1. Plot

2. Production

3. Themes

4. Release and reception

5. References

6. External links

Filibus is a 1915 Italian silent adventure film directed by Mario Roncoroni and written by Giovanni Bertinetti. The film features Cristina Ruspoli as the title character, a mysterious sky pirate who makes daring heists with her technologically advanced airship. When an esteemed detective sets out on her trail, she begins an elaborate game of cat and mouse with him, slipping between various male and female identities to romance the detective's sister and stage a midnight theft of a pair of valuable diamonds.

Filibus was released by Corona Film, a short-lived Turin-based studio operating on relatively low budgets and obscure casts. Though Italian reviews at the time of its release were negative, Filibus has been well received by later writers and film historians, who have highlighted the film's pioneering use of lesbian attraction, genderfluidity, and science fiction motifs, as well as its creative adaptation of stylistic elements from contemporary popular fiction. The film has been screened at numerous film festivals, and prints of it survive in archives in the Netherlands and in Italy.

Plot

The elegant Baroness Troixmonde has a secret identity: a mysterious burglar known to the world only as Filibus. In the wake of a bank robbery, a large cash reward is offered to anyone who can track Filibus down, and the renowned Detective Hardy puts himself on the case. The Baroness visits the notary in charge of the cash reward, and enters her own name in the competition. Encountering Hardy in the notary's office, she hatches a plan to baffle him: she tells him that she knows he himself is Filibus. Leaving the office in her chauffeured motorcar, she catches sight of Hardy's sister, Leonora.

The Baroness rides to a deserted country road, where she uses a heliograph to signal for Filibus's airship. Her crew of silent masked assistants lower a capsule, allowing Filibus to reach the airship, change into her burglary outfit, and fly to Hardy's residence. Hardy is being visited by his friend, the antiques collector Leo Sandy, who is unrequitedly in love with Leonora. Filibus, seizing a moment when Hardy is alone, uses the capsule to reach him and put him to sleep with a narcotic. She takes a print of Hardy's hand, which she will use to make a specially formed glove.

In disguise as a young nobleman, the Count de la Brive, Filibus stages the kidnapping and rescue of Leonora, leaving a print from the special glove on Leonora's clothing. The grateful Hardy invites the nobleman to stay with them for some days, and the Count begins courting Leonora. At a party at Leo Sandy's villa, they see a glass case containing his prize acquisition, an ancient Egyptian statue of a cat with priceless diamond eyes. When Sandy turns out the lights to show off the sparkling diamonds, the Count cuts a hole in the glass and deposits a note announcing that Filibus will steal the statue that night. Hardy attempts to search the guests, but to his consternation finds the glass piece in his own pocket, with fingerprints that match none of the guests' hands. At home, he realizes to his horror that the prints on both the glass piece and Leonora's outfit match his own handprint.

Hardy, resolved to trap Filibus, has Sandy plant a tiny camera in one eye of the statue and replace the real diamonds with artificial ones. That night, Filibus flies to Sandy's villa, kidnaps him, puts Hardy under the narcotic, and reaches the statue. Realizing Hardy's ruse, she locates the real diamonds, and stages the theft so that the hidden camera photographs the unconscious Hardy's face instead of hers.

Filibus returns Hardy to his home, plants one of the real diamonds on his desk, and telephones the police to alert them of the theft and kidnapping. Hardy pleads his innocence, but when they examine the diamond and the hidden camera's picture, the police are led to believe that Hardy must indeed be Filibus. Hardy fears that this may indeed be the case, if he committed all of Filibus's heists while sleepwalking. Meanwhile, Leo Sandy, escaping Filibus's assistants and parachuting out of the dirigible, is picked up by a passing car and brought back to his villa. Learning of Hardy's arrest, Sandy rushes to his assistance and gives his evidence about his kidnapping. The relieved Hardy is allowed to go free and pursue the real Filibus, whose identity is still unknown.

Intending to trap Filibus, he tells the press to announce that he has returned to his home. Filibus decides to use the narcotic to pin another crime on him, a robbery of the International Bank. This time Hardy is prepared, and seizes Filibus when she tries to administer the narcotic. Recognizing her as the Count de la Brive, he ties her up, locks her in his office, and goes to get the police. By the time he returns with policemen, Filibus has managed to get to a window, signal for her airship, and escape into the sky. A few days later, Sandy proposes to Leonora and is accepted. Just as Hardy is congratulating them, a letter falls from the sky—a letter from Filibus, telling him that they may meet again. High in the clouds, the Baroness Troixmonde, the mysterious sky pirate Filibus, laughs over her haul from the International Bank.

Production

In 1914, the Turin-based film distributor Umberto Corona launched his own production company, Corona Film. The company produced 26 films before disbanding in 1918, mostly low-budget adventure films with little-known casts.^[1]

The screenplay was by Giovanni Bertinetti, a writer connected to the Futurist movement among the Turin intelligentsia; in addition to film scenarios, he wrote science fiction and adventure stories for children, as well as self-help guides espousing the Futurist ideals of "courage, audacity and revolt."^[4] In writing Filibus, Bertinetti may have been especially influenced by a contemporary push to bring feminist ideals to Futurism, spearheaded by the French writer Valentine de Saint-Point's call for women to shake off oppression and torpor and to embrace the activity and independence associated with men.^[4]

Themes

The film, while based in motifs and themes already popular in adventure serials, uses them in unusual ways; for example, the film's plot pushes the genre to the limits of its stylistic conventions, verging on a style redolent of fantasy. The screenplay also includes numerous unusual ideas, including the central image of the female sky pirate in her innovative airship^[2] and the concept of a high-society protagonist with a Jekyll-and-Hyde-like double nature.^[3]

In particular, the character of Filibus was novel for adventure films in presenting an all-powerful female character in full control of her life and actions,^[2][4] able to move fluently between gendered identities as well as on and over the earth.^[12] These themes mirror a wave of gender identity exploration then occurring in Italian culture: for example, Francesca Bertini had recently played a male protagonist in Pierrot the Prodigal, women's fashions at Futurist parties had begun to imitate styles for men, and a trickle of short action films with autonomous heroines had begun to appear. In real life, women's rights were highly limited in Italy, where married women were required to seek their husbands' permission to divorce, inherit property, or take out newspaper subscriptions, a situation dramatized in the popular diva films of the day.^[4]

Release and reception

The film's conclusion suggests the possibility of a sequel, but Italy declared war on Austro-Hungary shortly after the film's release, taking a dramatic toll on the country's film industry and possibly leading to the disbanding of Corona Film in 1918.^[4] A print of Filibus survives at the EYE Film Institute Netherlands.^[1] A print is also held at the National Museum of Cinema in Turin.^[2]

The Cineteca di Bologna screened Filibus in 1997 as part of the Cinema Ritrovato festival, with its program calling the film "an odd and funny forerunner of science-fiction movies."^[1] When the Dortmund Cologne International Women's Film Festival screened the film in 2013, its program described Filibus as "probably one of the first lesbian characters in the history of film."^[5] A film festival program for the Yugoslav Film Archive, where Filibus was shown in 2015, also commented on its pioneering exploration of lesbianism in film, nominating Filibus as cinema's first lesbian "bad girl".^[3] In 2017, an EYE Film Institute restoration of the film was shown at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival,^[31] with a score by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. In her program notes, Monica Nolan calls the film's protagonist "one of a kind," adding: "The special effects are endearingly low-budget, but who cares, when the action is fast-paced and just plain fun?"^[6]

In a 2014 review of the film, Claude Rieffel praised the film's "elegant and elusive woman pirate" (élégante et insaisissable femme pirate), saying that Filibus's ability to pass between male and female identities made the character "a champion of transgenderism before that term had been coined" (championne avant l'heure du trans-genre).^[7] The performing arts writer Imogen Sara Smith, in an essay for Film Comment on the 2017 San Francisco festival, noted that the film "zips along with crisp, deliciously absurd plotting and an effervescent lightness of touch," highlighting Ruspoli's "gracefully androgynous and slyly gleeful" performance as well as the plot's feminist themes. According to Smith, "In a summer when Wonder Woman was hailed in some quarters as a milestone for women in cinema, the audience watching Filibus (1915) at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival could be forgiven for wondering sardonically if movies are finally catching up to where they were a century ago."^[8]

In his autobiographical work Balão cativo (1973), the Brazilian writer Pedro Nava describes Filibus as a film "of major importance" (da maior importância), praising the genderfluidity and mythic aspects of the title character, as well as the film's innovative use of science fiction themes.^[9]

References

External links

• {{IMDb title|0173837}}
• {{youtube|DAGq2tyEBVQ|Filibus}}

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