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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - The Script in Italian Silent Cinema of the Teens: the Case of Turin
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Projects & Abstracts
2003-10-01
2022-12-03
2003-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Silvio Alovisio
2003/10/01
University of Turin 
2036-461X
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Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - The Script in Italian Silent Cinema of the Teens: the Case of Turin
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/19238/17080
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THE SCRIPT IN ITALIAN SILENT CINEMA OF THE TEENS:
THE CASE OF TURIN
Silvio Alovisio / Ph.D. Thesis Abstract
Università di Torino




  The goal of this research is an examination of the birth and development of the script
in the Italian silent cinema of the 1910s with a specific focus on Turin production. The
corpus of research documents includes over a hundred scripts from Turin’s Museo
Nazionale del Cinema, as well as thirty other published scenarios. As the most consid-
erable collection from the silent era in Italian cinema, these scripts document the entire
decade of film production in Turin during the 1910s. This study is completed by an
analysis of the surrounding production, exhibition, and marketing ephemera from the
decade: advertisements, magazines, film literature, contracts, notices, script manuals,
set photos, and film stills.
  Between 1909 and the early 1920s, Italian screenwriters began to achieve notoriety as
the script itself took on a more crucial role in the actual production process. During this
period, the identity of the screenwriter was balanced between that of a literary-minded
auteur and an innovator in mass cultural production. In Turin, the screenwriter’s dou-
ble identity represents a connection between the intellectual sources that contributed
to the evolving importance of the screenwriter, and the available financial capital in the
mass media marketplace, the continuously expanding avenues for public consump-
tion, the developing technological know-how, and, finally, growth in local business par-
ticipation and investment.
  In this context, we should understand the screenplay as:
  1. The result of the employment of intellectual workers in a new cultural industry.
  2. A document of growing importance emerging organization system for the actual
production process.
  3. A controlled film document, or the result of a combination between intellectual
work and economic and industrial powers, which will not be the case in the next
decade.
  In order to explore the role and contribution of the screenwriter in the renewal of the
media landscape that took place with the transition from the 19th to the 20th century,
this study is divided into three chapters. Each chapter strives to integrate an economic
analysis with an aesthetic evaluation of the film production process.
  Chapter one establishes a model that describes the relationship between intellectual
work and the cinema industry of the 1910s. On the one hand, the screenwriter appears
as a traditional writer whose interest lies in remaining on the outside of the production
process, choosing instead, key moments in which he will collaborate through selective
employment. On the other hand, we see a new kind of writer emerge as one complete-
ly absorbed in the production dynamics, a “specialist” whose work includes writing a
number of scripts for the same film. For example, Arrigo Frusta and Renzo Chiosso, two

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                                                          THE SCRIPT IN ITALIAN SILENT CINEMA

screenwriters from Turin, exemplify the second category of the “specialized” writer. A
discussion of their professional activities and career paths is a central aspect of this
chapter.
  The second chapter examines the script’s and the screenwriter’s role in the various
production modes of the Italian silent cinema of the 1910s. Here, the study investigates:
the organization of labor (the birth of the story department, the controversies concern-
ing copyrights, and script revision process); the attempts to promote standardized pro-
duction (manuals, schools, competitions, etc.); the relationship between and responsi-
bility of writers and metteurs en scènes; the script writers’ attempt to create a trust; and,
finally, the emergence of precautionary censorship of the scenario.
  The last chapter is dedicated to a detailed analysis of the scripts themselves. I con-
tend that with a study of the script, we in turn gain valuable information about the
mise-en-scène and frame composition. Screenwriters, such as Frusta, would often pro-
vide answers for questions concerning the entire realization process by planning not
only the story but the entire mise-en-scène through storyboards, or by developing
cross-cutting strategies. The work of the scriptwriter therefore underscores the impor-
tance of certain facts about the Italian silent film industry: the birth of a specialized
vocabulary; the emergence of writing techniques for the modern script; the apparent-
ly paradoxical relationship between the writer as an abstract and literal figure; the
changing nature of the intertitle (long considered the only creative aspect of script
writing); and finally, a theory of mise-en-scène that develops from a study of the codi-
fication of style in lighting and depth of staging. Naturally, my study takes up a com-
parison between the filmic and the non-filmic sources. With this methodology, my
study interrogates Pasolini’s concept of the volontà della forma of the mise-en-scène
that emerges, he suggests, by comparing the film frame and its scenario, as well as the
set photos and the surviving film.
  Indeed, my research and analysis will contribute fundamental information concern-
ing the way in which the Italian cinema of the 1910s improved, and as it began to reach
a balance in its standardization of mise-en-scène. Above all, my project demonstrates
the existence of an intense planning net-work underlying the models of mise-en-scène
themselves.




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