Raffaele Viviani, Divismo, and the Cinematic Construction of Italian Identity

Most agree that the era of silent film lasted from as early as the mid-1890s to the 1920s. Silent film was the very first phase of cinema history; cinema in its infancy, we might even say. We like to imagine that when cinema landed on the art stage, it caused a cataclysmic shock that reshaped the way we understood both art and the world around us. And while there is some truth to this statement, it lacks context.

Illustration by Anviksha Bhardwaj

Early cinema was derided by other art institutions; in particular, legendary Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello criticized cinema as just trying to be theatre. His initial criticisms weren’t unwarranted, as most early silent cinema was adaptations of famous plays like King Lear or Macbeth. His ambivalence to cinema waned quite quickly, though, and he soon became a leading figure in the early history of cinema, with a great deal of his work being adapted for the silver screen. 

Despite Pirandello’s warming up to cinema, the form still struggled to gain legitimacy among the elites. Beyond many agreeing with Pirandello’s comment on art being a mimesis of theatre, cinema was also criticized for being populist. There is no better evidence of this than the Golden Age of Divisimo, lasting somewhere between 1913 and 1921. 

What is ‘Divisimo’?

Divismo refers to a social phenomenon found primarily in the Silent Cinema of Italy. It refers to actors who become ‘Divas’ – Diva being the Latin word for a goddess. In the present day, ‘Diva’ has taken on a new connotation, usually weaponized by misogynists to refer to famous women they don’t like.  

Divismo takes the form of a totalizing stardom that dominates the actors' lives, it turns them into essential gods. No longer is the actor simply a nameless figure who can morph themself into the character, blend into the narrative and disappear into the mimesis of the performance (as happens in the theatre). Instead, the Divo takes centre stage, often to the detriment of the narrative. The audience no longer watches the film for the narrative but for the Divo. The Divo takes precedence over all other aspects of film and art.

Divismo was born alongside cinema, emerging as an inherent product of the medium itself. Unlike other art forms, cinema is intrinsically global—its visual language and mass distribution allow it to reach far broader audiences. This mass appeal is essential to understanding divismo—it goes beyond just a cultural phenomenon, becoming a creation of cinema's unique capacity to produce and project celebrity on a global scale.

Divismo, here, also commodified the actor, turning them into a product that can be sold to people through the movies. The actor no longer belongs to themselves, or the performance, but to the audience. The individual no longer exists; only the actor exists, the divo. The divo is no longer a person but a product, a commodity to be sold on the free market. Consequently, the Divo must respond to the demands of the market, of stardom. 

Such stardom created a mass culture around the Divos that was then embraced by the audience, leading to the creation of proto-fandoms around the Divos. These are so entrenched in social life that many allow their political and social lives to be informed by these Divos. 

Divismo is no longer about the actor. Divismo instead becomes about how the public act and react to the Divo. The Divo itself is shaped by and shapes the audience in a dialectical materialist way. 

Dialectical Materialism is a philosophical approach established by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Dialectical Materialism proposes that the material reality exists before observation, and that we construct a subjective understanding of reality, which can then, in turn, influence the material reality. The world of material reality precedes the world of ideas, but it does not supersede it. The two are in a relationship and influence each other. 

The Divo didn’t precede the proto-fandom public audience or vice versa; the two exist simultaneously and are constantly influencing each other. 

If the Divo is not an actor, what is it? What do they do? The Divo adopts and reproduces archetypes present in mainstream culture. These archetypal roles are informed by—and inform—the audience who perceive them. For example, the Padre Nobile archetype, which translates to Noble Father, is a reproduction of masculine and patriarchal gender roles that were present at the time. 

This is almost banal as an observation, as with the evolution of cinema came the rise of cinema as a tool of representation. There’s just one intrinsic, inherent and textual problem with cinema as a medium. It is nigh impossible not to focus on the individual to inform society and the masses about marginalized communities. Marginalized communities are, therefore, reduced to archetypes at best and caricatures at worst. 

We might almost call it a simulacra of the real. Jean Baudrillard coined the term simulacra in his 1981 book ‘Simulacra and Simulation’. In it, he argues that the modern world is inundated by simulations; a copy of a copy. This copy of a copy replaces our perception of reality; the copy of the copy becomes the ontological reality. Eventually, reality becomes replaced by simulations, once this has happened, it becomes a simulacra. Marginalized communities, as understood through mass media, become a simulation of the real. 

The mainstream audience does not perceive the subaltern peoples through direct perception but rather through a reproduction of them. Said reproduction becomes real. The subaltern peoples do not have a voice; rather, said voice is silenced and forced into the mould of the mass media. 

Therefore, whether wanted or unwanted, the public used the Divo to understand marginalized communities. And it is precisely this that I want to focus on, with particular regard for ethnic minorities and the working class in Italy of the early 1900s. But before we do that, we need some historical context; in particular, we need to understand the Risorgimento.

Risorgimento (a.k.a. The Unification of Italy)

Cinema in the early 1900s was in a stage of rapid evolution and change. Simultaneous to the growth of cinema was a shift in the values that were present in society. Italy was 30 years away from reunification; a national Italian identity was beginning to form. 

The reunification of Italy (known in Italy as Risorgimento) lasted (debatably) from 1848 to 1871. It was a period of rapid, violent nation-building spurred on by nationalistic ideas of a mythic Italy. Italy as a unified national-cultural identity barely—if ever—existed before this point. 

The reunification of Italy is one of the most written about and talked about events in Italian history. To condense this complex history into a single essay is a fool's task. Instead of trying to condense it all, I will draw attention to two aspects of the unification which are essential to understanding this piece. The first aspect is the struggle of the Italian people to accept the concept of a united Italy. The second aspect is the Southern question. 

The Struggle of the Italian People to Accept the Concept of a United Italy

Denis Mack Smith (March 3, 1920 – July 11, 2017) was an English historian who specialized in the Italian Risorgimento period. In his analysis of the period, he identified what he believed to be the biggest challenge Italians at the time faced—accepting the idea of a united Italy. 

Even the very concept of a unified Italy was foreign to many public intellectuals at the time. The Risorgimento had three main goals: unification, liberty, and independence. This did not necessarily mean the same thing as nation-building. As Mack Smith noted, Italy always had many identities around which the people oriented themselves. There wasn’t really an ‘Italian’ identity; there were instead various, multi-faceted, regional and provincial identities. All identities with their own culture, history, and even language, most of the time. 

The challenge for the pro-reunification crowd was precisely in the name itself, ‘reunification’. And yet, even the name itself, reunification (risorgimento), implies unifying what was once unified; there’s just one problem with this. Italy was never ‘unified’ as they originally thought. A reunified Italy is built on a myth of a past unified Italy. 

This is nothing new, as with any nation-building, it needs to be built on a myth. Nations (and consequently empires and states) are not an ontological reality which we can find simply by observing the world around us. Empires, states, and nations need to be built. What said institution is built on is almost always a myth. Whether it be the Roman myth of Romulus and Remus, or the Mexica myth of Aztlan, every empire has a foundational myth that it uses to justify its nation-building. Italian risorgimento is no different. 

This forces us to ponder, if it is a ‘rebirth’, then what is it a rebirth of? Was it a rebirth of the Roman Empire? It can’t be that because the Italy of the 1800s was so divided from the Roman Empire that it is impossible to even say that they are the same thing. And so what is it? It is a myth. 

The Southern Question

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was an Italian Marxist, philosopher and public intellectual. He wrote a lot about the Risorgimento. Gramsci called the risorgimento a ‘passive revolution’. From his perspective, it was a revolution by a minority of elite middle classes from the north for their interests, all at the expense of the disenfranchised, dispossessed peoples of the south.

This is what Gramsci called ‘the Southern Question’, a direct reference to the Jewish Question. The south of Italy was seen as backwards, and therefore it became justifiable to exploit them.

One might even argue that this is a form of proto-orientalism. Orientalism, as understood pre-Said, referred to all the academic studies that have to do with the ‘Orient’. A vague and undefined term which refers to a variety of cultures and peoples, most of which don’t have a shared identity. Edward Said (1935–2003) was a Palestinian-American academic and literary critic whose most famous work is his 1978 book ‘Orientalism’. 

In it, he proposes a different understanding of the term ‘orientalism’. Said adopts a multi-disciplinary lens on the academic field of Orientalism. He proposes that the Occident (the West) creates, perpetuates, and reproduces the concept of the Orient. For Said, the Occident places the Orient as separate from the Occident.

This labelling of Orient is an inherently othering experience. It presents those of the Orient as separate, ontologically and metaphysically, from the Occident and all that it values. This othering action robs the Orient of any agency. For the Occident, the Orient cannot help but be uncivilized, backwards, and barbaric. Meanwhile, the Occident is civilized and advanced. And so, because of this, the Occident is justified in executing violence against the Orient. For the Occident has a civilizing duty against the Orient. Said’s work is highly influential and essential in helping us understand the process occurring between the north and south of Italy pre, during, and post Risorgimento. 

For the ‘civilized’ races of the north of Italy, the south is closer to the Mediterranean, than to Italy. This labelling of the Mediterranean is just another way to call them Oriental, and therefore not European. The northern Italians claim to trace their lineage to Germanic peoples; in so doing, they draw a line of cultural difference between north and south. All echoing modern discourses on the Orient, which Edward Said frequently drew attention to. 

The racism against the south is so normalized even today that it is commonplace to refer to anyone from the south as “terroni” (a slur), even if they are just from Rome or Naples, two cities which are in the centre of Italy. A clear indicator of the illogic of racism, which Jean Paul Sartre wrote about in reference to the illogic of the antisemite. 

This Italian identity was created, produced, and reproduced through institutional means, i.e. the establishment of an official Italian language and consequent forced teaching of said language. But also through the media, the birth of cinema was the perfect landscape for nation-building. It is no coincidence that fascism arose contemporaneously with mass media. 

Italy’s post-risorgimento wasn’t finished nation building. In fact, mass media (like cinema and radio) provided the perfect tool for Italy to further its nation building project. In particular, it used silent cinema to create a conception of Italy, which it used to build support for fascism. The most famous example of this is the 1914 silent film ‘Cabiria’. A film that presents Italy as a weak feminized woman who must be saved from a savage oriental horde trying to destroy it.

Much has been written on the role of ‘Cabiria’ in paving the way for fascism, with a particular focus on the character of Maciste, a strong man figure who becomes a prototype for masculine fascism. A character who in his debut film was a black man played by a white man in black face, but who was changed to just being a white man in his later appearances. 

So much has been written about ‘Cabiria’ that it is impossible to add anything new to that discourse. Instead, I want to draw attention to a forgotten figure of a silent Italian. I want to talk about Italy’s first black screenwriter, Raffaele Viviani. 

Who was Raffeale Viviani?

Viviani was a playwright, writer and (of course) actor who lived from 1888 until 1950 in Italy. There are two characteristics which distinguish Viviani from his contemporaries. The first is his ‘anti-Pirandello’ approach to his writing. Viviani chooses to forgo the typical psychological or individual aspects of the characters innovated and popularized by Pirandello. Instead, he preferred to explore his characters through a social angle. Throughout his work, Viviani attempts to empathize with and understand the working class, he actively chooses to present the social stratification of reality on the screen, a rarity for the time.

However, there’s another characteristic which makes Viviani stand out, and that’s the fact that he was a black man in Italy during the 1900s. Therefore, as a Divo, he becomes the bearer of representation for the working classes and ethnic minorities. Since Divismo is a two-way street, the audience watches Viviani with preconceptions of what working class and ethnic minority people are, and Viviani reinforces those preconceptions by playing into them as a Divo.

What are these preconceptions, though? The Italian public of the early 1900s, whether willingly or unwillingly, was viewing Viviani and his films as exotic, as oriental. They went to the cinema to see something strange, weird and exotic. 

From their moral perspective, they were seeing a culture that was savage, inferior and primitive. In their minds, they were thinking, “We were once like this, but we are not like this anymore”. This orientalism extended to viewing ethnic minorities as “creatures”.

To better understand how the Italian public othered and orientalized ethnic minorities at the time, we need to turn our attention to one of Viviani’s most fascinating films. 

‘Amore Selvaggio’: A Savage Love in a Savage Time

One such example of early class and ethnic minority representation is Viviani’s 1912 film Amore Selvaggio (translated as ‘Savage Love’). ‘Amore Selvaggio’ is a 21-minute long silent film (sections of which are lost) about the lower classes in Naples. 

Viviani plays the brother of a woman (Luisella) who falls in love with the landlord of the farm where they both work. The landlord treats them both as less than human, ‘as animals’. Luisella attempts to get the attention of the landlord but fails; this leads the landlord to fire her on the spot, and she is left heartbroken. She tells Viviani, who vows revenge and goes hunting for the landlord. 

Luisella does not want this and attempts to stop them from fighting. She succeeds in stopping them, and both Viviani and the landlord live unharmed. The film has a happy ending. On its surface, it’s a fairly innocuous film, but it's only once we look under the surface that we can see the complexities behind this more than one hundred-year-old film. 

The first thing that stands out about this film is how it highlights the contrasts between social classes. For example, the landlord is dressed elegantly, carries a rich cane, and always walks in a straight and firm manner. Meanwhile, Viviani is dressed as an individual from the lower class.

And in contrast to the landlords ‘dignified’ (at the time) walk, Viviani chooses to portray his walk as more animalistic; he drags his feet, he hunches his shoulders, and he moves erratically. At a certain point, Viviani is even found to be sleeping under a carriage; both like an animal, and a direct attestation to his place in the social stratification of the time.

These obvious signifiers of class—such as clothing, housing, and animalistic behaviour and movement—serve two purposes. First, they serve as visual representations of the inherent, implicit and unspoken hierarchy present in society. But more importantly, they serve as the central critique Viviani is proposing. 

In short, Viviani behaves as an animal both in his acting (moving erratically and violently) but also in his choices (making irrational choices and acting on impulse. In contrast to the landlords' more calculating actions). 

Viviani actively chooses to create this distance between himself, the landlord, and the audience with his behaviour. Viviani is behaving as the public believes ‘people like him’ behave. Viviani adopts the stereotypes of the ‘savage’, the ‘uncivilized’, in an attempt to critique those very same concepts. The animality of the protagonists of ‘Amore Selvaggio’ is the entire point. Without it, Viviani’s critique would be blunted and bland. 

In fact, Viviani deliberately plays into the Orientalism that both the landlord and the audience carry with them. Through the title alone, the audience is led to recall those present in the film as savage and animalistic. These primitive aspects of the characters are associated with African culture by the audience. With Viviani being a black Italian man, he presents himself before the audience as they see him. 

Viviani leans into the ‘animal’ nature. He used the same acting techniques adopted by another Divo of the time: Giovanni Grasso (1873-1930). His technique involves the actor becoming like a marionette who is animated through movement, an acting style where the actor becomes almost an animal. But Viviani is not the only character who acts like an animal.

The deuteragonist of the film, Luisella, presents herself as very sexual. Yet, it is a sexuality which is alien to the Italian mainstream. Her sexuality is intimate and animalistic. She is in direct contrast with other feminine Divas of the time. She is not noble or well-kept; her hair is unkempt and disorderly. Luisella does not reflect the dominant ideal of ‘femininity’ that the mainstream portrays that women aspire to and that men desire to possess. Instead, she reflects the populist woman present at the time, she carries with her a wild vitality, an amore selvaggio one might call it.

The other aspect of interest in the film is how the film views the working classes. Now, it’s not that the representation of rustic or working-class life was absent in physical art. In the late 1800s, there were artists such as Francesco Hayez (1791-1882) who painted a lot of rustic European life. The difference, though, is the intent behind this representation and what is represented. Most of this physical art, and even a lot after it, mythologized rustic and rural life. They would present a romantic lens on the working class. This romantic mythologization of a distant past which never existed laid the groundwork for the fascism which developed in the coming century. 

Regardless, if we turn our attention to Italian cinema (and theatre and literature), we can see that they tended to represent the working class in a negative light. The worker was presented as being individually evil and eventually hurting the working class as a whole.

Viviani plays into this stereotype that the audience holds. In the latter half of ‘Amore Selvaggio,’ Viviani adopts and corrupts the toxic Padre Nobile archetype to protect his sister. This was done to show a vengeful working Italian taking up arms to protect those around him, changing the stereotype of Padre Nobile from a noble protecting father figure to an angry, primitive, animalistic primate who is ready to fight to protect those he holds most dear. 

The animalistic nature of Viviani dehumanizes him and places the audience at a distance from the character; they cannot relate to this wild animal. And so they just watch, as if they are viewing a strange, fascinating object. They are alienated from what is happening, it is almost like our modern documentaries, where there is a clear audience and actor separation. The movie and Viviani are playing into this moralistic perspective on an inferior culture, the exotic and oriental dimension of the other.

The lower classes are seen as lesser, and the ethnic minorities as ‘savages’, driven by pure emotion rather than logic and reason, which the Western world, the Occident, is driven by. This contrast allows the audience to hold a moral high ground, for they know they will never be driven by rage and emotion. They are beyond these ‘lesser’ races. Viviani is acutely aware of this throughout his career as an artist and plays into it, for better or for worse. 

His use of the Italian stereotypes, preconceptions, and notions of the otherized, orientalized figure is certainly more nuanced than any done at the same time. Need I remind you that the original character of Maciste from ‘Cabiria’ was a black character (played in blackface), who was turned white in his later nationalistic semi-propaganda films?

If we focus on ‘Amore Selvaggio,’ we can see how Viviani uses these values to almost fetishize ethnic minorities. There’s nothing which textually challenges the audience or makes them question their preconceived notions. 

There’s certainly nuance in Viviani’s performance, in his sister’s performance, and in the narrative itself, but it all serves the status quo. Nothing is radically challenged, and that’s indicative of Divismo as a whole. It can never challenge the status quo, only reinforce it. And in so doing, perpetuating the violence intrinsic to the status quo. Viviani can carefully challenge the status quo without ever breaking it. There’s always a happy ending in all of his work, a ‘lieto fine’ in Italian. 

Viviani finds identity in the working class, but he is also careful never to remain a self-identified worker. Most of his working-class characters either discover they have an inheritance or come about riches in some other manner. In doing so, they lose their working-class status. The worker can never remain a worker, and they can never challenge the institutions which produce and reproduce the inequalities they are born into. The worker can only escape inequality and never break it. 

Therefore, rather than challenging the systems of the time and attempting to break down the status quo, Viviani feeds the working class a fairy tale narrative that keeps them from acting. 

While Viviani is often forgotten by many, his work serves as a lens into an Italy of the time. An Italy that was built on a violent mythologized past, one that led the way to fascism. Viviani was both ahead of his time and yet not. He drew attention to a marginalized and underrepresented group in society. But without a clear systemic criticism or critique, the most that Viviani can do is represent it. This tragically leads Viviani to uphold the status quo. He was aware of the social situation but did not do enough to challenge it. 

This doesn’t stop us from appreciating his work and drawing some meaning from it. Viviani’s work helps us to understand how Italians at the time viewed the other; this other being ethnic minorities and working-class people. 

That is, they were viewed with a level of disdain and alienation, but not one born of spite or direct hatred, but rather one built on the reinforcement of the status quo. A worldview that, when unchallenged, leads to the radical option, paving the way for fascism and for seeing all non-Italians through this oriental lens of ‘other, savage, wild, and animalistic’. 

Edited by Anish Paranjape

Damiano Carretta is an Italy-based writer at Political Pandora with a deep passion for film—watching at least one movie a day and thinking about cinema even when he isn't. For the past three years, he has published film analysis under the pseudonym Lady Horatia on Medium, taking a holistic, analytical approach. Rather than offering personal opinions, his work is designed to provoke thought, leaving readers questioning and exploring new perspectives. If a single reader walks away more curious than before, he considers his writing a success.

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References:

• Said, Edward, Orientalism, Pantheon Books, 1978

• Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation, Éditions Galilée (French) & Semiotext(e) (English), 1981

• Chapman, Alison, “On Il Risorgimento”, Branch Collective, 2012, https://branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=alison-chapman-on-il-risorgimento, 

• Sartre, Jean-Paul, Anti-Semite and Jew: Reflections on the Jewish Question, Morihien, 1946

• Mack Smith, Denis, ed. The Making of Italy, 1796-1870. New York: Walker and Company, 1968

• d’Azeglio, Massimo, Scritte e discorsi politici, Firenze 1939

• Gramsci, Antonio, The Southern Question, Guernica Editions, 2005

Keywords: Silent Film Era, History of Italian Cinema, Divismo In Silent Film, Early Cinema And Theatre, Luigi Pirandello Cinema Critique, Italian Film History, Raffaele Viviani Screenwriter, Orientalism In Italian Cinema, Representation In Silent Film, Cabiria And Fascist Propaganda, Working Class In Early Cinema, Italian Risorgimento And Cinema, Subaltern Voices In Film, Ethnic Minorities In Film History, Cinema As Nation Building.