Mario Roncoroni - Filibus (1915)

Filibus (1915)

Italy/Silent/Black & White

Directed by Mario Roncoroni

Written by Giovanni Bertinetti

Cinematography by Luigi Fiorio

Cast:

Mario Mariani

Cristina Ruspoli

Giovanni Spano

Filippo Vallino

Baroness by day, sky pirate by night, Filibus is a daring, masked anti-heroine criminal mastermind who flies around in a zeppelin, perpetrating intrepid schemes for the spoils of victory and the thrill of it all.

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.

Another significant aspect of the character of Filibus is the extent to which she exists in a mechanical world, and her ease with different technological devices. Filibus peers through binoculars and calls her airship down using a heliograph (“a device to telegraph by sunlight”, an intertitle helpfully informs us); she is as at ease driving a car as her aircraft; she ascends and descends from her airship in its can-like shuttle; she uses forensic techniques (faked fingerprints, a staged photograph) to beat the detective at his own game. Part of her subversiveness is how Filibus is able to traverse the new, stereotypically masculine world of mechanics in order to outwit the male characters.

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, gender fluidity, 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.

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 gender fluidity and mythic aspects of the title character, as well as the film's innovative use of science fiction themes.

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