In Duse [+lee también:
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ficha de la película], one of the five Italian competition entries at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, Pietro Marcello pays tribute to and explores the times of one of the most legendary and highly celebrated actresses of the turn of the last century, Eleonora Duse (1858-1924), played in the film by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi.

Cineuropa: What sparked your interest in wanting to make this film, and would you call it a biopic?
Pietro Marcello: I would not call it a biopic at all. Rather, it’s a work attempting to capture the spirit of Duse through cinema made out of imagination, fantasy and fiction – a transposition. That said, we carried out a lot of research thanks to our very good screenwriters, Letizia Russo and Guido Silei. Guido also initiated the whole journey by bringing her up as a possible subject. I immediately felt intrigued by this rebellious and revolutionary woman of her time. I also immediately thought of Valeria Bruni Tedeschi to play the lead. On the whole, everything has just fallen into place with this project, very smoothly and quickly.

As far as your research goes, there is said to be comparatively little documentation on her available, although she did make one film in 1916, Cenere (lit. “Ashes”). Was her voice ever recorded during her lifetime, as far as we know?
There was a recording made by Thomas Edison in 1896, but it was lost. So, we have Cenere, her film, which still exists, and we have the photographs, but we don’t know in any more detail how she looked or behaved.

Do we know why she didn’t do more films?
She loved cinema and went to the movies a lot in order to study. She really wanted to make films, but she was quite traumatised by her one experience. At this point, she was 58, and she realised she was no longer the young actress that the film medium cherished, so she started to think about directing herself. Her dream project was The Lady from the Sea, the Henrik Ibsen play. She was in talks with a US producer, and she even did some scouting. But it never happened.

The film plays out between the middle of World War I, the early 1920s and the end of Duse’s life. During this period, we get the rise of fascism and Mussolini, very prominent in the film. Both Duse and her friend and playwright Gabriele d’Annunzio, who has a significant part in the story, get to be part of this movement. To what degree would you say she was involved?
She was involved, partly, owing to economic reasons. She had all her money in German banks, and after the war, she became bankrupt. Her passion and her need for theatre were then used by Mussolini as a sort of emblem of the fascist art movement. But she was very marginal in all this and never took an active part. She also has this confidence that her art and her love for the theatre would be stronger than anything bad or evil. She was wrong, of course. Gabriele d’Annunzio was initially against Mussolini, but he became fascinated and was also chosen to represent the aesthetics of fascism. Mussolini showered them with money, and they allowed him to treat them this way. The film ends right after the March on Rome in October 1922, after which d’Annunzio’s plays all but disappeared from the stages of the world.

There’s a scene in the movie where Eleonora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt sit down for a conversation that becomes very colourful, as we probably could expect, given these two personalities, but it’s also very poignant, as they discuss the current state of art and the world. Is this based on any actual events, or is it a fabrication?
It very likely must have happened, as they were both titans of their respective countries, but of course, our imagination was also involved in the creation of the scene. It may play out 100 years ago, but it says a lot about our current times.

Your most recent film before this, Scarlet [+lee también:
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entrevista: Pietro Marcello
ficha de la película], as well as Martin Eden [+lee también:
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entrevista: Pietro Marcello
ficha de la película] and now Duse all take place in the early part of the last century. What has drawn you to make these “period” films?
As TS Eliot said: “Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past.” I firmly believe in this connection, like a reflective mirror for the history of mankind. Right now, we’re living in 2025, but somehow, it’s the same as right after World War II in 1945, with great changes – and not positive ones. It’s time to ponder what we could do about it.