Italia. Il fuoco, la cenere (international title: Italy. Fire and Ashes) is a lyrical, visionary journey into the origins of Italian silent cinema, which had an unparalleled and glorious history and survives dispersed through film archives across the globe. This dazzling art and industry gave sparkle to some of the first international stars and generated peplum, melodrama, and adventure films. In its realm of romance and delirium, in an era spanning Verdi’s symbolism and D’Annunzio’s decadentismo, Italian cinema enjoyed international fame, captivating crowds, intellectuals, and artists throughout Europe before crossing to America. The protagonists of our story are the men and women directors, actors, technicians, and critics who contributed to the exuberant originality of that cinema. Narrated by Isabella Rossellini for the Italian edition and Fanny Ardant for the French – each giving voice to remarkable archival images through the original words of those who created and experienced that aesthetic and cultural revolution – the film revives an era of splendor and the history of a nation that was soon to fall into the abyss of Fascism.
Our film aims to open a door onto a universe of darkness and mystery. The images pulsate, emerging from obscurity, and we are visited by ghosts, through whom we witness an entire vanished world, unknown to many. This is the story of an art and at the same time the story of a country and of its manners and tastes, the fragrance of a past time – or rather, the fragrance of different eras that succeed one another, until we are led, imperceptibly but inexorably, towards the Fascist era and the collapse of a profoundly European culture.
While the general structure of our narrative seeks to maintain a certain chronology, this study of cinema is nonetheless poetic, above all else, and far from a mere compilation or any attempt to be completist. Our choices focused on the most innovative works in their genre, those which even now seem to us capable of teaching something about cinema, or even teaching cinema in a different way. The film also shows how this kind of filmmaking was not born in a void, but was naturally inspired, in its creation, by the art forms that preceded it: painting, sculpture, opera, photography, theater, and so on.
Editing is at the heart of the project, both in terms of overall structure and at each point of juncture. Every phase of the narrative thus finds its own internal tension and rhythm in an attempt to bring back to life what lies buried beneath the surface of the images, as if these films could reflect something of the unconscious of Italian society at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The constant dialogue between fiction and documentary images reveals the obsessions or the gaps in that society, its grandeur as well as its vulnerability.
In the marvellous film archives of Italy and Europe we visited – Turin, Milan, Rome, Gemona, Bologna, as well as Amsterdam, Paris, and London – surviving nitrate reels embody the memory of cinema and the very fragility of that memory, its resplendent beauty and its inexorable decomposition. Looking at them, we realized that an archive is aesthetic material in itself, radiating colours whose original tints have been preserved, or throbbing with distortions caused by the passage of time, and sometimes lent an abstract quality once their deterioration has become irreversible.
For the Italian-language narration of Italia. Il fuoco, la cenere we chose – through the emblematic voice of Isabella Rossellini – to give speech to the creators of these images and those who were spectators at the time: Luigi Pirandello, Salvador Dalí, Antonio Gramsci, Ricciotto Canudo, Giovanni Pastrone, Federico Fellini, Francesca Bertini, and others. They allow us to relive what the audience saw in those films, and what entranced, amazed, or troubled them.

Céline Gailleurd, Olivier Bohler