Cenere is a 1916

1916 in film

The year 1916 in film involved some significant events.-Events:* October 17 - release of A Daughter of the Gods, the first US production with a million dollar budget, with the first nude scene by a major star....

 silent film

Silent film

A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, pantomime and title cards...

 directed by and starring Febo Mari. It is adapted from the 1904 novel by the Nobel Prize

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...

-winning Sardinian

Sardinia

Sardinia is the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea . It is an autonomous region of Italy, and the nearest land masses are the French island of Corsica, the Italian Peninsula, Sicily, Tunisia and the Spanish Balearic Islands.The name Sardinia is from the pre-Roman noun *sard[],...

 writer Grazia Deledda

Grazia Deledda

Grazia Deledda was an Italian writer whose works won her the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1926.-Biography:...

. It is notable as the only film performance by of the Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 theater star Eleonora Duse

Eleonora Duse

-Life and career:Duse was born in Vigevano, Lombardy, and began acting as a child. Both her father and her grandfather were actors, and she joined the troupe at age four. Due to poverty, she initially worked continually, traveling from city to city with whichever troupe her family was currently...

.

Plot

Rosalia Derios is an unmarried woman in a small Sardinian village whose lover abandons her before the birth of their son, whom she names Anania. Realizing that she will not be able to properly raise the child, she gives full possession of Anania to her one-time lover. However, she entrusts the boy with a sacred amulet before he leaves. Anania grows to adult and retains possession of the amulet, but he is haunted by his mother’s absence and tries to locate her. He pushes aside career prospects and cancels his plans for marriage to pursue his search for Rosalia. Anania proves successful and locates his mother. But Rosalia cannot take shock of being reunited with her adult son and kills herself.

Production

When Eleonora Duse was approached in 1916 to appear in a film adaptation of Cenere, she had been absent from performing on stage for seven years. Duse expressed deep respect for the source material and its potential as a film. She later explained her return to acting in this production by stating: “I have been persuaded to create the character of Rosalia Derios, from the novel by Grazia Deledda, because it seemed to me that in the sorrowful figure of the mother, all sacrifice for her son, a figure moving in an austere and solemn landscape, would assume the total and clear plastic and spiritual significance that the silent theater must force itself to realize.”

Duse co-wrote the screenplay for Cenere with Febo Mari, her director and co-star. The film was shot over a four-month period on locations across Sardinia.

Duse initially had hopes for Cenere to open a new career in film acting. But upon seeing the finished film, she was disappointed in both the production and her performance. "I made the same mistake that nearly everyone has made," she said after viewing herself on screen. "But something quite different is needed. I am too old for it. Isn't it a pity?" Duse would later write to the French singer Yvette Guilbert with the request not to see “that stupid thing, because you’ll find nothing, or almost nothing, of me in that film.”