Carmine Gallone’s Casta Diva and the Italian Composer Biopic, 1935–1954: Pastiche, History and Affect

Carmine Gallone's "Casta Diva" is a strange kind of biopic. The film does not attempt to chart the life of Vincenzo Bellini in its entirety. Instead, the composer's tormented relationship with Maddalena Fumaroli provides the pretext for a typically operatic story accompanied by excerpts from Bellini's operas, in which the heroine finally dies in the arms of her lover. Between the first version of the film (1935) and its remake (1954), several other composer biopics were produced in Italy. While sharing with "Casta Diva" a highly melodramatic tone, these films offer a more comprehensive overview of the lives and works of their titular composers, and their plots are less overtly modeled after nineteenth.century operatic tropes. What is more, the use of pre-existing music in their soundtracks differs from both "Casta Divas" in several respects. Thia articles presents a comparative study of "Casta Diva" and some of the Italian composer biopics produced between the 1930s and the 1950s, e.g. Mario Bonnard's "Rossini" (1943), Camillo Mastrocinque's "Il cavaliere del sogno" (1946), Raffaello Matarazzo's "Giuseppe Verdi" (1954) and Gallone's own "Melodie eterne" (1940) and "Puccini" (1952). I discuss the different dramatic, narrative, temporal, and visual strategies adopted in these films, and the role played by pre-existing music in their soundtracks. I ask whether these features assumed a distinctive configuration in "Casta Diva", which might have determined the film's particular significance within Italian culture, particularly the 1954 remake in the context of the post-war years. The category of pastiche as elaborated in the fields of film and cultural studies reveals itself as especially useful in this discussion. In particular, I rely on Richard Dyer's theory of pastiche as a means of "feeling historically", applying it to "Casta Diva" and asking whether the aesthetics and dramaturgy of Gallone's biopic, and notably the 1954 remake, might have encouraged in the audience a strong affective engagement with the Italian cultural heritage at a moment of national identity (re)building.