Cinefórum-Clásico

Leopoldo Carlucci’s Caino (1918), a film named after the biblical story of the first murderer, also involves illness and shock without recovery. To prove once again that D’Annunzian illness with a regenerative convalescence is impossible on the screen, I will have to summarize the film’s convoluted plot. This is a worthwhile undertaking because the diva Elena Makowska plays the femme fatale in Carlucci’s film. This coincidence of diva and femme fatale is an exception that can be verified with Pina Menichelli in Il Fuoco and Tigre Reale.

As the title itself suggests, Carlucci’s Caino is a tale about two brothers in conflict. Raoul and Bruno, respectively a medical doctor and a farm manager, love the same woman, Elda, a tranquil country girl. At first Elda is involved with Bruno, and they kiss lovingly near the stables. On the other hand, Elda has a beautiful sister, Cecile, a singer who lives in Paris. The frivolous and insensitive Cecile is Elda’s polar opposite.

Raoul takes Elda away from Bruno. Later he becomes involved with Cecile. Raoul courts Cecile inside a church while Bruno and Elda, who now share the same experience of loneliness and betrayal, watch the couple’s passionate kissing. In the end, the heated affair between Raoul and Cecile runs its course, and Raoul decides to marry the quiet Elda.

Urban images and postcard views of resorts appear only once during the narrative: when Raoul and Elda go on their honeymoon. In the couple’s photographs from Milan, Lake Garda, and the Riviera, Cecile either stands next to Raoul, displacing Elda, or she dangerously hovers over the newlyweds.

Although he is married to Elda, Raoul follows Cecile into a life of grand hotels, musical intoxication, and gambling. Little by little, he falls deep into debt. Financial ruin is inevitable unless Raoul forges Bruno’s signature on a check to the evil Lord Gaston, an implacable suitor of Cecile and a sort of cruel father of all fathers. As the manager of the family properties, Bruno is the stabilizing father figure for all the relatives in the country-side. Of course, he continues to live in the country, far from the corruptions of the city.

Despite her marriage to Raoul, Elda is always lonely in the country; Bruno, who works all the time, is lonely too.

Because of the schemes of Lord Gaston—whose image is even intercut with that of a poisonous spider—and Raoul’s forging of Bruno’s signature, Bruno loses the farm and the family home. Even though Raoul is guilty of adultery, gambling, and ruining his family, it is Bruno who pays the most painful price, since he loses the woman he loved, the land he worked on, and the honor of his name. One more development complicates this already complicated plot: Raoul and Elda have a child together, baby Elina. To everybody’s surprise, the infant looks just like Cecile. Society seems to be coming apart: good fathers lose their authority, and children’s faces raise doubts about who their mothers are.

Crisis is in the air: Elda, in shock, rejects her own baby until she recovers her maternal instinct. However, the birth of Elina was so difficult that eventually Elda dies, and her corpse ends up inside an anatomical theater on an examination table under her husband Raoul’s scientific scrutiny. Just before his medical lecture on the female body, Raoul hallucinates, transforming Elda into Cecile. Here, the superimposition of the two women’s faces exposes the final unraveling of all identities and family relations.

The superimposition is significant because Caino, by its handling of filmic devices, blames the crisis of the family unit on representational technologies like the cinema and photography. Likewise, the femme fatale instigates all sorts of doublings and traumas because of unexpected or genealogically impossible similarities involving a biological reproduction.

How does Caino end? The wretched Raoul returns to the farm after having spent years working in Libya, a colonial outpost. As a result of this experience, he has become a new and much more responsible man. Unaware of Raoul’s positive transformation and full of anger over the past, Bruno, the good brother, behaves like Cain and kills his formerly bad brother. The horror is that he does so in front of the innocent Elina, who is now a young girl. After witnessing this act of violence by Bruno, whom she considers her father, and after beginning to understand that her true father might have been Raoul, who was trying to take her away from Bruno’s house, young Elina goes completely mad, the innocent victim of a genealogy of family betrayals, abuses, and envy. The final twist is that before his fatal confrontation with Bruno, Raoul, who had done well in Africa, left a note containing enough money for Bruno to reacquire the land he had lost to Lord Gaston.

Caino’s violent ending exemplifies a definitive denial of D’Annunzian convalescence; little Elina sees too much, a clear reminder of the role of visual perception in Freud’s primal scene. 5 In La piovra, the child dies. In Caino, the representative of the future, Elina, is forever damaged by the evil of those who should have set an example. In Il Quadro di Osvaldo Mars, a young girl sees the painter Osvaldo Mars kill himself in front of the portrait of a lascivious Salome. In this case, the child is an eyewitness to the tragic end of an adulterous affair between the painter and her own mother. In Il Quadro di Osvaldo Mars, muteness and shock are temporary, comparable to an illness. Eventually, it is only thanks to the girl’s delirious narrative that the police are able to replace a hypothesis of murder with evidence of a suicide.