnard, then barely in his twenties, as the gondolier in the background glimpsed during Iago’s landing. We can’t be certain: “moviola impressions,” one might say, based on studying the footage frame by frame.
Though it was impossible to screen both versions this year, it still seemed right to include the Japanese copy, which in any event allows us the chance to consider the influence such a major production would have had on Bonnard, present or not, and his development as a budding actor, especially when considering the aim of Film d’Arte Italiana of raising cinema to the same level as the more traditional arts. Every aspect of the film’s production was geared towards this goal, including the advertising materials. The poster, for example, besides representing the dramatically charged scene of Desdemona’s murder, informs the public that the sets were painted by Professor Gardenghi; the costumes and equipment were provided by the Zampironi company of Milan; and Bologna’s House of Rovinazzi supplied the furniture.

Marcello Seregni