Back in 2017, I saw a restoration of Filibus (1915) at The San Francisco Silent Film Festival and found it to be more surprising and delightful than most films made a century after it. The packed Castro Theater did not anticipate a hundred-year-old movie that was so unapologetically queer and joyously creative. And yet there we were, with a film that follows the exploits of a brilliant super villain who pits themself against a formidable detective. Sure we’ve seen it before, but have we seen it with a gender-swapping antihero who gets around via floating zeppelin, dropping sedatives on the detective all while flirting with his sister? An Italian production, Filibus has similarities to Louis Feuillade’s French serials Fantomas (1913) and Les Vampires (1915), which were all the rage at the time. Audiences wanted convoluted and sensationalist crime stories and Filibus delivered beyond genre conventions.
Much like The Student of Prague, Filibus begins by introducing its cast of characters, in particular Valeria Creti in three different roles--the upper class Baroness Troixmonde, the evil villain Filibus in a basic black mask, and Count de la Brive, a slight, refined man in suit and monocle. With the intro we are able to avoid confusion, allowing the audience to know about Troixmonde’s varying identities, although the other characters herein do not. This way, we are able to identify with her/him/them and feel like a co-conspirator, a kind of approach that had left the genre by the 1930s. No moral code could include this much fun. Troixmonde spends her time floating around in a dirigible, nothing less than a first-class air pirate with a crew of henchmen ready to do her bidding. Not only does Filibus want to steal jewels, but also frame their nemesis, Detective Kutt-Hendy (Giovanni Spano), for the crimes. In a number of highly unlikely, yet highly entertaining scenes, Filibus is able to descend from the air ship in a metal basket, sprinkling a sedative over Kutt-Hendy in order to incapacitate him. What follows is a plot to steal his handprint and make a glove with his prints on it, as well as other hijinks including a small surveillance camera set inside the eye socket of a priceless Egyptian cat statue. As Filibus continuously gaslights Kutt-Hendy into believing he is committing the crimes while sleepwalking, Troixmonde’s other alter ego Count de la Brive gets close to Kutt-Hendy’s sister Leonora (Cristina Ruspoli), making the villain’s master plan particularly insidious. Near the climax we get a thrilling sequence of Kutt-Hendy capturing and tying up Filibus, only to have them escape, with the clear intention of coming back in a sequel, which unfortunately never happened.
Aside from the amorally lighthearted plot, Filibus is most notable in a contemporary context for its fluid gender characteristics. Not only do we have a wealthy, intelligent woman dominating a male police officer with such ease, but one who effortlessly slides into androgynous and male roles. The confusion of pronouns when describing this picture never ends, as that was not a cultural concern that audiences had a century ago, to my knowledge. Kutt-Hendy (which by the way, is one of the most cumbersome detective names in all of cinema) finds himself a patriarchal figure being tricked into insanity or prison by an invader from above. Filibus seems to be a supremely subversive film when watching it today, but an exploration into how gender was represented in cinema over a century ago reveals a situation far more complex. In her book Girls Will be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, Laura Horak writes, “Far from being inherently transgressive, cross-dressed women in early twentieth-century America were associated with wholesome entertainment.”* The book shows how the immense popularity of cross-dressed women in silent cinema was initially viewed in an innocent way. From theater productions near the end of the nineteenth century to films of the 1920s, critics generally made a distinction between two audience types--a sophisticated elite who could easily glean the sexual undertones of films like this, versus more provincial, uneducated viewers who found the films exciting, amusing, and unintellectual. This is what critics thought, but does not reveal a more nuanced view of what audiences really thought. There were over 400 American silent films with cross-dressed women, which then began to decline in the 1920s as views of masculinity and the star system changed film industry conventions. Previous to seeing Filibus, I had only seen two other silents that had women depicting male characters: Betty Bronson as Peter Pan (1924) and Louise Brooks eluding the police in male drag in Beggars of Life (1928). Both of the movies are relatively chaste, but with a bit of fantasy and imagination, queer audiences can take them in whole new directions. By the mid to late twenties, images of on screen lesbianism began to take more clearly articulated and intentional forms, forever changing with Marlene Deitrich in the 30s.
It is worth emphasizing that Horak’s book focuses particularly on American films, so it is only applicable to the cultural context of Filibus in a more general way. Italian and greater European culture is quite distinct from the US, and audiences may have experienced the film far differently. That being said, cinema was already an international import/export industry, so there were cultural influences occurring. In the San Francisco Silent Film Festival program of 2017, Monica Nolan mentions that the writer of Filibus, Giovanni Bertinetti, was also a children’s science fiction author, concerned with fantasy and new technology. Bertinetti was influenced by The Futurist movement and Marinetti’s manifesto of 1909. The seemingly progressive gender choices of Filibus clash with the conservatism--if not outright fascism--of Futurism. The movement may have provided an explosion of creativity, but is also remembered for its pro-war, pro-violence disposition. As Nolan mentions, Bertinetti’s Futurist influence is applied in Filibus--“The film is a precursor to today’s gadget-driven techno-thrillers: in her various schemes Filibus employs not only her zeppelin but something called a heliograph, a tiny camera, a miniature gun, lots of soporific drugs, and a fake handprint.”** It is apparent that the film's transformation of reality comes with the help of new technology, while its transformation of reality through gender fluidity is not as explicitly stated.
Bertinetti may not have thought very hard about Madame Troixmonde’s alter egos, leaving it up to audiences a century later to speculate. Troixmonde’s power clearly comes from money, most likely the kind which was not earned honestly. Her second identity as Filibus is complex in that they seem more boyish than masculine, lending itself to a common characterization of the time, the boy-wonder-played-by-a-girl. Filibus is definitely more androgynous compared to Count de la Brive, who is understood to be a male counterpart in his relations with Leonora. It is important to think about Troixmonde’s gender fluidity as much more of a performance than expressions of true identity. She is obviously using these different characters/costumes as a way to deceive and confuse Kutt-Hendy and the rest of the world. Whether Troixmonde really feels a change in gender with each costume is not something Filibus delves into. The audience is given the privileged position of knowing the connection between Troixmonde, Filibus, and de la Brive. Kutt-Hendy eventually puts it together that Filibus and de la Brive are the same person, but ironically misses the Troixmonde connection due to the layers of disguise.
Aside from the gender aspects of Filibus, the film can be appreciated as a cultural artifact. Keep in mind that at the time of its release, movie theaters were randomly just exploding around the world. The silver nitrate film stock was highly flammable until about the mid-1940s, but that did not stop audiences from piling into theaters at their own risk. The restored version we can see today digitally or on safety stock has some inescapable decay that only adds to the beauty and character of the film. The long strip of degradation obscuring the Egyptian cat statue in one scene adds to the fascination and excitement of the viewing experience. I also wondered if the airship scenes were intentionally hand-processed to create a cloudy, distorted aesthetic, or if this is an effect brought to us by time and decay of the image. I can easily see Filibus as a good double feature with an episode of Fantomas, but it could be paired just as well with Bill Morrison’s experimental explorations of cinema history, like Decasia (2002) or Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016). The movie is one of those rare examples in which plot and aesthetic, whether intentional or changed by time, combine to give us a uniquely memorable viewing experience.
*Horak, Laura. Girls Will be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016. p. 2 [other general info from same paragraph partially from book as well]
**Nolan, Monica. “Filibus.” https://silentfilm.org/filibus/ Originally published: June, 2017. Accessed: November 26, 2023.