Joron Derem, from France, sells on 23 June 2017 an "Italian School, early 20th century" study for the movie "Attila - I Nibelunghi", estimated at 800 to 1,200 Euro.
It is a striking image, but sadly I can find very limited information about the movie. The signature on the drawing is hard to read, and the image provided by the auction house is just a fraction too small to get a better idea of what it says.
First, the movie. It is an adaptation of the Wagner opera, written by Mario Bernacchi and produced by Milano Films. And that's about it... It is the first movie adaptation ever of the story, as far as I can tell, so important in that regard. As usual with movies at the time, it is very short (one reel, about 10 minutes or so?). The film is preserved in at least 2 copies (which is quite a success for movies of the period, many are largely or completely lost), and I have been able to find 2 frames of it online here, but these don't look anything extraordinary.
The drawing itself to me looks inspired by Cubism / Futurism, which wouldn't be impossible in Milan in 1910 (where the Futurist Movement was founded in 1909), but certainly very early and almost certainly done by a "real" Futurist, not someone later inspired by them. The "signature" on the work is either the first word (Apuerotonto?), or the word before 1910 (Cari?), or it isn't signed at all. Neither the image nor my Italian are good enough to decide this any more definitively. "Cari" may simply be "Circa", evidence that it was only described afterwards.
Futurist painters include Mario Carli (but he was a writer, not an artist), and Carlo Carra, but I don't think it is their sugnature or (like I said) that it is signed at all, which would make this an unsigned but very early Italian proto-Cubist / Futurist drawing. Truly Futirst films only appeared between 1916 and 1919 and are much more experimental than this 1910 movie (as evidenced by the subject and the two frames, and the fact that it hasn't received more attention), but that doesn't mean that they can't have hired some true local artists to design the costumes and so on for them.
Basically, a lot of this is speculation and needs further research by specialists, but there is a reasonable chance that this is a very early Cubist-influenced Italian drawing, which would make it a rather exceptional find and probably worth a lot more than the estimate.
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