My meeting with Eleonora Duse happened by chance. I was fascinated by the historical period in which she lived, but I knew little about her, often overshadowed by her relationship with Gabriele D'Annunzio. Discovering her extraordinary life as an actress and as a woman was like running into an unexpected and extraordinary character. Eleonora Duse's story struck me immediately for the human contradictions that characterized her existence: the conflictual relationship between her desire to live a "normal" life and her destiny as an actress forced, from an early age, to play the lives of others; the need to leave a mark on society and the ineffable and ephemeral nature of theatre; the impossibility of reconciling motherhood with work; the desire for autonomy and the great entrepreneurial setbacks; the temptation of glory and the drive for research and experimentation. Behind the great successes of the "Divina" there were equally sensational failures that, in my opinion, are one of the most interesting keys to understanding her profound humanity. I didn't want to simply tell who Duse was through a biopic, but to describe the soul of a woman in her twilight.

Eleonora was a woman condemned by her talent and her revolutionary vision of the theater to find a dimension of greatness only on stage. In real life, she clashed with her own limits as well as with the limits of the society of her time. An artist is always a child of her time: but equally, Duse was hopelessly ahead of her time.

Despite this, she was able, overcoming a thousand vicissitudes, to lead her company beyond the mountains, just as a director does with his crew. The film is therefore a paradoxical epic.

The choice to focus on the last years of her life, between 1917 and 1923, came naturally. In that period, Eleonora faced her final accounting: with her art, with her own body, with motherhood, with D'Annunzio, with the history of Italy. 

The encounter between Duse and History also offers me the opportunity to investigate other themes that occupy me: the role of the artist in the face of tragedies such as war, poverty and pain, and the possible expressions of the relationship between art and power. We didn't want to narrate who Duse was, but to restore her soul in a time of transition, when the energy of youth gives way to the stubborn strength of maturity. A scarred woman still driven by a deep impulse. Even in pain, in art, in life. 

The film was made in perfect harmony with Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, who immediately was my only choice to play Duse. In her I found that creative fire, that inner strength I was looking for. Valeria is not only an extraordinary actress, she is also a director and a professional partner with whom I was able to share every decision. Working with her was a privilege and a joy. The work with the cast was also valuable. Extraordinary actors who gave body and soul to complex characters, in an atmosphere of a real theater company, led by Valeria as an authentic lead actress.

Among the allusions in the film, there is the figure of the Unknown Soldier. The train that crosses Italy, carrying the nameless body of a soldier, becomes a symbol of a broken country. 

The journey is really the very breath of the film. Duse never stopped: in her entire life she never stayed for more than forty days in any one place. Always on the move, always searching.

This is the Duse we show. Not the one that has been, but the one that continues to travel. Like a train that never stops.

And how did you decide to face this?

I thought of cinema as a mechanical tool, which has the privilege of stealing time and also space from a scene. In this case, when theatre becomes cinema, it can become almost comedy or even farce. I think of the moment when Duse's partner, Memo Benassi, does not remember the line on stage and she murmurs under her breath: the joke... It is in these moments when theater  stalls that cinema can enter. Cinema as a doctrine remains a nobler art, cinema is a spurious art, a bit of a scoundrel. I understand the theater actors who once despised cinema.

Have you done a lot of historical research work?

The screenwriters, Letizia Russo and Guido Silei, did an extraordinary job. We read a lot about her biography and the history of those years. There are no direct testimonies of Duse's art: there was a sound recording by Edison that has been lost. There is Cenere, a film that she shot when she was already getting on in years, which is not very successful and in which she almost tries to be seen as little as possible. But that was not the decisive point for me: I was interested in her talent; I am interested in telling characters who have a fire burning inside. 

Duse's acting, as you said, is recorded only in indirect, sometimes contradictory testimonies. Still, there is a general perception of its originality and uniqueness. You show her acting: have you asked yourself questions about what it might have been like, bringing this mystery back to the screen? 

I didn't even try; I didn't have this ambition. It was something that isn’t part of what I am trying to do. For me, characters are always archetypes: Martin Eden was an archetype, Eleonora Duse is an archetype. Writing the film I didn't think of Duse, I thought of Bruni Tedeschi. At a certain point I was asked to make a film about Duse and the colleagues in my small production company, almost all of them women, were enthusiastic. I immediately thought of an old film by Nikita Mikhalkov, Slave of Love, about a film actress in the years of the civil war between Bolsheviks and Whites in Russia, and I immediately thought of Valeria. When I wrote the treatment, I already imagined her in the role. When I write I like to immediately imagine real actors.

The film focuses on a particular moment in Duse's career, her return to the stage after retiring more than ten years earlier. Why did you choose this moment?

Because she is a nineteenth-century character and I was interested in the end of an era, the total dissolution, the end of the First World War, the failed agrarian reform, the coming of fascism, while everyone is drunk with the lack of awareness of what is to come.

Parallel to the story of Duse, we look at scenes of a coffin crossing Italy by train. This is vintage footage of the procession of the body of the Unknown Soldier, an unidentified soldier who fell in the First World War and to whom a monument was dedicated in the heart of Rome, at the Altar of the Fatherland.

It is an idea that comes from my soul as an archivist. I prefer archives to fiction, because in historical scenes, especially mass scenes, you can never reach the power of those images, even in a grand staging. Even Visconti, in the battle of the Leopard, had his problems. If I were really to put on war scenes I would need gigantic means.

War has been shown in many ways, it fills our homes, even today with images of Ukraine, of Palestine. I also wonder: to what extent can you film it? There is a limit, an ethical sense of filming it. 

The Unknown Soldier was introduced in 1921 and immediately after Fascism appropriated it. It originated in an idea of General Douhet, from Caserta, who at one point was sent to military prison because he rebelled against the military hierarchy. In 1918 he created the association of the Unknown Soldier, which was founded as a memory of the martyrdom of the soldier inconnu, as a criticism of the high commands. For me it represents the Great War very well as a laboratory of violence.

In the film there are many historical characters (actors such as Memo Benassi and Ermete Zacconi, writers such as D'Annunzio and Matilde Serao, and then Mussolini etc.), while the young playwright that Duse wants to launch, Giacomino, is invented.

He is an invented character who, however, is expressive of a typical mechanism of Duse: the creation of false myths. She would often project her talent onto young men. She had already done something similar at the end of the 19th century, even with D'Annunzio when he was a young poet. And Giacomino is a mediocre man, a man without qualities, whom we see again later in a Fascist uniform.

In that historical phase, Duse found herself confronted with fascism: Mussolini paid homage to her, offered her a state pension. How important is this issue of her relationship with politics?

That is exactly the theme of the film: the relationship between art and power. D'Annunzio says it to Duse: you let yourself be caught in the butterfly net. Even D'Annunzio basically let himself be caught, he was an opportunist. At the beginning, for the nationalists, he was almost more of a spiritual guide than Mussolini: "the poet-prophet", as he liked to be called. Mussolini feared his charisma and influence. But just as Fascism was taking power, he gave a speech in Milan, on the balcony of Palazzo Marino, which represented a check, the end of his political ambitions, and then he allowed himself to be used by Fascism and used it in turn. Mussolini also appropriated his aesthetics and rhetoric. And Fascism also took possession of Duse after her death: she died a few years later in Pittsburgh, and at D'Annunzio's suggestion the government organized a train that transported the body through Italy, very much like that of the Unknown Soldier.

This is your first film with a female protagonist. Has this changed anything?

I shot in a state of grace because I had Valeria Bruni Tedeschi next to me. Working with her is extraordinary. There is a true relationship of love in realizing the work together. Don't forget that she is also a director, and this was especially important for me. Duse is an ensemble film, I had so many things to manage, I often shot with a double camera, and being able to count on her support as an actress with a director's eye, I was able to devote myself to many things at the same time. Our relationship was created by the camera. She wanted me to be behind the camera at all times, and this created an intimate dimension. And then I love all actors. 

Which you are discovering little by little. This is your third film with professional actors.

And I have also become more of a craftsman. I am learning many things. I come from documentaries, from the archive. I like to discover the actors at the beginning of the film, then continue together. Maybe if you're not happy afterwards you don't work with them anymore. But you always have to love the actors, always.

How do you work with them? Do you discuss, do you adjust the script, do they improvise?

I do a lot of readings, because a screenplay is always an incomplete work, different from its transposition into the medium of film. If the joke doesn’t work, you change it, and then you change it again on the set, because by now you know what you're doing. Because cinema is unexpected, for me it is lifeblood. For me, working on the set is a wedding invitation. And Valeria understood this well. During filming we always tried to finish earlier and give ourselves some time to improvise things. The things you make up on the spot often end up in the film. 

Eleonora Duse chose the Veneto region as her adopted home. Venice plays a significant role in the film.

I know it well, I lived there, and my desire when I returned was to walk to the Fondamenta Nuove, in front of the cemetery of San Michele. For me it was important to give a personal geography of Venice, because if you make comparisons with those who shot there you feel small, and then you have to know how to film Venice, it's difficult.

A lot of the film is shot with a handheld camera, which makes it more blurred, avoiding the somewhat academic air that period films often have.

Coming from documentary, I'm a bit impatient: with the hand-held camera I do it first, the grips who have to assemble dollies or tracks make me waste a lot of time …

And then in this case the hand-held camera was like a counterpoint. Let's take an example: In Last year in Marienbad, the dollies the soft camera movements, do an extraordinary job. But bringing a similar feeling to period cinema is more complex. The hand-held camera gives you a counterpoint. Because you immediately feel the vision of those who is behind the camera, and a relationship is established with the actor. I was behind the camera the whole time: if I hadn't done it, I wouldn't have been able to have such a direct relationship with the actors. The handheld camera offers you dynamics and movement. And then there’s also the editing: this film has a lot of edits.

Another counterpoint is provided by music, in which you use some original compositions and much pre-existing music.

I always work that way. In this case I discovered Gian Francesco Malipiero, an extraordinary composer of the first half of the 20th century, from Veneto. I spent months listening to him: I used Il finto arlecchino and Vivaldiana. The way I have represented them, these performers, despite their greatness, are also a bit of ham actors, and the music I have chosen makes you think of ham actors.

You also put a song by Rondò Veneziano.

Yes, I like to mix. Then they were victims of a certain intellectual snobbism, and I like to go against these forms of snobbery. Reverberi, the creator of the group, was a great music producer, their first albums were beautiful, they were listened to all over the world. I remember that when I was a child when I went on fairground rides, the music of Rondò Veneziano was ever-present.

The film is Venetian but also Neapolitan. Not only because among the characters there is Matilde Serao, a Neapolitan writer and great friend of Duse, but also because the film also has elements of popular theater, of melodrama. 

Yes, the film is also reminiscent of the “sceneggiata,” a popular form of melodrama in the Neapolitan dialect, like Martin Eden. The scene in which Duse seems to be dying and then wakes up saying that she wants to return to the stage for me is like De Filippo's play Filumena Marturano (The Best House in Naples), where the protagonist pretends to be dying to make sure her lover marries her. And there are also scenes of farce, such as the one with the ignorant film producer. 

After all, after meeting Sarah Bernhardt, Duse tries to take charge of modernity, to make a new theater, and she is trapped because she relies on Giacomino, who is a kind of parody of modernity.

The meeting with Sarah Bernhardt is important because it puts her in crisis. Duse had these continuous uncertainties, these crises. Throughout her life, she was subjected to a lot of trouble, she made wrong choices that ended in failure. Not to mention her human, personal fragility, because that would open up long new chapters. And as I mentioned in the beginning, I liked to see all her personal as well as the collective history, confronted with one element: the brute force of her talent. That is the point.

Small, slight, awkward and without a carrying voice, her mere presence contradicts the received expectations that demand physical prowess and vocal power in acting. Her ability to give herself over to her characters while remaining recognizably herself was extraordinary and enormously influential. Duse was consistent without ever being the same or imposing her personality on her roles, forcing both her co-actors on stage and the audience to follow her performances with rapt attention.

Over the years, she is internationally recognized as an unclassifiable and revolutionary talent. Her repertoire is modern and popular: from Italian realism to the dramas of Sardou and Dumas to Ibsen. Anton Chekhov is so impressed he models Madame Arkadina in his play The Seagull on her. Her repertoire overlaps with that of the great French actress Sarah Bernhardt, a source of a competition and respectful rivalry that divides theater critics. Within about ten years, Eleonora Duse becomes the embodiment of the essence of theatrical performance. Already a European phenomenon, starting in 1895 she tours South America, Russia, and the United States to overwhelming adulation, turning her into a worldwide sensation. In 1923, she becomes the first woman to appear on the cover of recently founded Time Magazine, a consecration of the Divine, as she is called. She becomes the undisputed symbol of modern theater and "embodiment of all the arts" as Stanislavsky, who credited her as an inspiration for his work, publicly defined her.

Off stage, Duse’s life was far from easy. Moody and inconstant, she adds many traits of the characters she gave life to on stage to her own already complex personality. Duse’s daughter Enrichetta is born in 1882 during a short-lived marriage to her fellow actor Tebaldo Marchetti. Duse struggles to reconcile motherhood with her work as an actress. Her constant travel forces her to put her daughter in boarding school, a decision she always felt guilty about. In 1895, she forms a long-lasting complicated personal and professional relationship with the poet and nationalist firebrand Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938), causing an international scandal.

Throughout her life, Duse suffers from severe attacks of depression, during which she remains locked in her room, alone, for days, until in 1909, at the height of her success, she suddenly retires from the stage.

After World War I, her savings are lost in the post-war economic turmoil. In 1921, Duse decides to return to acting. Italy is in turmoil, with Mussolini’s fascists poised to take over the country. Sixty-three years old and in poor health, she is unable to go on stage every night, and her comeback tour ends with considerable losses, despite its great success with audiences and critics. Ignoring her doctor’s opinion, she decides to leave for another exhausting tour abroad, first to London and then to the United States and Cuba, in a last attempt to reaffirm her artistic and financial independence.

Born during a theater tour, Eleonora Duse dies during her final tour on July 30, 1923 in Pittsburgh, faithful to the end to her destiny as a nomad and "passionate pilgrim".

Contemporary appreciations of Eleonora Duse’s genius

Anton Chekhov - "I have just seen the Italian actress Duse in Shakespeare's Cleopatra. I don't know Italian, but she acted so well that I seemed to understand every word; What a wonderful actress!"

Bernard Shaw – “I have to say in no uncertain terms that this is the best performance I've ever witnessed in my life.”

Charlie Chaplin - "The perfect artist: the simple, direct soul of the child; the technical experience of the craftsman; the heart that has learned the lesson of human compassion, and the incisive analytical brain of the psychologist. Bernhardt was always deliberate and more or less artificial. Duse is direct and great...”

Lee Strasberg (after watching her in Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea) - "When her husband finally told her 'If you want to go, go', at that moment the most blissful of smiles painted her face. It started from the face, but, in fact, it radiated throughout the body."

Luchino Visconti – “Before her there was a formula to express love, a formula to express surprise, a formula to represent pain. Mere formulas, conventions. Eleonora Duse repudiated them all"

Luchino Visconti – “I had the impression, absurd and real, of listening, unseen, behind a door, of having happened to be in someone else's house and suddenly discovering the terrible secrets of an unknown family. […] The impressions aroused in me by that little lady over sixty, who entering the scene was transfigured and became the Lady from the Sea [...] belong, in my life as a man, to the very narrow category of definitive impressions"

The selection of the body took place in Aquileia on October 28, 1921. Eleven bodies of unidentified soldiers from the various war fronts were exhumed, and Maria Bergamas, mother of a missing soldier, was entrusted with the honor of choosing which coffin would become a symbol of the sacrifice of all the unknown fallen. The coffin was then placed on a special railway wagon, decorated with drapes and patriotic symbols, and embarked upon a solemn journey through Italy.

The transfer of the body aroused deep emotions throughout the nation. The train left Aquileia on October 29 and traveled through numerous cities before arriving in Rome on November 4, the anniversary of the victory in World War I. Along the way, huge crowds gathered along the tracks to pay homage to the coffin: ordinary citizens, veterans, mothers, widows and orphans knelt as a sign of respect. The train moved slowly, in an almost sacred silence, interrupted only by the sound of military bands and prayers.

Once in Rome, the coffin was welcomed with all military honors and solemnly buried at the Altar of the Fatherland on November 4, 1921. To this day, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier remains the centerpiece of the celebrations for the Day of National Unity and the Armed Forces, as well as a place of meditation and memory for the entire country.

The archival material in DUSE derives mostly from the silent film Gloria: apotheosis of the unknown soldier, made in 1921. The feature film collects authentic images of the transfer of the body of the unknown soldier and the solemn celebrations in Rome. The journey of the Unknown Soldier remains one of the most trenchant pages in Italian history, capable of uniting the nation in the memory of the sacrifice of thousands of soldiers who died for their country.