"L'art du silence! La fiève au coeur, depuis cette offre de Griffith, je n'ai rêvè que des films”: "Cenere" through Duse's Letters to Her Daughter Enrichetta

During the First World War, despite the atrocity of the situation, Eleonora Duse was a volcano of ideas. She made projects and worked actively for their realization: in fact, action was her antidote to the problems of the soul and the body. The depth and the creativity of her cultural interests were immediately transformed into plans, she was an artist who really wanted to produce something for the performing arts. In this way, her approach to the art of cinema was made concrete by a movie: she considered all the productive and practical terms, and had a personal scheme, a sort of private, mental vision for the images on the screen. Her first movie project was about the Sistine Chapel, but it was not realized. Then, she matured another plan for a movie based on a literary work: Grazia Deledda’s Cenere (Ashes). Nowadays, we can consider Duse as a precursor of our contemporary filmmakers: she had great enthusiasm and, in her artistic research, she tried to realize her project by considering all of its complex aspects. In a word, we might say that she foresaw the role of a contemporary director. There are many documents and memories about her work in the movie industry of the 1910s, but probably, the most intimate and sincere are the many letters written to her daughter Enrichetta, who lived in Cambridge and was therefore far removed from her mother’s daily life.