Film History Essentials: La Serenata di Fregoli (1899)
(English: Fregoli’s Serenade)
Italian entertainer Leopoldo Fregoli charmed and delighted audiences for 30 years as a mimic, impersonator, quick-change artist, conjuror, and (above all) comedian. At the height of his popularity, he traveled with a crew of 23 people, including a milliner, hairdresser, seamstress, and costume designers. His props, which included several hundred costumes and over a thousand wigs, reportedly filled four train cars. He would routinely play a hundred or more characters in a single performance.
His skills as a master of disguise were so widely-known, in fact, that there is a psychiatric delusion named after them. A person with “Fregoli disorder” is someone who believes that several different people are all the same person in disguise. The word fregolismo in Italian has come to refer, not only to the theatrical art of quick-change, but also to frequent, sudden, and opportunistic changes in political position. While Fregoli’s popular stage career clearly left a mark on the culture, it crossed paths only briefly with motion pictures. Still, he left behind a distinctive body of work from those few years.
It has been argued that Fregoli was cinema’s first named star, and this claim (which is dubiously attached to many different performers) deserves some examination. Bodybuilder Eugen Sandow was likely the first person whose celebrity was used to market a film, and he also appeared in motion pictures by multiple filmmakers. And Sandow was just one out of several performers throughout the mid-1890s whose established fame served as a draw for films that featured them. Then again, the performers in these films were appearing as themselves, in much the same way that there were films of President McKinley, Queen Victoria, or Pope Leo XIII. Presumably no one would argue that this latter group were early “film stars.”
Fregoli sometimes appeared in films as himself, performing some element of his stage act, but in other films (as in La Serenata di Fregoli) he is clearly playing a character in a fictional narrative. In some ways this is similar to Georges Méliès, who was also a magician, also filmed elements of his own acts, appeared in most of his own films, and used them as part of his theatrical programs. However, out of 27 known films that Fregoli made around the turn of the century, over half have his name in the title. By contrast, Méliès never included his name in the title of his films, and Fregoli also seems to have achieved a great deal of international fame before Méliès did.
Fregoli’s series of self-titled comedic films, featuring himself in the main role, most resembles the film careers of later stars like Max Linder (who greatly influenced Charlie Chaplin) and Fatty Arbuckle. All of these early comedians, along with other silent stars like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd (who didn’t usually include their names in the titles of their films), played a recognizable persona in film after film. But it was understood by audiences that the characters in these films, who appeared in a variety of contexts and even time periods, who might be married sometimes and other times not, or have different ages and occupations, weren’t all meant to be the same person, despite being played by the same person in a recognizably similar way.
If Leopoldo Fregoli wasn’t the first international film star to pioneer this sort of celebrity recognition in motion pictures, then he at least deserves to be acknowledged as among the first. He is also somewhat unique among other filmmakers of the 19th-century in that the movies seem to have pursued him, rather than the other way around. He lucked into a film career in much the same way that he had lucked into a career as an entertainer to begin with.
In 1887, he left Italy for military service in Africa, and participated in the invasion of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). According to one account, while on leave in Eritrea he organized a group of fellow soldiers to stage a play. However, just before they were set to perform, his entire cast was recalled to the front. Not wanting to disappoint the audience, Fregoli went out and played all the parts himself. He was so successful that (reportedly) the commanding general reassigned him to run the theater and entertain the troops.
After leaving the army, he toured successfully in Italy and other countries, and eventually came to the attention of Alfred Moul, managing director of London’s Alhambra Theatre. Fregoli began performing there in March 1897, and a run that was meant to last a single month was stretched to almost three. This was the same venue where Robert Paul had debuted his motion picture projector one year before, and Paul had continued to show films at the Alhambra in the meantime.
This connection was presumably how Paul came to meet Fregoli, and got him to appear on film for the first time. Fregoli performed his impersonations of various famous composers for Paul’s camera. Paul marketed Fregoli’s Famous Impersonations of Composers to be accompanied by specific musical cues to go with each composer. Unlike Méliès, though, Fregoli doesn’t seem to have developed an immediate interest in making his own films.
That apparently changed when he toured Lyon at the end of 1897, and met Louis Lumière, who was a fan. Where Méliès had tried and failed to buy a cinématographe from the Lumières (he bought his first camera from Robert Paul instead), Louis invited Fregoli to visit the brothers’ factory. Louis also took the opportunity to shoot a few films with Fregoli, including one where he performed a serpentine dance in full costume and wig (see right).
They spent two days showing Fregoli how the cinématographe worked, and then arranged for him to get his own. It was delivered the following summer. Fregoli soon incorporated it into his act and started calling it the “Fregoligraph” (see left). It accompanied him on tour, but his films also sometimes played as part of programs where he wasn’t present. Fregoli was far from the first Italian filmmaker, but he was certainly one of the first to appear, as either an actor or director, before an international audience.
Screening:
La Serenata di Fregoli puts a uniquely Italian spin on the oldest cinematic gag: Someone pulls a prank that causes someone else to get wet, and then the perpetrator is chased by their victim. It’s more sophisticated than the original (with props, scenery, and costumes, as well as dialogue between the characters), but the basic structure is the same. However, it’s easy to imagine that this version of the scenario (an irate sleeper douses a serenader who has come to the wrong window) is a joke that is far older still.
Much like Méliès, Fregoli’s performance is affable and energetic, and careful to bring the audience along with him for every step. Note the way he frequently looks and gestures directly to the camera (which Méliès did not generally do, even when he was performing a stage act on film). Fregoli invites the audience to be in on the joke, telling them “watch this” with a gesture and a wink before setting up the hapless soldier.
What’s particularly notable is how Fregoli (again in contrast with a filmmaker like Méliès) is using a real-world location to film. This is clearly the middle of an actual country lane, but the “house” is a piece of two-dimensional stage scenery set up against the hedge at the side of the road. It’s an excellent use of an existing space. Fregoli has placed the camera so that we can see the main action up close, but he still has plenty of room to run away without exiting the frame. The same shot would have been much more difficult to achieve with either a fake backdrop or a real house, not least because the window is too low to be an actual second-story window, so the camera would have to be further away to get it in-frame.
See also how the ground below the window is already muddy and wet as the scene begins, and there is a bit of splashing evident at the base of the “house.” It’s possible that the shot was rehearsed in advance, though it must not have been with an actual person standing under the bucket. With the soldier there, the entire side of the house ends up getting wet, as well. Perhaps this is a sly bit of foreshadowing, or a nudge to the audience to notice that this isn’t the first time an unlucky serenader has gotten this treatment. The film’s one mystery is the man in the straw hat who suddenly appears alongside the soldier to give chase to Fregoli at the end.
Moviegoings 