The Singular Multiple: Francesca Bertini as Star and Director

The article examines the career of Francesca Bertini, the famous star and director of Italian silent cinema, as a case study for a more general discussion of the problematic relationship between stardom and authorship in the experience of women filmmakers during the silent period. Bertini’s position in the history of women's cinema appears unique under several regards, all of which appear to be connected to her contradictory status as Diva, the inimitabile and sublime creature she came to epitomize in Italian silent cinema. Now, while this very successful public image has certainly provided her with an extraordinarily well-established position in traditional film history, on the other hand it is also the reason for the sense of distanciation she can induce in the feminist historian, who no longer finds herself involved with an obscure - or anyway obscured - figure, but with an image that, for once, appears to be even eccessively neat and bright. The peculiar ambiguity of the Diva figure – a powerful, creative and charismatic woman, who nonetheless gets her aura only from a thorough identification with the most obvious stereotypes of male literature - is no doubt an exemplary test for feminist historiography, a challenge to develop an interpretative frame aimed to allow a process of feminist evaluation even in the case of those figures, like Bertini, who may at first look ambiguous or disturbing from such a stance. The examination of Bertini’s career and personality is undertaken in view of the development of a new concept of acting as agency, or even as a vicariating form of film direction, involving a series of theoretical speculations on the very notion of authorship. The article ends on a reconsideration of the problematic relationship between the “visible few” and the “invisible many” that underlies all attempts in feminist historiography.